Just one issue I wish they had addressed....competition

This was a great documentary. I loved Atari as a kid and spent hours on end playing it and it was great to get insight into the game developers. While I was no fan of the game E.T., I do not think it was such a flop that it brought down Atari, rather enormous competition they did not adequately fight.

When Atari was the dominant game system there really was just one competitive threat, Intellivision. Intellivision had better graphics and better sports games, however the controller was horrible and Atari was a much more user friendly machine. However around the time of E.T., Coleco Vision came out. This system had better graphics and games e.g. Atari Donkey Kong had just two board while Coleco Vision's Donkey Kong had all the boards. Also Coleco Vision had an adapter where you could also play all the Atari games.

Also, at this time PC's started to take hold and most household would rather spend money on a computer where their kids could play video games. Apple came out with a very used friendly computer and did Commodore. Atari also tired to venture into home computers, but their computers were inferior to Apple. The Atari 5200 and 7800 could not compete when most household were buying computers instead.