JT August starsabre@att.net on Sunday, March 5, 2000 at 20:37:47
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The RCA Studio II failure was more self induced than to blame on Atari. The system had many limitations that made it ineffective as a competitor against Atari. The numeric keypad controllers were key. They were clumsy and awkard to use. Also, RCA had its own baggage that hindered the system. Atari was still struggling with Distribution, while the Studio II was simply added to the well established RCA distribution flow. Atari recognized that to gain market share, they had to advertise aggressively, and did so. RCA did very little advertising, thinking that the unit's presence in RCA retailers would be pretty much sufficient. Atari was aggresively developing games, and had over 20 carts by the first Christmas, whereas RCA ultimately developed only seven total, and none of the games were particularly impressive.
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