[3] Created to compete with Mattel's Intellivision, the 5200 wound up a direct competitor of ColecoVision shortly after its release.

On May 21, 1984, during a press conference at which the Atari 7800 was introduced, company executives revealed that the 5200 had been discontinued after less than two years on the market.

Following the release of the Video Computer System in 1977, Atari began developing hardware for a next generation game console.

The RF box was also where the power supply connected in a unique dual power/television signal setup similar to the RCA Studio II's.

A single cable coming out of the 5200 plugged into the switch box and carried both electricity and the television signal.

The 1983 revision of the Atari 5200 has two controller ports instead of four, and a change back to the more conventional separate power supply and standard non-autoswitching RF switch.

It also has changes in the cartridge port address lines to allow for the Atari 2600 adapter released that year.

In fact, towards the end of the four-port model's production run, there were a limited number of consoles produced which included these modifications.

The design of the analog joystick, which used a weak rubber boot rather than springs to provide centering, proved to be ungainly and unreliable.

[11] Another major flaw of the controllers was that the design did not translate into a linear acceleration from the center through the arc of the stick travel.

Antic magazine reported in 1984 that "the similarities grossly outweigh the differences, so that a 5200 program can be developed and almost entirely debugged [on an Atari 8-bit computer] before testing on a 5200".

[18] This gave the ColecoVision a significant advantage as its pack-in, Donkey Kong, delivered a more authentic arcade experience than any previous game cartridge.

The game was under development with the title Agent X when the movie producers and Atari learned of each other's projects and decided to cooperate.