I'm not really sure what point it's trying to make. Atari didn't build its success by trying to draw in people that the existing home game market didn't cater to, because there was no existing market. It was a success because it was the first home video game machine that was both capable and affordable. And it didn't appeal to everyone because it had titles designed to cater to women and parents, it appealed to everyone because it existed in the age before the great and terrible Marketing Demons declared that testosterone-fueled boys and young men were the Only Possible Target Audience for video games and game companies became slaves to that demographic, so there was a brief and wonderful window of time where programmers just got to make some damn good games.
I mean, if the article were arguing on that basis that Nintendo ought to be more like Atari and abandon focus-grouped pablum to just make some good games, I'd agree entirely, but they seem to be coming at this like they think Atari had some kind of conscious outreach program for disenfranchised gamers, which is ridiculous. (And besides, crap casual games aside, Nintendo is one of the few companies left that is actually trying to do that. Of course, they have a bigger problem in that they can't seem to make anything that isn't a sequel to a sequel to a sequel anymore, but that's a separate issue entirely.)
Really, what the industry needs isn't an outreach program for non-gamers - what it needs is to line up all the marketers and focus groups against the wall and shoot them in the head, force themselves to abstain from sequel-making for the next ten years, slash dev teams to no more than fifteen people per game, and just start making games again.
