I have not read this article yet, but if memory serves correctly, Nintendo approached Atari in regards to producing titles for the system. That system being the Atari 7800 which had completed development before the Nintendo Famicom was even a glint in Nintendo's fatherly eyes.
At this time Atari was being sold, and a couple of the chips inside the 7800 had been developed by a couple different companies, so it's release was delayed a couple years till they figured out who was going to pay them off; The new owners (The Tramiel family) or the old.
Needless to say, Atari never ended up doing business with Nintendo. I even heard that Nintendo even asked Atari if they could use the Atari logo on their Famicom Game System when they released it state side. Obviously Atari once again refused, so we ended up with a gaming unit called The Nintendo Entertainment System.
When the 7800 did finally release it all but bombed in the market. Only us die hard Atari fans bought one, though we generally had a Nintendo sitting around as well, since Nintendo had a monopoly on all the 3rd party development at the time, and therefore all the cool releases (not that the Atari or SMS did not have a few killer releases of their own).
From what I understand, according to a recent issue of Atari User Magazine, the 7800 pretty much blew away all 8-bit consoles at the time, with a few minor exceptions here and there. The Nintendo was certainly at the bottom on the barrel in regards what it could do, which was plain to see by anyone who owned a Sega Master System at the time. Sadly Atari did not have many people developing for it, so there really are not any games out there that show off it's true power.
O.K., I suppose I better go and read this article now.
