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Heroes Community > Tavern of the Rising Sun > Thread: Ok, the heck?
Thread: Ok, the heck?
del_diablo
del_diablo


Legendary Hero
Manifest
posted September 14, 2009 07:55 PM

Ok, the heck?

>Videogame crash of 83~

This links to TVtropes, so to spare anybody from the demon that resides there and grabs your soul I will quote:
Quote:
A long, long time ago, in the magical time we call The Early 1980s, the video game market was in its second generation. Arcades were popping up all over the country, the Atari 2600 and a few competitors dominated the home market, and Pac Man Fever held the nation in its iron grip.

Then, in 1983, something went terribly, terribly wrong. Dozens of game manufacturers and console producers went out of business, production of new games crawled to a standstill, and the American industry as a whole would be more or less abandoned for the next two years.

So what happened? Although it was an industry-wide phenomenon, the best place to start would probably be the downfall of Atari, a tale inextricably linked with the crash:

Atari's refusal to give game designers authorial credit or royalties for their work led to a growing culture of dissent. Many of them left to form their own companies to make cartridges for the 2600 system, most famously Activision. Atari lost its legal attempts to prevent the use of its format, meaning that many of the most creative people in the industry were directly competing with Atari's game efforts.
Compounding this was Atari's business strategy: to sell its consoles as cheaply as possible, relying on the sales of games for its profit margin. Certainly it worked when Atari was the only game in town, and had a home-market monopoly on Space Invaders and Asteroids, but as competing companies produced superior work (and numerous budget-gaming companies producing cheap, yet comparable work), Atari's sales faltered.
A number of notoriously poor high-profile cartridge efforts. Most notable were a designed-in-six-weeks version of Pac Man, and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, widely considered two of the worst games ever made. Not only were the games bad, but Atari over-produced them: 12 million copies of Pac Man for a 6 million console industry, in the hopes that it would be a system-seller. Left with millions of dollars of worthless cartridge stock, Atari would later dump and pave over many of the copies in a New Mexico desert landfill.

Its customer base eroded by its inferior technology, by the end of 1983, Atari would rack up nearly $500 million in losses. However, Atari was not alone in its troubles. Its competitors were also facing their share.

A glut of companies attempting to follow in Atari's success gave consumers way too many choices for almost any to succeed. They included Astrocade, Colecovision, Gemini, Arcadia, the Magnavox Odyssey, the Mattel Intellivision, the Vectrex, Sears Tele-Games, the Channel F-System II... many with indistinguishable libraries. (See above picture for a Qbert ad from the time period... how were people supposed to choose?)
A similar problem occurred with software development. Games for these systems were cheap to produce and thought able to sell, whatever the quality. Poor titles from hastily created start-ups flooded the market. Even non-video game companies produced their own games that were little more than thinly-disguised commercials for their products. There were games for Chase the Chuck Wagon (a 1980s dog food brand) and The Kool-Aid Man, for crying out loud! It eventually reached the point where Quaker Oats had a video game division!
The PC market made its first competitively priced entry into American society. Though many had software libraries that catered to the early gaming crowd, their educational and office software gave them an edge. Some computers, like the Commodore 64, were priced and marketed to compete with game consoles.
A media backlash, viewing video games as a fad, played up the various company bankruptcies as proof that video gaming was dead.

The main result of the crash would be the dominance of the home video game market shifting from the United States to Japan. It would not be until Nintendo's heyday that the industry would completely recover. Ironically, Nintendo owed a good deal of its success to packaging the system with the peripheral Robot Operating Buddy (R.O.B.) which, despite being a piece of garbage that only worked with two games, assuaged the concerns of shopkeepers uneasy about stocking a new video game console.

Nintendo also knew better than to call their video game console what it was, as the public was unlikely to react well to such a thing post-crash; in Japan it was the Famicom, or "Family Computer", while in America it was the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was also designed with a front-loading cartridge slot so it looked more like a VCR than a game console. Nintendo's Seal Of Quality measure also provided a degree of protection against the low-quality shovelware and "porn" games that had plagued the Atari.

As you might guess, it worked.

It needs to be noted that the Crash was a uniquely American phenomenon, and even there never risked killing video games as a medium. Although the home gaming market was weakened by the temporary death of the dedicated console, the growing PC base provided a viable replacement for home video game production by the small number of companies that hadn't left the business or gone bankrupt. Also, even though the American arcade game scene was beginning its slow descent into obscurity, arcade games were still very near the height of their popularity. Even with a dearth of domestic game creation, minor arcade classics like Paper Boy, Punch Out, Space Ace, Karate Champ, and Gauntlet found their release in the post-crash pre-NES days.

Across The Pond, the European market was not dominated by consoles at this stage, but by early home microcomputers (predominantly the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64) with an outrageous number of one-person coders writing games for the far cheaper tape distribution system. These machines flourished and became the backbone of the industry for the next decade; the so-called "bedroom coders" would receive status ranging from "cult hero" (Jeff Minter, Matthew Smith et al) to "legend" (Bell and Braben, The Oliver Twins). Of course, that didn't stop some of the more mental publishers disappearing up their own arses (Imagine, most notably - see the Bandersnatch section of Vaporware), but the industry remained solid regardless.

The crash also had little effect on the industry in Japan, and while Nintendo was essentially able to enter the ruins of the US console market unopposed, the Japanese market of the day was highly competitive. The Famicom did achieve similar near-monopoly status as its NES sister did in the US, but it did so against fierce opposition.


This is quite some history, and it is well written down.
Summary:
*The American marked went to hell, due various reasons
*This allowed Nintendo to enter the American marked, that was in pieces of rubble
*The Europeans was sitting over on the other sides of the oceans(yes, plural!) and microcomputers was all rage, a small coder industry and mass tape distribution was the big hit. Not affected at all
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