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The Great Video Game Crash of 1983: Difference between revisions
The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 (view source)
Revision as of 05:20, 10 September 2014
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{{Useful Notes}}
[[File:qbert_crash.jpg|link=Q*bert|frame| [[Multi Platform|Four consoles. Four computers. All with the same game.]] [[Hilarious in Hindsight|In retrospect]]...[[What an Idiot!|whoops]].]]
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* A media backlash, viewing video games as a fad, played up the various company bankruptcies as proof the industry was dying.
The Crash killed the American home console market for two years — video game sales dropped from $3 billion in 1982 to as low as $100,000,000 in 1985, and many game companies went out of business.
When it was revived, it was done from the outside: via the introduction (and overwhelming success) of the [[Nintendo]] [[Nintendo Entertainment System|Entertainment System]]. As a result, Japan replaced the USA in dominating the home market. This was particularly evident in the case of [[Sega]], whose American parent company, Gulf & Western, sold it to a Japanese corporation in 1984, minus its former U.S. division.
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The Crash was a uniquely American phenomenon, and even there, it never risked killing video games as a medium. The rise of the home computer (particularly the [[Commodore 64]]) continued home video gaming, and while the American arcade scene was beginning its slow decline, arcade games were still near the height of their popularity. Minor arcade classics like ''Paper Boy'', ''[[Punch-Out!!]]'', ''[[Space Ace]]'', ''Karate Champ'', and ''[[Gauntlet (1985 video game)]]'' found their release during this period. Many of these arcade games would later be ported to home consoles (with varying degrees of success) after the market was revived — but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Across [[The Pond]], the European market was dominated by early home microcomputers (predominantly the Sinclair [[ZX Spectrum]] and [again] the C64), with an outrageous number of one-person coders writing games for the far-cheaper tape distribution system. These machines 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" ([[Elite|Bell and Braben]], the Oliver Twins). That didn't prevent some quite talented developers from making enough stupid decisions to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, of course (Imagine Software, most notably; see [http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/bruceworld/ here] for info, with a big example of an [[Orwellian Editor]] as a bonus). Even with the missteps, the European gaming industry remained solid.
The Crash also did not affect Japan. Though the home of a massive arcade base that naturally grew from Pachinko Parlors and Mah Jongg dens, Japan was not a particularly early adopter of home systems, and most American imports were curiosities at best. Japan received the [[Nintendo Entertainment System|Famicom]] console and the [[MSX]] computer in 1983, right after the crash in America. Those two systems would dominate the Japanese gaming industry for the rest of the decade. Interestingly, near the start of '83, Atari had started negotiating the rights to the Famicom's U.S. release, though this would eventually be scuttled by the effects of the Crash. But oh, [[What Could Have Been]]...
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Older Than the NES]]
[[Category:Videogame Culture]]
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