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The Great Video Game Crash of 1983: Difference between revisions
The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 (view source)
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{{trope}}
[[File:qbert_crash.jpg|link=Qbert|right| [[Multi Platform|Four consoles. Four computers. All with the same game.]] [[Hilarious in Hindsight|In retrospect]]...[[What an Idiot!|whoops]].]]
In [[The Eighties|the early 1980s]], the American video game industry was in [[The Golden Age of Video Games|its second generation]] and making money hand over fist. Arcades were popping up across the country like daisies, the [[Atari 2600]] dominated its competitors in the home market, and [[Pac
In 1983, however, something [[Gone Horribly Wrong|went terribly wrong]]. Dozens of game manufacturers and console producers went out of business, production of new games crawled to a standstill, and the American console game market as a whole was dead in the water for the next two years. When it came back in vogue later in the decade, it was thoroughly dominated by Japanese companies, with old American stalwarts viewed as also-rans desperately playing catch-up.
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* Atari refused to give game designers authorial credit or royalties for their work, which led to a growing culture of dissent. Many of Atari's programmers left to form their own companies to make games for the 2600, the most famous and successful of which is [[Activision]]. Atari lost its legal attempts to prevent the use of its cartridge format, which allowed the most creative people in the industry to directly compete with Atari's own efforts.
* Atari's business strategy — sell its consoles as cheaply as possible while relying on game sales for its profit margin — made the situation worse. The strategy 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 either superior work or cheaper-yet-comparable work, [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|Atari's profits suffered]].
* The company was responsible for a number of notoriously poor high-profile cartridge efforts in late 1982. The most notable of these were [[Porting Disaster|a designed-in-six-weeks version of]] ''[[Pac-Man (Video Game)|Pac-Man]]'' and [[The Problem With Licensed Games|an awful adaptation of]] ''[[ET the Extra Terrestrial (Video Game)|ET the Extra Terrestrial]]'', which are widely panned as [[So Bad
* The closest thing the Crash had to a "Black Tuesday" was December 7, 1982. During a shareholder meeting, Atari reported a 10-15% expected increase in profits. This doesn't sound too bad, but was far below the 50% expected increase people had been led to believe would be announced. By the next day, the stock of Warner Communications, Atari's parent company, immediately dropped 33%, and a mini-scandal erupted when it was revealed that the current president of Atari, Ray Kasser, had sold 5,000 shares of the company half an hour before making his announcement.
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* A glut of companies [[Follow the Leader|attempting to follow in Atari's success]] gave consumers too many choices, which meant no one system could succeed in the long term, since very few consumers would buy more than one. These included (but were not limited to) the Bally Astrocade, the [[Colecovision]], the Coleco Gemini, the Emerson Arcadia 2001, the [[Magnavox Odyssey]] [[Odyssey 2]], the Mattel [[Intellivision]], the Vectrex, the Sears Tele-Games, and the Fairchild Channel F-System II. Many of the systems featured indistinguishable libraries; this was due in part to Atari, Coleco and Mattel all releasing games for each other's consoles. The picture at the top of this page (an ad from this period for ''[[Q Bert (Video Game)|Q Bert]]'') shows the exact problem left to consumers looking to determine just what system to buy. In the end, consumers largely waited to see which console dominated, and, when it became clear that no one would, companies were already going out of business.
* A similar problem occurred with software development. Games for these systems were cheap to produce, and since their makers figured [[Shovelware|they'd sell no matter the quality]], [[
* As game developers began going out of business, retailers were left with unsold product that could not be returned to now-defunct manufacturers. Hoping to salvage ''something'', stores offered massive discounts just to clear inventory. The market for higher-priced new games shrunk in the face of large amounts of budget-priced crud, especially since...
* There was no way for consumers to discern the good games from the bad. The Internet was still in its infancy and there were few video game magazines, so most buyers were left with only the screenshots and text on the back of the box to tell them anything at all about the game. Since these were almost always [[Covers Always Lie|nonsense designed to get you to buy the game]], consumers were left once-bitten twice-shy.
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