The Great Video Game Crash of 1983: Difference between revisions
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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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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-Man Fever|no-relation-to-the-trope]] ''Pac-Man'' Fever held the nation in its iron grip.
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 for the next two years. What happened? Although
* Atari's principal hardware platform, the model 2600 game console, was showing its age technologically. Designed in 1977 to be manufactured cheaply, its graphics were primitive and its memory severely limited (128 bytes - not kilobytes or megabytes - of RAM). The limitations were initially tolerated as the common mass-market computers in 1977 were the then-new Apple ][ (powerful but expensive), Commodore PET (no colour graphics) and Radio Shack "TRaSh-80" (no colour or sound). By 1983? Desktop computers were coming down in price, their sound and graphics were improving and consumers were looking for a system which could do more than just play a few primitive video games.
* Atari refused to give game designers authorial credit or royalties. 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 this, 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 profit — made the situation worse. It worked when Atari was the only game in town, but with the rise of the competition, [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|Atari's profits suffered]].
* Atari was responsible for a number of notoriously poor high-profile games in late 1982. The most notable were [[Porting Disaster|a designed-in-six-weeks version of]] ''[[Pac-Man]]'' and [[The Problem with Licensed Games|an awful adaptation of]] ''[[E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (video game)|ET the Extra Terrestrial]]'', which are widely panned as [[So Bad It's Horrible/Video Games|two of the worst games ever made]]. Not only were these and similar games awful, but Atari over-produced them — 12,000,000 copies of ''Pac-Man'' were made for a 10,000,000-console industry in the hopes it would be a [[Killer App|system-seller]]. Angered stores returned the unsellable products in droves. When the company was left with millions of dollars in worthless cartridges, it dumped them in a landfill in the New Mexico desert.
* 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%
With its customer base eroded
* 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 [[
* A similar problem occurred with software. Games for these systems were cheap to produce, and since their makers figured [[Shovelware|they'd sell no matter the quality]], [[Sturgeon's Law|poor titles from dozens of hastily-created start-ups flooded the market]]
* As game developers went out of business, retailers were left with unsold product that could not be returned
* It was hard for consumers to tell the good games from the bad. The Internet was unavailable to the general public and magazines and books had a long lead time and could only review a few games, so most buyers were left with only the screenshots and text on the back of the box. Since these were
* The home computer market made its first competitively-priced entry into American society. Though computers had software libraries which catered to the early gaming crowd, their educational and office software gave them an edge. Certain computers, such as the [[Commodore 64]], were also priced and marketed to compete directly with game consoles.
* 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.
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
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:Useful Notes]]▼
[[Category:Older Than the NES]]
[[Category:Videogame Culture]]
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