The Great Video Game Crash of 1983: Difference between revisions
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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 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 [[Colecovision]], the Coleco Gemini (a 2600 clone), the Emerson Arcadia 2001, the [[Magnavox Odyssey]] [[Odyssey 2]], the Mattel [[Intellivision]], the Vectrex, and the Fairchild Channel F-System II.
* 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.
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