{"id":53,"date":"2014-03-10T22:49:49","date_gmt":"2014-03-10T22:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/?p=53"},"modified":"2014-03-10T22:49:49","modified_gmt":"2014-03-10T22:49:49","slug":"the-video-game-crash-of-1984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/?p=53","title":{"rendered":"The Video Game Crash of 1984"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an old post that I wanted to save from the burning remains of my old sites. It’s a small article about what really was going on during the first great crash, and the implications for the gaming industry at the moment.<\/em><\/p>\n

For gamers, in 1984, the world ended. That was the year that the first major \u2018video game crash\u2019 destroyed the video game industry, ruining everything forever and forcing everyone back to the TVs to watch Superfriends and Bugs Bunny on Saturday mornings. It was all Atari\u2019s fault and no one wanted video games anymore, nor would they ever again. Retailers, convinced of their reasoning, dumped all their video game products for pennies on the dollar. Games, like Defender, which had sold for $50 in 1983, was selling for a buck or two in the K-Mart discount bins. The fad was finally over, and retailers could take that precious space to sell real product, like those Polo shirts everyone wants.<\/p>\n

Of course, twenty-five years later, we know how much of that wasn\u2019t even remotely true, aside from how retailers took the \u2018video game crash\u2019. While retailers and business leaders simply felt that the \u2018fad\u2019 had passed, or was \u2018maturing\u2019 into that more-sophisticated home computer market, it\u2019s important to note that the actual demand for video games increased during the crash. Total sales increased, and volume was good.<\/p>\n

The problem, really, was that the supply of games exploded to an insane degree, with everyone from Kool Aid to Chuckwagon trying to cash in on the \u2018fad\u2019 of the time. Hundreds of cartridges were released for the Atari 2600 alone in 1983, and most of them were simply rushed piles-of-code meant to catch unwary consumers with inferior product. It was a bigger pie, but it was being divided into countless shares all fighting for an increasingly jaded consumer base. In other words, the video game industry actually killed itself.<\/p>\n

While the Atari 2600 was the dominant console for this era of video-games, it suddenly found itself competing with a growing number of platforms. Not only could a consumer choose between the venerable 2600, and with the chief competitors Colecovision and Intellivision, but there were large number of \u2018cloned\u2019 consoles (mostly 2600 knock-offs), the ill-fated Vectrex, the Emerson, and a number of others. To complicate matters, both Atari and Intellivision were wisely cloning out their systems to Sears and Radio Shack futher cluttering the market.<\/p>\n

It also didn\u2019t help matters that the \u2018big players\u2019, notably Atari, couldn\u2019t exactly be counted on for churning out good quality games. Atari had churned out the awful 2600 port of Pac-Man, which could have single-handedly turned the fortunes of the company around, but instead threw in a few hundred nails into Atari\u2019s coffin as a rushed, badly sounding, badly played, horrid excuse of a \u2018port\u2019. Atari had also spent a fortune on making the video game version of the movie E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, which was basically an awful puzzle-adventure game which delighted a grand total three people with its masochistic game-play. Sadly, both of these games were produced in insanely high numbers, which didn\u2019t sell (even at the $1 price-point the following year) and many had to be thrown in a landfill somewhere in the Southwest Desert, ready to be discovered by an intrepid archeologist in the future who will be left to wonder just what the hell the 1980s were all about anyway.<\/p>\n

The last bit contributing to the crash, though, was just mere \u2018obsolescence\u2019. Coloecovision had already gained ground against the Atari 2600 with superior graphics and sound capabilities, but even that system was looking dated by 1983. The question was \u2018how do we move forward\u2019, and all three major companies were stalling and fumbling. Atari had a successful computer line (the 800 series) which seemed to pave the way forward. Intellivision and Colecovision both decided to \u2018update\u2019 their existing units into computer systems. Colecovision came up with the ADAM, a computer that boasted the innovative feature of perpetually erasing its own data. Intellivision came up with a lot of promises and never delivered.<\/p>\n

While Atari seemed poised to move forward based on their 800 computer series, Atari had to prove to the world that they too were not without great incompetence. They were already working on a new system, the upcoming 5200. The problem was that the unit had limited game support, couldn\u2019t play Atari 2600 games (a feature which helped propel the Colecovision forward), and had some of the worst controllers envisioned by mankind until that date. The loss of both prestige and funds was so great for Atari that even their successful 800 series would be impacted, and Atari, as a company, would never recover. The message to video gamers was clear \u201cThe future is coming, and we don\u2019t know what the hell to do about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the nails in the coffin, the coffin in the ground, all that was left to do was to bury the body. This, of course, came with the rise of the \u2018cheap\u2019 computer, notably the C-64. The Commodore 64 was a \u2018light cost\u2019 computer, but still had superior capability to all the video-game consoles out, and generally a superior game library to boot. Many gamers that hadn\u2019t already resigned themselves to their existing (and substantial) game libraries just went to the C-64 (making Commodore a giant for a few brief years). With that transition in 1984, the age of Atari was effectively over.<\/p>\n

Retailers, of course, completely misread the audience and figured that the \u2018fad\u2019 was over. They were wrong, of course, but since they were stuck with millions of unsold consoles and cartridges anyway, it would have been difficult or impossible to convince them otherwise. The big players in the industry, of course, never really admitted their own culpability with their myriad of mistakes. Atari would struggle for a few years trying to push old technology at premium prices. Coleco went on to sell Cabbage Patch Babies and then promptly go bankrupt when they screwed up that line. Intellivision would simply just disappear.<\/p>\n

That, then, was that, at least as far as most of the \u2018intelligent\u2019 people were concerned. Time Magazine famously declared the era of video games as over. No one wanted to be told otherwise. Oh, there was this little upstart company in Japan making something called the \u2018Famicom\u2019, but who wanted another video game? Confident in their genius, retailers and trade shows shunted out all video-game materials for a couple of years. Some kept to the C-64 and the fledgling IBM PCjr, to give the kids something to do when daddy wasn\u2019t working on important flowcharts you see (every household made flowcharts and pie-graphs back in the 1980s, apparently), but the fad was dead.<\/p>\n

Of course, the Famicom would get another name soon, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and another phase of video game history would be written, proving the stupidity of the same people who caused the video game crash in the first place hadn\u2019t relented. But that\u2019s really the lesson of the 1983 crash, isn\u2019t it? Make enough bad decisions and you too can turn a pile of gold into a pile of salted manure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is an old post that I wanted to save from the burning remains of my old sites. It’s a small article about what really was going on during the first great crash, and the implications for the gaming industry at the moment. For gamers, in 1984, the world ended. That was the year that… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/54"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}