Video Game Crash of 83

Post Reply New Topic

Found this interesting little video about the games crash of 83. I'm a bit young to have experienced it. For me video games came into our home after that with zx spectrum. So this is rather fascinating.



It's that old adage you can have it fast and cheap, but not cheap and good or fast and good.

Is it just me or it followed the same pattern as the dot-com bubble crash ?

It didn't really affect the UK cos we had the zx spectrum and games were cheap. in the US a bad Atari game was very expensive.

I'll have to watch that.

Wouldn't be surprising if another crash hits us in the near future >_<

I think the way forward is for mainstream and indie developers to merge together and compromise between new/innovative ideas and technical innovation. The problem with indie is that it's flooded with mom and pop HTML/Java games that don't have any lasting gameplay while the problem with the mainstream developers is that they stick to tried and tested formula and don't do anything new. If only there was a way for the two sides to pull their resources together instead of being in opposition to each other.

They're also reaching the point where they're putting so much money and time into graphics, that they're finding it very difficult to get enough sales to really profit on games like they used to.

There's a few other videos in this series about graphics. And the last one concludes that graphics, although nice, aren't essential for success. Look at minecraft. It's a runaway successful, but horrible. I hated that sort of thing back in the late 80s. Not sure I would have played it as a kid.

I don't think video games totally "crashed" in 1983. I just think, perhaps, innovation stopped for a little while.

Perhaps, it might be more correct to say that 1983 represented "the end of an era."

Companies like Atari went out of business, though.

There still weren't many video games played in the home back then. What there was--was of lower quality than found in the arcades.

In 1983, I was somewhat obsessed with Ms. PacMan. I would spend hours playing it in video game arcades.

Many video games were still introduced in 1983. But there weren't many innovative games introduced.

This is what Wikipedia says:
The video game crash of 1983, known as Atari shock in Japan,[1] was a massive recession of the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985. Revenues had peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983,[2] then fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent). The crash was a serious event that brought an abrupt end to what is considered the second generation of console video gaming in North America.

97% is pretty serious! Imagine cutting 97% of the jobs in your field in two years!

That's true what you said. Atari went out of business. Many of those companies from that era went out of business.

But in the mid-1980s, people still played video games in arcades quite a bit. I didn't know anybody who had video games at home. What home video games I saw were almost always of lower quality than that found in arcades.

in 1984, a game, "Punch Out," was introduced. It proved very popular. There were others.

Probably, in the later 1980s, home video game technology improved to the point where one didn't need to go to the arcade any more.

Home video games did get a lot better, but arcade games were still a lot more advanced, probably until around the time the Dreamcast came out (which was very similar to Sega's NAOMI arcade hardware).

The market recovered when the NES produced high quality games so that people trusted the industry again.
Other people had C64 home computers with cheap games also.

Nintendo also used a CIC

The Checking Integrated Circuit, or CIC, is a lockout chip designed for the Nintendo Entertainment System which had three main purposes: To give Nintendo complete control over the software released for the platform; To prevent unlicensed (pirate) game cartridges from running

I dont blame them for doing that considering what happened with Atari

Didn't stop Tengen and Color Dreams, though =)
Or Code Masters...
...or...

I'll be honest, I kinda wouldnt mind seeing another crash right now in the AAA side of the industry.

Granted, part of that is just me being unpleasant. This shouldnt be surprising. But at the same time, I always get the feeling that it could do with a bit of a shake-up. It's gotten pretty stagnant in some ways, and these big publishers are pushing themselves further and further into their own ditches by focusing so very much on graphics; it's going to get harder and harder to maintain that. Creativity has been low for quite awhile now, and of course other issues like the damn obsession with trying to make games be more like movies, and stuff like that.

I'd like to see some of that come apart, frankly. It just... I dont know, it seems almost "deserved" at this point. It'd be satisfying.


As for the original crash, I was much too young to actually remember any of it. I'd have been, what, 2 years old? But it's always been fascinating.