A lot of people think the 1983 US console crash happened because the games were bad. That's not it though! It happened because management overprojected growth/sales and sent the industry into a tailspin. Maybe sounds familiar! - ThreadSky

philsalv.bsky.social • 6 days ago

A lot of people think the 1983 US console crash happened because the games were bad. That's not it though! It happened because management overprojected growth/sales and sent the industry into a tailspin. Maybe sounds familiar!

Reposted from Chris Franklin

When you're at a point where there's just no way your action game based on a world-famous billion-dollar box office super hero character can realistically be financially viable you have to ask what the games industry is doing, man.

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silo64.bsky.social•6 days ago

Funny you should mention that

the15andthe45.bsky.social•6 days ago

My co-nationals and neighbours in the UK and EU are insistent the 80s crash didn't affect us. (Which was true... in 1983. But we were hardly operating in a vacuum and were impacted sooner rather than later.) The next crash might at least avoid any such exceptionalism: we'll all be stuffed.

mcoorlim.com•6 days ago

The UK was spared because they were still playing zx spectrum and BBC micro games on cassette you could buy for a £ and then copy on your tape deck and share with 5 friends

the15andthe45.bsky.social•6 days ago

Yes, exactly - Speccy, C64 and BBC B. We weren't directly impacted for a few years and we didn't have that crash. But the shape of our gaming industry was certainly hit a few years down the line with the rise of the NES and later machines - the reshaped US industry became the European norm too

the15andthe45.bsky.social•6 days ago

It's valid to say that we didn't have a gaming crash in 83 and 84 - that was a boom period this side of the Atlantic. It's invalid to say we weren't affected by the US gaming crash - it's shaped our gaming ever since consoles grew in popularity.

I know it's obvious but it also seems controversial

mcoorlim.com•6 days ago

Did Tramiel's microcomputer price war have an impact on you guys or was that just a US thing too?

the15andthe45.bsky.social•6 days ago

I actually don't recall - so probably a similar story in that in terms of awareness, no, but in real terms, yes. The Amiga certainly began to take off here and then the Atari ST took off and the two were in competition until the early 90s. Tramiel's involvement in that scrap then definitely hit us

marcnormandin.bsky.social•6 days ago

the console market crashed in 1983 because consoles didn't have Xevious yet, which is why the market was better in 1984, when there was console Xevious

mcoorlim.com•6 days ago

This is true. A buddy of mine had Xevious on the 7800. There was never a 2600 Xevious.

venbright.bsky.social•6 days ago

If memory serves, weren't they expecting more copies of E.T. to sell than the number of 2600 consoles sold up until that point?

Like, "we expect every single person who owns one to buy it, and plenty to buy the device just to play it, give or take" levels of insane?

atariarchive.org•6 days ago

This is not true

venbright.bsky.social•5 days ago

Thanks for correcting me!

bagelpriest.bsky.social•5 days ago

There was a story that Atari was publishing more Pac-Man cartridges than VCS systems and when an executive was asked why, he replied that, “customers would want a copy for their ski home.”

jrodbad.bsky.social•5 days ago

Indeed. History is set to repeat itself. I'll be curious to see who revives things this time, if anyone.

priceofreason.bsky.social•6 days ago

More than anything else, it was market saturation with absurd numbers of poor games being dumped onto consumers with no real way of filtering through all the garbage. Stores wound up having to offload tons of carts for next to nothing. I remember buying 2600 games for $2 apiece at Revco.

atariarchive.org•6 days ago

This is backwards. It was oversaturation by retailers of Atari’s own games as they over-ordered with the expectation that Atari wouldn’t meet the demand, which by 1982 Atari’s production was good enough to do so. The effort to clear the overstock out drove down the price of everything else, too

priceofreason.bsky.social•6 days ago

Consumers stopped trusting that their money was going toward a quality product, and when retailers couldn't move stock, they stopped ordering more. And so the snowball started rolling and getting bigger. And then the avalanche of market collapse.

sentient6.bsky.social•6 days ago

I have had so many arguments with revisionists about this. They literally think obscure rare games no one has ever heard of somehow crashed the industry and only Nintendo’s “seal of quality” could prevent this outcome.

philsalv.bsky.social•6 days ago

One of my favorite items in our library is this issue of The Logical Gamer, a gaming newsletter from the early 1980s. Their review of ET basically says "Yeah it's not great, but WOW Atari has a lot riding on this game for some reason"

https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/f2f37eef-bc4c-463b-9699-553ad2502732

haurchehaunt.bsky.social•5 days ago

it's so odd, from a 21st century perspective, to think of ET for the atari as a high budget game, but yeah i suppose that license have to have been pricey

philsalv.bsky.social•6 days ago

That's what the real problem was! When you have SO much riding on a throwaway ET game, you've made the wrong moves as a business

There's shades of Concord, AC Shadows, and Veilguard here. When executives keep betting the house on every single project, decent sales and reviews aren't enough

babykelp.bsky.social•6 days ago

also, on the hardware side, 2600 was getting pretty old at the time and the supposed-successor 2500 had failed. they were intending to release the 5800 in '84 but it got pushed back several years because of the ET mess.

babykelp.bsky.social•6 days ago

being a bit reductive I'd say atari were effectively a one-hit wonder that couldn't replicate or build on the success of the 2600. makes sense for them to explode spectacularly in a bad hail-mary attempt since the only other option is dying slow imo

atariarchive.org•6 days ago

This is entirely incorrect. The 5200 debuted in 1982 on schedule and was never intended as a replacement, and the 7800’s delay was entirely contractual problems stemming from the Tramiel takeover of Atari’s consumer division.

babykelp.bsky.social•6 days ago

I'll grant the 5200 might not have been intended as a replacement, but it only lasted two years on the market before being discontinued, hard to think of it as a success. and surely the sale to tramiel can be grouped with the general mounting woes of atari that we refer to as the crash?

atariarchive.org•6 days ago

The 5200 wasn’t a big success and they planned on discontinuing it in 84, but that doesn’t have much to do with ET and 1982’s market conditions, where by all accounts it sold very well

lameposting.bsky.social•6 days ago

I forget whether it was you or Frank (or some other history source) which traced down the first reference for a "AAA" game and it was: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari, 1982)

irishoutsider.bsky.social•6 days ago

The parallels are impressive. Overpaying for IP and undercooking the game to meet stratospheric forecasts…hasn’t really slowed down in 40 years

Also I give the ET designer credit for what he did in the time he was given.

videogamecanon.bsky.social•6 days ago

I’ve been trying to trace back the history of the “AAA” game and I’ve gone back to 1991, when it referred to games like Battletoads and TMNT: The Arcade Game.

https://www.videogamecanon.com/adventurelog/what-is-a-aaa-game/

lameposting.bsky.social•6 days ago

Ohhhh thank you!!! Yea I remember people starting to be VERY curious about when AAA emerged as soon as some dumbass said “quad-A”

videogamecanon.bsky.social•5 days ago

Multiple executives have tried to make AAAA happen! I honestly can’t believe they keep trying.

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