You will never convince me that "Nintendo saved the video game industry in 1983" is reasonable historiography, because it's 2025 and I have now lived through about a billion technological innovations, all transparently less meritorious than video games, all stubbornly surviving markets bottoming out - ThreadSky

nymphomachy.meangirls.online • 3 days ago

You will never convince me that "Nintendo saved the video game industry in 1983" is reasonable historiography, because it's 2025 and I have now lived through about a billion technological innovations, all transparently less meritorious than video games, all stubbornly surviving markets bottoming out

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tcervo.bsky.social•2 days ago

And to think, the NES was very nearly released under the Atari brand, but in typical 80's fashion, Atari effed up the deal and it fell through.

radiodeadair.com•3 days ago

Ah, but that was before the massive deregulation that began to change American business and industry from "making things" and "providing services" to "make believe" and "things that used to be crimes."

In 1983, you actually *could* kill an industry if you fucked up enough.

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

Well, that's an easy premise to accept but I'm not sure the situation in 1983 meets the standards of 'fucked up enough', or that this was some kind of cornered position wherein the only possible way to save it was the so-called geniuses of one sketchy Japanese company heavily remarketing it as a toy

gammarae.design•3 days ago

Legitimately arcade games likely weren't going to go anywhere as they were relatively easy to set up, took up less space than pinball, fun for drinkers and eventually someone was gonna want that at home.

I think I'm with you on this.

fierydarkstar.bsky.social•3 days ago

The computer gaming industry was similarly mostly-unaffected by the crash. Home consoles were a big deal at the time, but I think a lot of the discussion about the crash assumes the industry in 1983 looked and worked like it did in 2000 and consoles were even more overpoweringly dominant.

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

Imagining now an alternate timeline where the NEO・GEO absolutely blew up in the United States the way that the Master System did in Brazil

gammarae.design•3 days ago

brianm822.bsky.social•2 days ago

The 80s were when I got into home video gaming & no one I knew had a Nintendo

ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga 500...

Then in the 90s we moved on to PlayStations & then PCs in the 2000s

Not a Nintendo in sight although obviously someone was buying them somewhere...

I did try a Wii but it didn't last

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•2 days ago

are you european perchance

brianm822.bsky.social•2 days ago

Brit. You?

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•2 days ago

Born and raised outside Chicago. I hate the PAL standard but always envy Brits and Europeans a bit for the preponderance of personal computers back then, can't help but feel like I'd be richer and more fulfilled rn if I'd grown up with a Commodore 64 than with a Genesis

brianm822.bsky.social•2 days ago

Outer London

To be fair I was never a fan of NTSC. The fewer lines seemed to make a big difference

1st went to US & the late 80s, Florida. Great hols but telly not so good & bought some tourist VHS tapes for my dual PAL/NTSC VCR

Didn't get to try any games there. Yeah we were pretty fortunate

cleretic.bsky.social•3 days ago

There is itself interesting parts to the story of how Nintendo swung making the NES succeed, but it's squarely an America-centric one. The industry was perfectly healthy everywhere else, it was only really in America that Atari fucked things.

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

yeah and even in America the PC gamers (I guess they'd still be, like, Apple gamers and IBM gamers at that point, but) didn't really give a damn.

cleretic.bsky.social•3 days ago

Which itself is much bigger over in Europe. In the UK I know the home computer game market was the real juggernaut of 80s gaming.

jessica.moe•3 days ago

Apple II used a mos 6502 processor; the 1st successful home computer, had lots of 6502 apps, including games like Ultima! Commodore entered the 6502 (modified) market with the c64, including apps like skate or die! Finally Nintendo entered the 6502 app market with their Famicom and Super Mario Bros.

kevincow.bsky.social•3 days ago

They specifically only saved the North American console market, but that quickly became the biggest gaming market.

"Saved video games" is an overstatement, but the impact wasn't irrelevant. We'd still have games, but the industry would look completely different.

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

I grant you that it'd look different without Nintendo but the supposition that tends to float around is that it would look completely worse

kevincow.bsky.social•2 days ago

I mean it's impossible to know for sure, but I think the NES established a lot of important genres and standards that the medium would be overall worse-off without. And without a strong NA console market, their influence may have taken much longer to catch on, if those games were even made at all.

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•2 days ago

I think the point of contention is that these creators and designers are still going to exist either way, whether or not Nintendo as a monopolistic institution exists, so the inevitability of, like, fluid left-to-right scrolling doesn't really hinge on the NES, much less the "toy" rebranding

kevincow.bsky.social•2 days ago

I don't agree that they necessarily would have existed, or that they would have taken the same path and achieved the same results. A lot of the innovations that came out of the NES were because a lot of people were working with the same limitations of the same hardware and iterating on each other.

kevincow.bsky.social•2 days ago

JRPGs are a great example. So many of that genre's foundational conventions can be traced back to the specific circumstances of NES devs trying to iterate on Wizardry and Ultima on more limited hardware with an extremely limited input device. JRPGs probably wouldn't exist without the NES.

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•2 days ago

It's a little like saying that "adult" animation wouldn't exist without The Simpsons. It WOULD, but it wouldn't necessarily be pigeonholed into the particular niche that Simpsons pinned it in, and for my money I don't think early Simpsons has been worth the trouble of having South Park exist

karilas.bsky.social•3 days ago

Especially since the "great crash" was mostly localised to the US

lilliekoi.bsky.social•3 days ago

Especially when, even if we want to go with the great man theory, it’s so much funnier to say that Teddy Ruxpin saved video games

strule.bsky.social•3 days ago

The thing is that this "crash" was a US thing and the rest of the world was OK, at best Nintendo saved the American videogame industry

fierydarkstar.bsky.social•3 days ago

And it wasn't even strictly universal within the US. It hit the home console industry hard, which was admittedly a major facet of the overall US gaming industry. But it wasn't quite the be-all and end-all Nintendo hagiographers make it out to be, who ignore that the early '80s weren't the '90s.

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

I'm sorry but this is just the Great Man Theory of History applied to someone who makes treats instead of boldfaced genocides

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

This is especially obvious to me ,when you compare an industry that actually WAS salvaged around that same time

The Quartz Crisis was an existential threat to mechanical watchmaking in a way that the 1983 video game crash simply was not to video gaming, or even video gaming consoles.

loudpenitent.bsky.social•3 days ago

the continued fruits of your research

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

wikiwalking paying dividends

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

Like I think the Swatch Group probably actually did save Swiss watchmaking, and quite possibly a significant amount of mechanical engineering expertise in a general sense

But Swatch is basically a consortium, not an individual company, and even if it failed, *watches would still fucking exist*

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

The Swiss economy would get pretty ratfucked, granted

(Which by comparison goes to show you how ridiculous the romanticism of Nintendo's supposed "rescue" of the industry was — even if video games had been totally put in the grave, that was just a blip on Japan's economic radar in 1983)

backwoods-artificer.xyz•3 days ago

Also, like...
Wasn't the gaming crash of '83 specifically console gaming, and specifically in North America? like, I know that it's kind of a whole thing that Nintendo wasn't nearly as big of a deal in the UK because they had much stronger competition from the home computer market

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

The whole thing is overinflated to "If you've ever enjoyed video gaming at all, thank Nintendo executives in 1983"

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

It has a wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_crisis

nymphomachy.meangirls.online•3 days ago

This was a video on the subject I recommend as well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pl-CewTAl8

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