IGN: Revising History: The Crash of '83

[Atari2008]

The Crash of '83 is usually debated in this forum, and I'm always intrigued by it. Since I didn't live through it, I have no personal experience to go on, but the official stories of how games like Pac-Man and ET sunk a whole industry always sounded like a stretch to me, so it's nice to see this article that offers a more balanced approach. Of course, I'd love to hear what the experts in this forum think. Enjoy!

 

IGN: Revising History: The Crash of '83

[Reaperman]

how dare you! My parents were killed in ET's war.

weeping and riots everywhere. The value of the quarter dropped to just ten cents.

Never forget. Or our evil history is doomed to repeat itself.

Edited December 19, 2008 by Reaperman

[hooloovoo]

I think E.T. is hard but fun. Are people going to hate me for this?

[vdub_bobby]

I think E.T. is hard but fun. Are people going to hate me for this?

Nope.

 

E.T. is an OK game that is scapegoated for a lot of things. Taken as a game, it isn't half bad - it has a good, if overcomplicated, concept, great graphics, good sounds, some control issues and huge, gigantic design flaws (Most annoying pits ever? Confusing icons? Yes! And yes!). Put it all together and, without the huge license and massive hype, it would be remembered much like Montezuma's Revenge - a pretty good little adventure game. But, with the hype, it has become The Legend: The Game. That. Killed. An. Entire. Industry. Bwaahaaahahahahahahahaha!

 

But anyway, AtariAge probably has the highest concentration, in all of space and time, of people that like that game. So no, no hate.

 

EDIT: Just read the IGN article and...it's not half bad. I don't agree with everything he wrote, but it's a lot better than most of the "history" you get from the gaming rags these days.

Edited December 19, 2008 by vdub_bobby

[4ever2600]

They've already got it wrong... The crash happened in 84!!!

[Atarifever]

They've already got it wrong... The crash happened in 84!!!

Actually it happened around 1995. There hasn't been a real game made since then.

[Atarifever]

By the way, IGN retro is the best thing done by any of the major "modern gaming press." I am constantly surprised by how good it is.

[Atarifever]

Some of the comments from the readers are still pretty terrible here though. Case in point:

Why did these consoles and the companies that made them fail? Why did American videogame makers pack it up and go home?

 

The Atari 2600, the Atari 5200, the Bally Astrocade, the ColecoVision, the Coleco Gemini, the Emerson Arcadia 2001, the Fairchild Channel F System II, Magnavox Odyssey2, Mattel Intellivision, the Tandyvision, the VTech CreatiVision, and the Vectrex - none of those consoles survived past 1984, let alone flourished like the NES did from 1984 to 1994 - a ten year lifespan. Why?

 

Is it because they werent as powerful? Too expensive? Mismanaged and mismarketed? Not enough games? They fragmented the market? No, no, no, no and no.

 

The companies just didnt have their sh*t together in terms of software licensing. The software libraries were too diluted, and cimply didnt capture the public imagination.

 

The best selling game on the 2600 was the abysmal port of Pac Man, an arcade game meant to eat coins. But even the best 2600 games - Pitfall, River Raid, Adventure - were short, simple affairs.

 

If Atari had put an emphasis on quality control with its software, and had someone with the talent and vision of Miyamoto designing games with mass appeal meant to be played for weeks and months, not minutes or hours, they never would have gone under.

 

Yuck.

[mos6507]

Does that guy even know that Miyamoto made Donkey Kong? Obviously not a good port on the 2600, but still. You'd expect people to look back on the old games from a Japan-centric perspective.

Edited December 19, 2008 by mos6507

[Pixelboy]

Some of the comments from the readers are still pretty terrible here though. Case in point:

Why did these consoles and the companies that made them fail? Why did American videogame makers pack it up and go home?

 

The Atari 2600, the Atari 5200, the Bally Astrocade, the ColecoVision, the Coleco Gemini, the Emerson Arcadia 2001, the Fairchild Channel F System II, Magnavox Odyssey2, Mattel Intellivision, the Tandyvision, the VTech CreatiVision, and the Vectrex - none of those consoles survived past 1984, let alone flourished like the NES did from 1984 to 1994 - a ten year lifespan. Why?

 

Is it because they werent as powerful? Too expensive? Mismanaged and mismarketed? Not enough games? They fragmented the market? No, no, no, no and no.

 

The companies just didnt have their sh*t together in terms of software licensing. The software libraries were too diluted, and cimply didnt capture the public imagination.

 

The best selling game on the 2600 was the abysmal port of Pac Man, an arcade game meant to eat coins. But even the best 2600 games - Pitfall, River Raid, Adventure - were short, simple affairs.

 

If Atari had put an emphasis on quality control with its software, and had someone with the talent and vision of Miyamoto designing games with mass appeal meant to be played for weeks and months, not minutes or hours, they never would have gone under.

Yuck.

People who don't understand how the business works and cannot put themselves into the mindset of that era of gaming are bound to make these kinds of comments. Fortunately, most of the nice people on these boards know better.

[chrisbid]

what i cant stand is the idea that 1985 is when things turned around

 

the NES didn't really start to hit the big time until 1987. I got my NES over the summer of 1988 and there were still plenty of kids that did not have one. it was only test marketed at the end of 1985

[Atari2008]

I do like that this is one of the few articles that actually portrays the 7800 in a positive light. The 7800 gets such a bad rap due to the way Atari mishandled it, but from the things people say you'd thing that the system in and of itself was inherently flawed and there was no way it could produce good games. Yet the first crop of games like Food Fight and Robotron as well as the homebrews show this not to be the case. It's nice to see the 7800 finally get its due.

[Artlover]

The story is heavily Atari biased in nature as that is all it seems to talk about beyond a few in passing comments about the others around at the time. Also, don't aggree with a lot of their logic for calling many of the reasons myths.

 

Myth: Over-saturation of consoles and games killed the market. This argument seems counter-intuitive right from the start. The downfall of the market leader would create an opening for competitors, not close it, right? That is, of course if any of them worthy.

Uh, yeah, sure. The problem is when you've already invested your money in one, and they go under. What am I supposed to do, just chuck it all and reinvest in a competitor? People wern't rich back then. They also seem to miss the fundamental concept that different platforms appealed to different people for different reasons. They are looking at it in such a general "gaming machines" concept that they forget/ignore one doesn't/can't replace another.

 

Myth: Competition from computers helped to crash the industry. This is probably the truest of all the popular arguments about the crash, but there's one very big problem with it: The computer and console business were not separate industries. The same companies frequently made games for computers and consoles, often ports of the same titles.

Yes, they were seperate industries. That's just flat out ignorant right there. Further, sure, many companies made software for consoles and computers, and? Computers and software wasn't impacted by the crash like the consoles were. They were still selling.

 

Can pretty much rip apart everything they said in one way or other. It is what it is, trying to rewrite history. The only novel thing about this article is that it doesn't bash ET & Pac-Man. But again, the whole article was Atari biased from the start.

[accousticguitar]

I would say the article has a misleading title. The point (towards the end anyway) seems to be that Pac-Man and ET didn't sink Atari on their own. Well, no, but they sure didn't help the situation any. Management made a lot of other terrible decisions, but ET and Pac-Man were two of the worst. Those two games alone potentially alienated millions of customers.

[supercat]

I would say the article has a misleading title. The point (towards the end anyway) seems to be that Pac-Man and ET didn't sink Atari on their own. Well, no, but they sure didn't help the situation any. Management made a lot of other terrible decisions, but ET and Pac-Man were two of the worst. Those two games alone potentially alienated millions of customers.

 

E.T. was overhyped, but a lot of people who had the game back in the day liked it. Not quite enough time play-testing (IMHO, changing the collision-detect logic for the pits and adjusting a player's position off a pit when traveling to the lots-of-pits screen would have helped enormously) but I don't think people felt ripped off.

 

Pac Man, on the other hand, was an obvious piece of shovel-ware. Games with no flicker or intelligent flicker were already pretty common; using full-time 15fps flicker for the ghosts was just plain lazy.

[Artlover]

E.T. was overhyped, but a lot of people who had the game back in the day liked it. ............. but I don't think people felt ripped off.

Speak for yourself.

 

Ugh, this game is giving me more cancer. {flatlines}

[Nukey Shay]

Speculation: Suppose Atari never made ET or Pac-Man for the 2600. What happens? The crash still happens. It was inevitable because the console market was too fragmented at a time that the public interest was shifting more toward other markets. The end effect wasn't the result of anything that anybody did wrong (everybody doing everything right would have the same effect...no single console producer/division made enough to stay in the black).

 

Now let's suppose that you are one of the companies involved. What could you do? Not much, except what they actually did do. Either fold completely (and/or focus on other tech), or eliminate overhead so that existing product isn't eating away at your bottom line.

[Gregory DG]

I don't think anything could have stopped the crash, short of a slower rise of Atari. The faster things rise, the faster they fall.

[mos6507]

I don't think anything could have stopped the crash, short of a slower rise of Atari. The faster things rise, the faster they fall.

 

Atari falling kind of took out the other players the way people now talk about how GM/Chrysler failing would kill Ford in the insuing shockwave. Atari had made a series of blunders up until that point so there was no one thing they could have done to save themselves. It was a tragedy of errors on many fronts. Kind of like debating the fall of Rome and looking for that one cause when it was clearly a mix of things.

[Reaperman]

Speculation: Suppose Atari never made ET or Pac-Man for the 2600. What happens? The crash still happens. It was inevitable because the console market was too fragmented at a time that the public interest was shifting more toward other markets.

granted the crash may still have happened.

but the fact that ET melted the eyeballs of over half the world's video gamers certainly increased the urgency with which people turned away from video games. Those who could still see had to quickly form gangs for protection from the enraged and blinded teenage hoards roaming the countryside.

 

seriously. ET sold well, it wasn't very good at all, but it was what it was. Nobody thinks grand theft auto will crash video games...

[Nukey Shay]

The alternative is to believe that Atari was in control of everything...including competitors' and 3rd-parties' market share, which would be idiotic. The effects held across the entire US market. What fed the myth is the fact that Atari had to kill off excess inventory...these 2 titles in particular, since they had both been overproduced to offset the cost of their respective licenses - in forecast of the (until then) exponential growth of the industry. This is nothing new, and companies still do it to this day.

[jetset]

People also forget in '83/'84/'85 the economy was shit. Double digit unemployment, double digit interest rates, double digit inflation. Buying expensive electronic toys was not a priority to many families. Granted this was by no means the main reason but no question it was a biggie.

[tyranthraxus]

what i cant stand is the idea that 1985 is when things turned around

 

the NES didn't really start to hit the big time until 1987. I got my NES over the summer of 1988 and there were still plenty of kids that did not have one. it was only test marketed at the end of 1985

 

100% agree with you. I think its become a pet peeve of mine the way people wave the 1985 NES flag.

 

I remember Xmas 1986 was the big push for the NES which meant that 1987 was the first year for most of those families. That year was also when classics like Metroid and Zelda came out here and pushed the system to further heights.

 

It'd be interesting to compare the Sears Catalog between the years of 82 to 87 to observe the shift.

[sandmountainslim]

Interesting article, thanks for the link.

 

From my own personal memories I recall '84 as being the year when everything just "died" and went away.

Where I live and among my peers '83 was still a wide-open year for the Atari and for gaming in general.

Wp

[Jess Ragan]

I always thought it was the crash of 1984...