Big Player Posted January 8 Share Posted January 8 (edited) Some evidence the crash. Sears was the largest retailer in the US back during the 1980's and had an extensive mail-order catalog. I looked through the Sears Christmas catalogs from 1981 to 1988. Here is what I came up with. Consoles and cartridges only, other hand held electronic games and home computers not included. Anyone can check my work. 1981: 5 pages devoted to video games. Pages 663-667 of the catalog. The links below has slightly different page numbering. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1981-Sears-Christmas-Book 1982: 11 pages of video games. Pages 637-647. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1982-Sears-Christmas-Book 1983: 14 pages of video games. Pages 598-611. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1983-Sears-Christmas-Book 1984: 8 pages of video games. Pages 589-596. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1984-Sears-Christmas-Book 1985: 0 pages of video games for sale. (Two pages for Commodore computers, one for the C64, one for the Amiga C128. Pages 608-609.) https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1985-Sears-Christmas-Book 1986: 1 page of video games. Page 523 for the NES. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1986-Sears-Christmas-Book 1987: 2 pages of video games. 1 for the NES, 1 for the Atari 7800. Pages 666-667. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1987-Sears-Christmas-Book 1988: 6 pages of video games. 3 for the NES. Pages 438-443 (including the Atari XE as a console) https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1988-Sears-Christmas-Book (edit: 1985 - it was a C128 for sale, not an Amiga.) Edited January 8 by Big Player 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hwrd Posted January 8 Share Posted January 8 9 hours ago, GoldLeader said: Whilst I fully know The Crash happened; Does anybody remember the "Retail Glut?" I recall the Walmart-type stores having bins of Atari-branded 2600 and Mattel-branded INTV games for ~$3. Tons of cartridges, but limited selection (30 copies of two/three games). 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted January 8 Share Posted January 8 (edited) 57 minutes ago, hwrd said: I recall the Walmart-type stores having bins of Atari-branded 2600 and Mattel-branded INTV games for ~$3. Tons of cartridges, but limited selection (30 copies of two/three games). The number of carts released in 1982 shot up for sure. But seeing that the 2600 only got around 500 commercial titles (give or take a hundred) total over its entire decade + lifespan- if hardly seems excessive. Compare that to other consoles. Maybe you could argue that retailers were taken off-guard by a sudden surge in titles, or they foolishly thought they could sell anything on cart at full-retail price The other narrative about the crash that I have doubts about is that people got sick of buying rushed games from fly-by-night companies and stopped buying games altogether. I personally never saw that happen. This was during a steep recesssion, people weren't going to just drop $30 on a game they had never heard of. But people snatched up these games once they hit the bargain bin at $5 or less. And many of those games were actually fun. I really think once all the big name arcade games got ported and many of them disappointed, that's what popped the hype bubble, not the flood of no-name games. Edited January 8 by zzip 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+GoldLeader Posted January 8 Share Posted January 8 2 hours ago, Big Player said: Some evidence the crash. Sears was the largest retailer in the US back during the 1980's and had an extensive mail-order catalog. I looked through the Sears Christmas catalogs from 1981 to 1988. Here is what I came up with. Consoles and cartridges only, other hand held electronic games and home computers not included. Anyone can check my work. 1981: 5 pages devoted to video games. Pages 663-667 of the catalog. The links below has slightly different page numbering. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1981-Sears-Christmas-Book 1982: 11 pages of video games. Pages 637-647. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1982-Sears-Christmas-Book 1983: 14 pages of video games. Pages 598-611. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1983-Sears-Christmas-Book 1984: 8 pages of video games. Pages 589-596. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1984-Sears-Christmas-Book 1985: 0 pages of video games for sale. (Two pages for Commodore computers, one for the C64, one for the Amiga C128. Pages 608-609.) https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1985-Sears-Christmas-Book 1986: 1 page of video games. Page 523 for the NES. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1986-Sears-Christmas-Book 1987: 2 pages of video games. 1 for the NES, 1 for the Atari 7800. Pages 666-667. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1987-Sears-Christmas-Book 1988: 6 pages of video games. 3 for the NES. Pages 438-443 (including the Atari XE as a console) https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1988-Sears-Christmas-Book (edit: 1985 - it was a C128 for sale, not an Amiga.) Just a note: NES is on page 529 (1986 Sears book) 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+GoldLeader Posted January 8 Share Posted January 8 1 hour ago, hwrd said: I recall the Walmart-type stores having bins of Atari-branded 2600 and Mattel-branded INTV games for ~$3. Tons of cartridges, but limited selection (30 copies of two/three games). Yep! I remember The Clearance, not the "Glut"... 34 minutes ago, zzip said: The number of carts released in 1982 shot up for sure. But seeing that the 2600 only got around 500 commercial titles (give or take a hundred) total over its entire decade + lifespan- if hardly seems excessive. Compare that to other consoles. Maybe you could argue that retailers were taken off-guard by a sudden surge in titles, or they foolishly thought they could sell anything on cart at full-retail price The other narrative about the crash that I have doubts about is that people got sick of buying rushed games from fly-by-night companies and stopped buying games altogether. I personally never saw that happen. This was during a steep recesssion, people weren't going to just drop $30 on a game they had never heard of. But people snatched up these games once they hit the bargain bin at $5 or less. And many of those games were actually fun. I really think once all the big name arcade games got ported and many of them disappointed, that's what popped the hype bubble, not the flood of no-name games. Exactly what I remember! I don't ever remember a "Too Many Games" situation. I do believe there may have been a big crossover with a time frame where (too) many other interests were competing for my attention,...Cars, concerts, VCRs, movies, Music, MTV (for people with cable haha)...There's a chance I missed the "Too Many Choices, not enough good ones", because I was in the record store instead...Or maybe it happened in bigger cities (but I doubt it because we never found that to be the case before, almost all store shelves were roughly the same...) Truth be known, we used to dream of these Legendary, Mythical stores,...Where (depending on time frame) you could find: All the action figures (Including Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Battlestar, and Black Hole etc.), All the Micronauts (Including the old ones), and Shogun Warriors (Including the Ultra Cool old ones),...All the video games including cartridges you usually can't find anymore...Or all the cassettes, records, and CDs from Every band, even the ones where you've only heard one song on a comp! But these stores never existed...(Though bigger cities did get stock more music in their records and tapes stores)... Perceptions vary, but "The Glut" is probably the one part of the narrative I'd challenge, though I think it was more of a "Hard to put into words" situation...Saying some people got burned on lesser games a few times so (presumably) quit buying cartridges altogether, takes a lot more words and a lot more explaining... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+pboland Posted January 8 Share Posted January 8 2 hours ago, Big Player said: Some evidence the crash. Sears was the largest retailer in the US back during the 1980's and had an extensive mail-order catalog. I looked through the Sears Christmas catalogs from 1981 to 1988. Here is what I came up with. Consoles and cartridges only, other hand held electronic games and home computers not included. Anyone can check my work. 1981: 5 pages devoted to video games. Pages 663-667 of the catalog. The links below has slightly different page numbering. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1981-Sears-Christmas-Book 1982: 11 pages of video games. Pages 637-647. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1982-Sears-Christmas-Book 1983: 14 pages of video games. Pages 598-611. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1983-Sears-Christmas-Book 1984: 8 pages of video games. Pages 589-596. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1984-Sears-Christmas-Book 1985: 0 pages of video games for sale. (Two pages for Commodore computers, one for the C64, one for the Amiga C128. Pages 608-609.) https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1985-Sears-Christmas-Book 1986: 1 page of video games. Page 523 for the NES. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1986-Sears-Christmas-Book 1987: 2 pages of video games. 1 for the NES, 1 for the Atari 7800. Pages 666-667. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1987-Sears-Christmas-Book 1988: 6 pages of video games. 3 for the NES. Pages 438-443 (including the Atari XE as a console) https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1988-Sears-Christmas-Book (edit: 1985 - it was a C128 for sale, not an Amiga.) On a side note, did anyone else see the TechForce toys on page 668 (1987 catalog)? A Noland Bushnell creation. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1987-Sears-Christmas-Book/0668 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted January 8 Share Posted January 8 7 minutes ago, GoldLeader said: Perceptions vary, but "The Glut" is probably the one part of the narrative I'd challenge, though I think it was more of a "Hard to put into words" situation...Saying some people got burned on lesser games a few times so (presumably) quit buying cartridges altogether, takes a lot more words and a lot more explaining... To the extent there was a Glut, it was primarily a 2600 phenomenon, most of those fly-by-night publishers only released 2600 games, and Coleco, 5200 and INTV got relatively few of them. So why did Mattel bow out? Because of a 2600 glut? Because Atari released E.T.? Because 2600 Pac-man was subpar? It doesn't add up! Gamers seemed to lose interest across the board, including arcades. That shouldn't have happened if it was mostly a problem on the 2600. 44 minutes ago, GoldLeader said: I do believe there may have been a big crossover with a time frame where (too) many other interests were competing for my attention,...Cars, concerts, VCRs, movies, Music, MTV (for people with cable haha)...There's a chance I missed the "Too Many Choices, not enough good ones", because I was in the record store instead...Or maybe it happened in bigger cities (but I doubt it because we never found that to be the case before, almost all store shelves were roughly the same...) For awhile games were all the rage. It's all anybody talked about on the schoolyard, all we'd ever do when hanging out at other people's houses-- play on the Atari or Intellivision. And then suddenly it all stopped. Well not completely, but a helluva lot less than it had been! Everyone was into new things. I know people hate when you call it a fad, but the Pac-Man/Donkey Kong era followed the pattern of a fad-- everyone is into it, then everyone is suddenly "too cool" for it. And many people didn't completely stop playing, but games were now sharing time with other new interests and so less money was being spent on it. And just to illustrate the impact of VCRs/Home Video. Electronic Games Magazine was a sister publication with "Video" magazine, which covered home video. When Electronic Games folded, it became a mere 2-page column in the much more massive Video magazine! Just shows how much bigger the home video market had become around the time of the crash. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zoyous Posted January 8 Share Posted January 8 16 minutes ago, zzip said: Gamers seemed to lose interest across the board, including arcades. That shouldn't have happened if it was mostly a problem on the 2600. For awhile games were all the rage. It's all anybody talked about on the schoolyard, all we'd ever do when hanging out at other people's houses-- play on the Atari or Intellivision. And then suddenly it all stopped. Well not completely, but a helluva lot less than it had been! Everyone was into new things. I know people hate when you call it a fad, but the Pac-Man/Donkey Kong era followed the pattern of a fad-- everyone is into it, then everyone is suddenly "too cool" for it. I agree that there was a video game fad in that era. Although as any one of us here will point out, we never stopped being into games. But following "Pac-Man Fever," the general public largely moved on and then for quite a long time, video games and computers in general were deemed to be the domain of a weird and potentially violent subculture. The industry in general "crashed" due to the involvement of would-be businesspeople thinking it was a ticket to a quick buck, which it was for a couple of years. But once the media craze surrounding it waned, most of these participants were revealed to not really have business chops. These days you can see all these scuzzy little vape shops in every strip mall. Back in the day, those would have been the locations of arcades in many cases. It was that kind of relatively low-bar-of-entry independent business that could flourish during the height of the fad but then quickly folded when they were confronted with the regular ups and downs of a long-term business without the benefit of a national craze driving heightened interest. (Not to mention the benefit of actually addictive chemical products like nicotine vapes.) 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jake Riley Posted January 8 Share Posted January 8 13 hours ago, GoldLeader said: Whilst I fully know The Crash happened; Does anybody remember the "Retail Glut?" I ask this because while I still played games, my money was also going to cars, gas, insurance, heavy metal, going out, etc. as now I was in high school. Although it is always mentioned (as part of the cause) I cannot remember one single time when I went into a store and thought there were too many choices. There always seemed to be less and less choices, not too many. This could just be timing...A couple of down periods and retailers thought the craze was over (and it was just a fad) so they quit buying so many... PS I can even remember buying ColecoVision games (at full price) I hadn't planned on buying, because there wasn't enough selection and I didn't want to leave empty handed. When I said retail glut, I meant that Atari was overly confident about the industry and produced way more cartridges than they needed. This meant a lot of the carts ended up not selling, which hurt the industry. Not because there were too many games, or too many consoles. The latter is another myth about the crash. Most of the consoles at the time were a lot more obscure than the main two companies, and didn't really hurt the industry. They were kind of like the CDIs or CDTVs of their time. Sure, crash might have been partly due to general interest in games fading a bit, but that alone probably wasn't enough to crash the industry like it did. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boschloo Posted January 8 Share Posted January 8 (edited) On 1/3/2024 at 11:38 AM, Flojomojo said: Thanks Carl! Carl Sagan, BHA. Edited January 8 by Boschloo 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Player Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 I just realized I screwed up the links in my post. If you click my links, they all go to 1981. Just change the year in the url to get it right. Too late to edit my post. The full site is here with catalogs from Sears, Montgomery Ward and JC Penny going back to the 1940's. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ 4 hours ago, GoldLeader said: Just a note: NES is on page 529 (1986 Sears book) It's page 523 as printed though. The numbering is off on the site for a few of the years. I put down the printed numbers but I realize now I should have put down both. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mockduck Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 4 hours ago, pboland said: On a side note, did anyone else see the TechForce toys on page 668 (1987 catalog)? A Noland Bushnell creation. https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1987-Sears-Christmas-Book/0668 Wow, that is fantastic! Never heard of it. $250 seems like it would have felt expensive back then. Wonder how well/if it actually worked? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 18 hours ago, Zoyous said: I agree that there was a video game fad in that era. Although as any one of us here will point out, we never stopped being into games. But following "Pac-Man Fever," the general public largely moved on and then for quite a long time, video games and computers in general were deemed to be the domain of a weird and potentially violent subculture. Yeah a lot of us kept playing, and I think that's why so many people have the "what crash? I never noticed" reaction. But I couldn't miss the social change around gaming, it was too blatantly obvious. Games went from all everyone talked about, to the domain of "ewww nerds!". In the 80s you did not want to be labeled a nerd! (it wasn't cool until the 90s tech boom when "nerds" started getting rich) So we kept out interest in gaming kind of quiet in those years, until suddenly in my junior or senior year, everyone was getting NESes and suddenly it was cool to be a gamer again! 18 hours ago, Jake Riley said: Sure, crash might have been partly due to general interest in games fading a bit, but that alone probably wasn't enough to crash the industry like it did. According to wikipedia, game sales dropped from $3 billion in 1982 to $100 million in 1985. Even if you marked down every $30 game to $5 and sold the same volume, you don't get to $100 million in sales. Not all games got marked down. There had to be a significant drop in demand to see that kind of fall off. For some reason, everyone wants to find a structural, supplier side cause of the crash. As "if only Atari had done X instead of Y, the crash could have been averted" Maybe it's because we don't have hard data on consumer attitudes of the time period? I would argue that the crash could not have been averted because the industry was in a bubble. All the growth came on the back of the "Pac-man Fever" craze, and once that wore off, it had nothing to sustain that growth. So the industry declined as fast as it had risen a few years prior. The overproduction decisions by Atari were because they had no idea they were in a bubble and thought the crazy growth would continue. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1980gamer Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 19 hours ago, zzip said: To the extent there was a Glut, it was primarily a 2600 phenomenon, most of those fly-by-night publishers only released 2600 games, and Coleco, 5200 and INTV got relatively few of them. So why did Mattel bow out? Because of a 2600 glut? Because Atari released E.T.? Because 2600 Pac-man was subpar? It doesn't add up! Gamers seemed to lose interest across the board, including arcades. That shouldn't have happened if it was mostly a problem on the 2600. Mattle and Coleco suffered from hardware glut. On the Coleco side ADAM is all that needs to be said. On the Mattle side, they had a poorly selling Intellivoice, System Changer, ESC, Music Keyboard not to mention 2 consoles in development. E.T. may have been a profitable game, if they didn't produce a supply greater than the possible demand. Literally more carts were produced than consoles to play them on. I guess the logic being it would drive console sales. Even if it did, they must have believed it would have near 100% penetration in existing homes. WOW! The funny part about the POST crash, my 4 sisters (all older than me) never played Intellivision or Colecovision.. But they played a ton of NES. The Mario theme still haunts me. 2 of them even stayed in gaming through the Wii. Now they just play on the phone. I was 13 in 1983.. So, yes, I started spending money on music and going to movies etc. But still played videogames almost daily. My console buying personally slowed when I got a C64. (let's be honest, the C64 was a videogame console!!!) Then I was mostly buying for that. I was still buying the NEW intellivision games, only a handful were released each year post crash. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 7 minutes ago, 1980gamer said: My console buying personally slowed when I got a C64. (let's be honest, the C64 was a videogame console!!!) Then I was mostly buying for that. I was still buying the NEW intellivision games, only a handful were released each year post crash. Computer Gaming was the only segment that was growing during the crash, but it was relatively small since most people didn't make the jump from console to computer. Most other consoles saw releases slow to a trickle as well 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hwlngmad Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 People who think that there wasn't a video game crash in the United States (i.e. North America) need to quit sniffing glue. They are probably the same that don't think we (meaning the U.S.) didn't go the moon either. 1 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
4ever2600 Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 https://boingboing.net/2024/01/08/inside-ataris-headquarters-just-before-the-1983-video-game-crash-that-decimated-the-industry-video.html/amp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jake Riley Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 4 hours ago, zzip said: Yeah a lot of us kept playing, and I think that's why so many people have the "what crash? I never noticed" reaction. But I couldn't miss the social change around gaming, it was too blatantly obvious. Games went from all everyone talked about, to the domain of "ewww nerds!". In the 80s you did not want to be labeled a nerd! (it wasn't cool until the 90s tech boom when "nerds" started getting rich) So we kept out interest in gaming kind of quiet in those years, until suddenly in my junior or senior year, everyone was getting NESes and suddenly it was cool to be a gamer again! According to wikipedia, game sales dropped from $3 billion in 1982 to $100 million in 1985. Even if you marked down every $30 game to $5 and sold the same volume, you don't get to $100 million in sales. Not all games got marked down. There had to be a significant drop in demand to see that kind of fall off. For some reason, everyone wants to find a structural, supplier side cause of the crash. As "if only Atari had done X instead of Y, the crash could have been averted" Maybe it's because we don't have hard data on consumer attitudes of the time period? I would argue that the crash could not have been averted because the industry was in a bubble. All the growth came on the back of the "Pac-man Fever" craze, and once that wore off, it had nothing to sustain that growth. So the industry declined as fast as it had risen a few years prior. The overproduction decisions by Atari were because they had no idea they were in a bubble and thought the crazy growth would continue. Had Atari not overproduced their games but interest still declined, would the crash have happened? Or, at least, would it have been nearly as huge? Interests in things wane from time to time, but that isn't really enough to singlehandedly crash an industry like what happened. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Video Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 Atari wasn't the problem though. Their games continued to sell, so did some others, like Activision. The problem was games piled up from every fly by night group or individual out there. Gaming got relatively huge an everybody wanted a piece of the pie. The problem was there simply wasn't enough of the pie to go around. Some of those third party games were good, but most were abysmal trash, and some were reskinned poor sellers from big boys (atari won't say anything if we basically pirate a game that doesn't sell well) and some were exact copies of other games, even in some cases copying game breaking elements. Then there's Atari policy. In order to get games into stores, atari offered to buy back what doesn't sell. That's great, but stores assumed Atari would buy back anything that didn't sell, but Atari wasn't buying back crap made by others, leaving stores who unrestrictedly bought a bunch of trash holding the bag, which made a lot of store dump games, all games, into bargainbins, and it was a quick decline for Atari (and others) as suddenly stores wouldn't even buy/stock Atari stuff anymore either. Despite being honest, atari got blamed for "not supporting their buyback" which wasn't initially true, but probably became true as even the big boys got to broke to do things like that. This ill will towards Atari remains with many retailers to this day. Those of us who legit liked gaming still played, but fads are fads for a reason. Their unpredictable. Pacman was insane, then it wasn't, then it took till smb for a new fad to pop up (at least I don't recall anything huge between pacman and mario) but those that like games, rather than fads kept playing. Its just single screen arcade style has limited appeal in general, so you'd have to be relatively hard core to play through the crash. I was also one that had a c=64 and yes, its a video game console (that happened to do computerie stuff. But outside 2600, and that was more a "by the skin of its teeth" thing, consoles just died. Coleco and 5200 just disappeared, and 7800 got shelved rather than a full release. But games kept on, it was just a trickle instead of a flood. Actual gamers instead of fad chasers kept playing because their willing to look for the stuff, not because it remained easily attainable. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted January 10 Share Posted January 10 2 hours ago, Jake Riley said: Had Atari not overproduced their games but interest still declined, would the crash have happened? Yes. Most of Atari's excess inventory was buried in a landfill rather than clogging up retailers. They should have been able to write-off that inventory, maybe have a bad quarter or two if it was just an inventory problem, then return to profitability. But then Atari started to lose even more money in 1983 and 84 to the point where it was putting parent company Warner at risk, which is why Warner was happy to sell Atari off in 84. Usually the "glut of games" theory is expressed as too many companies rushed into produce low-quality games in 1982, these companies went bankrupt in 1983, leading to retailers putting their games in bargain bins for $5, and this made it hard for companies like Activision to sell games at full price and they suffered too. There is surely some truth to that. But book stores and record stores have long had bargain bins without destroying their respective industries, so I don't think it's the sole cause. And again bargain bins were mostly a 2600 problem, every console and the arcades suffered during the crash. 2 hours ago, Jake Riley said: Interests in things wane from time to time, but that isn't really enough to singlehandedly crash an industry like what happened. That's true, but the example I usually give is "Pokemon Go" and "Fortnite". When these games came out, they became hugely popular and faddish. Predictably the hype went away and certainly much of the user base did too. But the loss of their popularity probably didn't do more than create some ripples in total game revenue. The industry is now mature and diversified. And many gamers burned out on those games simply moved onto other games. The problem in 1983 was the industry was very young, and most of the recent growth was based off a single game! Prior to Pacman, arcades were overwhelmingly filled with space games, racers or shooters. That appealed to a certain audience. Pac-man was a different kind of game and it brought in people from all walks of life, and it created a cultural sensation with a hit song, breakfast cereal, saturday morning cartoon and a whole bunch of other stuff. But a lot of those people Pacman brought in were just following the latest fads, and they disappeared when the novelty wore off. There were no other popular games to move to yet, they moved back to non-gaming interest. Gaming reverted to its original demographic more or less. This chart shows the sales during those years and it's shaped like an almost perfect bubble with an overcorrection to below even 1978 levels. After the crash you see a slower, more sustainable growth rate So I am fairly the crash was due to a fad/bubble, and all the other things like poor ET sales, dying arcades, bargain bin games from bankrupt companies, oversupply, and death of consoles for several years were symptoms of the problem rather than the cause. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1980gamer Posted January 10 Share Posted January 10 @Video I agree with you. Atari was not to blame. They just didn't do themselves any favors. I filled most of my current collection in 1984 with the $.99 games at KB Toys. I was not buying the "premium games", I'd bet I picked up 100+ games in 84. 85 the prices were way up... like $5 each. LOL I still picked up a rear gem from time to time. But I was mostly buying C64 and trading games by then. 86/87 Toys R US, at least near me, carried C64, NES, SMS and Intellivision games. I don't remember ever seeing an Atari 7800 in the wild. I got a NES pretty early, but I didn't play it often. I was still using the C64 and Intellivision released some new games. 1 player sports etc. I never had an SMS, but I kind of thought of it as a better CV. I had a friend that had one and I liked it. Not enough to buy it. I would grab one now, if I saw a deal. Clearly the "crash" was real, but it only enhanced my gaming and my friends. In my circle, kept gaming, we never stopped going to the arcades. We could buy and swap games like crazy. By the time the cheap games dried up, we had a full comeback with the NES etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted January 10 Share Posted January 10 2 hours ago, Video said: Their unpredictable. Pacman was insane, then it wasn't, then it took till smb for a new fad to pop up (at least I don't recall anything huge between pacman and mario) Maybe Donkey Kong? During the crash Spy Hunter, and maybe Star Wars arcade were the only things that had anything close to mass appeal that I can recall- Well maybe Dragon's Lair arcade machines drew crowds for about a week. But they were never close to Pac-Man or SMB in popularity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1980gamer Posted January 10 Share Posted January 10 I feel a little foolish looking back, I even picked up a few games I already had for the Intellivision. I had the TRON games in gatefold boxes and got them again in the smaller end tab versions. I don't know why I opened these, I wanted to see if they were newer versions or something? KB had all of the intellivision games at 99 cents with the exception of a few ESC games. But the ESC was $39.99 when I got it at KB. World Series Major League Baseball was impressive, but the ECS was not good... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1980gamer Posted January 10 Share Posted January 10 (edited) 9 minutes ago, zzip said: Maybe Donkey Kong? During the crash Spy Hunter, and maybe Star Wars arcade were the only things that had anything close to mass appeal that I can recall- Well maybe Dragon's Lair arcade machines drew crowds for about a week. But they were never close to Pac-Man or SMB in popularity Dragon's Lair was a game I watched others "play" It was $1 a game in my area. No thanks. I tried it 1 time only. Right next to that machine was a Pacman machine that had a maze I had never seen before; I have not seen it since... I looked at all the Mame versions I could find.. No luck. Star Wars was pretty popular. Track and Field and Congo Bongo got a lot of my quarters. I had a few friends that would play Gauntlet, but that was later... maybe 1988? I was into driving games at that point. I don't know why; I had a car! LOL Well, it was a Junk car... So, driving a racing car or convertible was most likely the draw. I always liked driving games. Auto Racing, Lemans on the C64, Bump N Jump, even Up n Down. Oh, Night Driver and Indy 500 way back. Edited January 10 by 1980gamer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted January 10 Share Posted January 10 14 hours ago, 1980gamer said: Dragon's Lair was a game I watched others "play" It was $1 a game in my area. No thanks. I tried it 1 time only. I guess I was lucky, DL was only a quarter at my local arcade! That quarter didn't last long though! I balked at any machine charging 50 cents, I definitely wouldn't have paid a dollar! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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