ask thread What was the crash of 1983 like?

[jetset]

@Jetset:and don't forget Sony with the original Playstation skipping FMV, loading issues etc blight.The original laser lens holder (i think it was) being plastic, warped when hardware got hot, i had to turn my day 1 PS1 on it's side, then upside down, then finally get it replaced due to that, yet because Sony handled the customer returns aspect so well, they were able to take minimal heat (no pun intended) from that, deep pockets of course helped.

 

Ditto the PS2, which made it to the UK consumer TV show, Watchdog here, with 'horror' stories of kids turning device on, pressing eject and DVD drive motor burning out as soon as tray opened.....

 

 

Again, Sony took minor damage, by getting on the case to ensure support was there.

 

By time i had issues with my PS3, Sonys customer service here in UK was horrendous!!! World apart from Sony i knew as a PS1 owner, yet hows PS4 selling?.

 

Yeaf, Sony was quick to minimize the damage. MS on the other hand...their handling of the Thompson drive failure was absolutely inexcusable. I had heard the horror stories...didn't believe them until it happened to me. Their "support" pretended it wasn't a widespread problem when clearly millions were affected. Then the was the problem where units were overheating and (probably exaggerated) stories of units catching fire...what did MS do? They sent out a new power cord that basically shut the unit off every ten minutes, rather than fix the problem. Problems are to be expected with a launch console, but when the company refuses to fix the problem, and furthermore acts like they don't know about it...that's f***ed up.

[Keatah]

To me, I also thought there were too many systems on the market, and that's why they all went belly up. You had 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, 5200, Home Computer lines from Atari, Apple, Commodore, IBM, Amiga, - there was just too many systems.

 

Problem was none of them were compatible. There was little or no interoperability, no file standards, no application standards. Programs made for one machine had to be entirely re-written to work on another.

 

 

My dad bought my brother a Vic-20 with datacassette in 1982 "to learn computing on" and it became the center of our attention.

 

What was "home computing" anyways? Seems that the tasks they manufacturers made the machines for or dreamed up never happened much at home. Too many technical things. Too little performance. It would take 20-years later to realize a lot of the promises made by early advertisements.

 

So what was a typical "home computing" family supposed to do? Sit around on Saturday evening typing in programs of dubious practicality?

 

 

All I remember was the cheap games at Kay Bee that could be had for only a few dollars and the mall arcade downsized and moved into a smaller space.

 

I discovered marijuana a couple of years later and I found getting stoned was more fun that playing video games.

I had artificially lost interest in cartridge-based gaming at the time. Missed out on even getting the cheap stuff. I was (too) narrowly focused on women and transitioning into the 16-bit era. Since I could not afford a Mac I went with the Amiga. Bad mistake. Later come the 90's and I still couldn't afford a Mac. So I went with the PC and have been with it ever since.

 

Had Apple made the Mac more affordable I might have never even bothered with the PC. Their loss..

 

 

We talk about it with such drama, but to Joe Consumer, it was the typical cycle of boom and blowout. People might say video games were dead, but they remained popular, just not to the extent that they were.

 

"The crash" is more of a retrospective economic term for the then video game industry. Every kid who wasn't chasing pussy full time was still loving those games.

 

The typical kid didn't really notice "the crash". It wasn't really a crash, it was simply business sorting itself out. I viewed it as a transition from home consoles to real computers.

 

 

I mean honestly the VCS was really old hat by then. We liked it and would sometimes play games on it for fun, but the sentiment was "You still play Atari?" Then I would say "Well, I play the arcade version on the computer" (mostly talking about the Pac-Man comparison) Then the reaction would be "Oh cool, you have a computer. Have you tried hacking into Norad?" And would suddenly get all fascinated.

 

Naturally we all dreamed of hacking into Norad after Wargames.

 

I hated always having to dismissing the hacking norad idea. The computers we had at home were not Hollywood computers.

[+RichG1972]

Best thing you can do Maxell is look up some video documentaries on it on Youtube, some of the best stories come from video game company employees and engineers from back in the day who lived it firsthand, I took the liberty of finding a list of videos on Youtube for you:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=video+game+crash+of+1983+why

[p.opus]

I think crash is a harsh term. Definitely it applied if you were a video game manufacturer, but for the end user it was more of an evolution.

 

There was a growing sentiment about the amount of complete shovelware that was being thrown at the systems. While some arcade transitions were better than their arcade counterparts (Space Invaders) and some games were groundbreaking (Adventure), a lot of games were huge disappointments (Defender and Pac Man). Corporate greed had taken over and the quality of the games had become suspect. E.T. did not "break" Atari, but it was a reflection of the corporate attitude that had become to pervade the market. Get a license, create a crappy game that bore little resemblence to the source material, put it in a fancy box with fancy artwork and ship it out as quickly as possible.

 

There were no places to "rent" or try games out at that time, so you were taking your chances, and in the 80's, $20 to $30 bucks was not a small investment.

 

Also, by 1984 personal computers were becoming more and more affordable. The Atari 400/800, Commodore Vic-20, Commodore 64 and TI-99/4a and Radio Shack Color computers were all low cost computer options that beat anything available in console format The C-64 was the same base price as a VCS had been in 1977. Parents, wanting to give their kids something more educational than a video game, turned to personal computers. And as kids, we were more than willing to move our gaming over to a computer if mom and dad thought it was "good for us".

 

As a kid, you simply played video games on your computer, and they kicked the crap out of anything the 2600 could put out. Heck, the commodore 64 and Atari 800 used the same controllers, so you could simply plug in your Atari Joystick and play the same games you were playing on the 2600, but they looked SOOO much better.

 

So we played our arcade favorites on home computers instead of consoles. It was also during this time that the gamer expected "more" from their games. We wanted an experience that was beyond the 3 lives and your done gameplay. We began to want more complex adventure type games that you could save your location and games that you could actually win.

 

At that time, Video Games could be picked up for a song, and Atari 2600 cartridges filled bins the same way DVD's fill the 5 dollar bins at WalMart today.

 

When the NES came out in 1986, those of us who were Atari and Intellivision owners were pretty much convinced the computer was the future of gaming. The NES was for our younger brothers and sisters, and the early Nintendos's were clearly marketed to the under 10 crowd.

 

The NES also had better "quality control". Nintendo had total control on who could make cartridges for their system, something Atari, Mattel and Coleco had never bothered with. So with a Nintendo game, you had confidence in that Nintendo seal. Heck, it even LOOKED like a "seal of approval".

 

The industry had learned from the wreckage of three years ago.....or so we thought.

[+RichG1972]

The NES came out in 1985 not '86

[AtariTexas]

I remember the crash being very bad. Long soup lines in Sunnydale

[p.opus]

The NES came out in 1985 not '86

It was released in october of 85 in New York City. It was released again in Feb of 86 in LA, followed by Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities. for a second round of limited sales in test markets. The NES did not receive a national release until Sept of 86, which is when it was widely available.

 

If you lived in NYC, then yes, you saw one in 85. Some of us may have seen them in the wild in early 86, but it did not release nationwide until Sept of 86.

Edited August 24, 2015 by p.opus

[+save2600]

 

There were no places to "rent" or try games out at that time, so you were taking your chances, and in the 80's, $20 to $30 bucks was not a small investment.

 

Agree with most of your observations, but there were indeed places that rented Atari games. A local video rental store by us used to, as I rented Amidar and a couple others BITD.

[VectorGamer]

 

Agree with most of your observations, but there were indeed places that rented Atari games. A local video rental store by us used to, as I rented Amidar and a couple others BITD.

 

I didn't see any video game rentals locally until the NES came out. At that time you could rent games from a video rental store or the local convenient store. Perhaps video game rentals were not as popular in the early 80s?

[p.opus]

 

Agree with most of your observations, but there were indeed places that rented Atari games. A local video rental store by us used to, as I rented Amidar and a couple others BITD.

 

 

 

I didn't see any video game rentals locally until the NES came out. At that time you could rent games from a video rental store or the local convenient store. Perhaps video game rentals were not as popular in the early 80s?

 

I don't remember being able to rent games. I think if you had it might have deterred some of the schlock that got released. Sometimes you could see what a game looked like as the local store that was demoing the 2600 would show games, but they never showed the cheap shovelware ones. But they did show off pac-man and defender which is why I decided I didn't want them. Chopper Command was much nicer. Also, ET was such a hot property that the box could have been packed with still steaming manure and still would have sold 1,000,000 copies. ET sold the world on Recees Pieces for god sake....yuk...

[+RichG1972]

It was released in october of 85 in New York City. It was released again in Feb of 86 in LA, followed by Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities. for a second round of limited sales in test markets. The NES did not receive a national release until Sept of 86, which is when it was widely available.

 

If you lived in NYC, then yes, you saw one in 85. Some of us may have seen them in the wild in early 86, but it did not release nationwide until Sept of 86.

That's funny because I was living in Lewes Delaware in 1985 and the NES Deluxe Set was gotten for my stepcousin Michael in 1985 by his grandparents , I have a clear memory of it

[+RichG1972]

I remember the crash being very bad. Long soup lines in Sunnydale

Sunnyvale, Sunnydale is a cartoon locale

[p.opus]

That's funny because I was living in Lewes Delaware in 1985 and the NES Deluxe Set was gotten for my stepcousin Michael in 1985 by his grandparents , I have a clear memory

I'm going off partial memory (I was 20 at the time) and what Wikipedia states (of course they could be wrong, but their dates are referenced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Nintendo_Entertainment_System)).

 

By the age of 20 I was completely into computers so the NES did not hold any interest to me. I wouldn't get interested in Nintendo until game boy hit the market. By that time I was in the Navy on Submarines, and a portable game system like the Gameboy was just the ticket to play video games 500 feet below the ocean.

Edited August 24, 2015 by p.opus

[fiddlepaddle]

1) Sears would let me play any game I wanted before buying it. They even accepted returns, and gave a refund if you wanted.

 

2) Sunnydale is where Buffy went to high school; this is very important to remember.

[WildBillTX]

What was "home computing" anyways? Seems that the tasks they manufacturers made the machines for or dreamed up never happened much at home. Too many technical things. Too little performance. It would take 20-years later to realize a lot of the promises made by early advertisements.

 

I agree, those ads made word processing and creating a spreadsheet look like so much fun with mom & dad and the kids crowded around the computer. <Sarcasm>

 

I remember spending a couple hours typing in a C64 Space Invaders type game from Compute magazine only to find out even after debugging the code that it played lousy. The coolest program I remember typing in was one that would very crudely digitize and play back your voice from the data cassette.

[Nebulon]

If you suddenly see brand new console releases going for $5.00 each at every gaming store then you know something is up.

 

That's essentially the first major crash sign that I noticed back in the day.

[SoulBlazer]

See, that's the thing about the age difference....I WAS 10 in 1986. Hence why the NES and SNES are my favorite systems. But I had a C64 also and gamed heavily on that and the PC also, just as much as consoles. And I'm still gaming new games today at the ripe old age of 39.

[Grig]

Well in 1983 I was 12 so I was already heavy into Atari. I never noticed a "crash" but I do remember seeing games and systems in the bargain bin at Kay Bee. I just thought it was the way business was. Things came out, they sold, they went on clearance and were replaced by something else, etc. I was programming on my Atari (400,800xl,130xe) up until 1988 and then I bought a Commodore 64C and learned how to program on that so I never stopped using my 8 bit computers. Of course I did notice how dry the market was around 1985 and later except for a lot of re-issues but I did not pay attention too much because i was always programming. I never got into the NES and finally got late into the Sega Master System/Genesis which I really liked. I was on BBS's and Quantum Link as well as involved in local user groups for Atari and Commodore so they never really went away for me until the mid 1990s with my last Commodore user group in Fresno. I never took a deeper look into what happened in 1983-1984 until recently so it was just life as usual in my perspective back then. We even had large arcade spots in Bakersfield until the early 2000's (Jimmy's Arcade) but of course around 1997 they became "nickel" arcades and most of the machines were toggled to the expert level with some even only starting off with two lives instead of three.

[+swlovinist]

I was only 7 years of age when the Video Game Crash happened. At the time like many others, I did not know what it was. What I do know is that there were less places to play arcade games. One of the main Arcades in a downtown mall area shut down(really nice arcade) Luckily, the places in my small home town survived with arcade games for many years. Two of my friends had then acquired C64s so I totally started playing alot of games at their houses. My cousins acquired alot of games at this time for their Atari. The only game system I had in my house at this time was a TV scoreboard.

[high voltage]

Most people didn't notice the crash of 83, because it was in 84:

 

 

As acknowledged here by famous Activision programmer Alan Miller:

 

 

and famous Activision programmer Garry Kitchen:

 

 

and the excellent Video Game magazine Electronic Game wrote about:

 

Edited August 28, 2015 by high voltage

[hookem]

The typical kid didn't really notice "the crash". It wasn't really a crash, it was simply business sorting itself out. I viewed it as a transition from home consoles to real computers.

 

 

That's exactly how I remember it. I perceived no "crash" as a kid at the time, just a move to home computers. The games were better on the computers, all the arcade ports were being re-released on them (plus advanced RPG games) and it just seemed illogical to have a dedicated gaming system for awhile... until the NES came out and the younger kids started using them. It took me a while to warm back up to the idea of a dedicated gaming system.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Same here. Homecomputers (C64) were the next big thing. But it seemed like an evolutionary step from single use to more versatile computers.

 

Was the term "crash" even used back then?

Edited August 28, 2015 by Thomas Jentzsch

[p.opus]

Same here. Homecomputers (C64) were the next big thing. But it seemed like an evolutionary step from single use to more versatile computers.

 

Was the term "crash" even used back then?

Totally agree. Crash is a term that the businesses used. Like others mentioned, Atari's video game division was gutted with when Tramiel took over, and the company tried focusing it's business on the personal computer market.

 

You can't really view the video game market "correction" in a vacuum.

 

You really need to take into account several factors.

1. Atari, Intellivision and Colecovision had no control on who could make games for their systems. Thus a lot of fly by night companies made cheap games hoping to "cash in". (sounds familiar.....). Atari was specifically affected since it was the overwhelming leader in market penetration.

2. Personal Computer prices dropped dramatically with the decrease in RAM prices. Around the same time, Sinclair paired with Timex and offered a rudimentary computer for less than $100. The Vic-20 was selling for around $149, and the C-64 was sitting at $200, which was unheard of for a computer with 64K RAM.

3. Kids were also playing "electronic games" such as Football, basketball, Simon, Merlin, etc. So this was also taking away from sitting in front of the TV.

4. Arcades in the early 80's had hit their zenith and had flooded the market. Every mall had an arcade, every convenience store had one or two video game machines, The video game market, both home and commercial had simply become over saturated.

 

So the market corrected itself. The NES hit about a year or two later, and dominated the market. They implemented their Nintendo "quality control" measures to discourage development of shovelware. They initially targeted their games to the younger brothers and sisters of those of us who grew up on the 2600. They provided nearly arcade level graphics at home.

 

It's safe to say that the NES proved to be the final nail in the Arcade coffin. And while vestiges of the arcades still exist in Chuckie Cheese and Dave and Busters, they are predominately filled up with ticket and prize games. The video game arcade as shown in movies like Wargames, Tron, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High died with the rise of the NES.

[high voltage]

True, look what EG said: Shake out.

Other magazines from that time had similar words, but crash was not used at all.

[high voltage]

Totally agree. Crash is a term that the businesses used. Like others mentioned, Atari's video game division was gutted with when Tramiel took over, and the company tried focusing it's business on the personal computer market.

 

 

But Tramiel did well to get Atari games back into business, he tried hard to get the 7800 released. The re-release of the VCS Jr proved very successful too. New games were released with the red box version.

Edited August 28, 2015 by high voltage