famicomer

Maybe, but if the theory is that high interest rates led to reduced consumer spending (possibly with a delayed effect) which led to the video game crash, a more direct way of testing that hypothesis would be to look at consumer spending levels. When you do, you can see that they never went down. They leveled off (ie didn't grow) during the late 70s-early 80s, but by the time the crash came they were increasing again. So there wasn't a collapse in consumer spending that led to the video game crash. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/consumer-spending

I agree with your first point - the excessive inventories of games didn't cause the crash, they were just an effect of it. I have trouble agreeing with your explanations for the crash though. The interest rate argument doesn't make much sense to me. Interest rates on mortgages peaked at over 18% in the fall of 1981, when the video game market was booming. If they were an important factor in driving people to stop buying console games then the effects of that would have happened much sooner than 1983-1985 (by which time interest rates, while still high by historical standards, were going down from that peak). The negative media coverage might have played some role, but of course that coverage didn't occur in a vaccum - Atari (and others) made some objectively bad business decisions that fed into that and made them ultimately unable to survive the crash.

Totally agree. From what I*ve read, after Warner took over Atari any business sense went out the window and they just drove it into the ground.

Yes, there were 30 in total, I just meant that I had 7 of them. Awesome collection there BTW.

Thanks! I have the regular 2800 releases of 7 games (Space Invaders, Asteroids, MIssile Command,Phoenix,Super Breakout,Real Baseball) with their boxes and manuals. They are pretty hard to find even in Japan, after two years of searching those are the only ones I have found (have some pics here <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" data-cke-saved-href="http://famicomblog.blogspot.jp/2013/10/some-more-atari-2800-loveand-hate.html%20).%C2%A0%20They%20are%20pretty%20hard%20to%20find%20even%20in%20Japan%20(I" href="http://famicomblog.blogspot.jp/2013/10/some-more-atari-2800-loveand-hate.html%20).%C2%A0%20They%20are%20pretty%20hard%20to%20find%20even%20in%20Japan%20(I" ve%20been%20hunting%20them%20for%20about%202%20years%20while%20living%20here%20and%20those%20are%20the%20only%207%20i%20have%20found)."="">http://famicomblog.blogspot.jp/2013/10/some-more-atari-2800-loveand-hate.html ).

Awesome, that copy of Challenge of Nexar has the exact same sticker. I guess Spectravision must have released most (all?) of its games in Japan too. I now have a new collecting challenge to pursue.....

Thanks for the replies. Actually that ad is even more intriguing - it isn't Japanese, the subtitles are Chinese (from Taiwan or Hong Kong probably). I didn't know the VCS was released there too.

Hi everyone, I live in Japan and have an Atari 2800 (the ill-fated Japanese version of the VCS) that I sometimes pick up games for. I just bought a CIB copy of Gangster Alley for it, which is kind of interesting. It is interesting because Gangster Alley isn't one of the games that was actually officially released for the 2800, but my copy of it was nonetheless sold in Japan (basically its the American box with a Japanese sticker identifying it as a 2800 game on it). I haven't been able to find any information about Atari 2800 games released this way, I put a picture of the box up here http://famicomblog.blogspot.jp/2015/01/interesting-find-atari-2800-discovery.html Anybody know anything about it?

Really late reply, but add my name to the list. Just got mine in the mail a few days ago. Put some pics up here: http://famicomblog.blogspot.jp/2013/05/the-atari-2800-saga.html?showComment=1369441845561#c11977447052604080