An interesting Time magazine article about video games from 1983

[Rev. Rob]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...iid=chix-sphere

 

It's right in the midst of the great crash. Excellent read!

[homerwannabee]

Wow thanks for that. Two things I noted in the article. The article states that there was 35 million carts in inventory. I was thinking that 5 million of those were E.T. carts. The second thing is that Clive Smith hit his prediction right on the money. I think I have more faith in Clive Smith knowing the future than Nostradomas

[2600Lives]

Cool. I have an actual Time magazine from...'81 I wanna say that talks about the gaming boom. Got it from my school library when they got rid of a bunch of crap (and I was working in the library after school), so not only did I get that but a bunch of vintage computing mags, too.

[JimmydelaKopin]

They hit it right on the money. It's what i've been saying all along.

 

The cause of the crash was not product glut but retailer glut. Too many people thought that one could get rich off of cashing in on a fad by opening up a store and selling what's hot...without realizing all the costs that go into opening a store and how much competition they had (such people were not only competing with a dozen or so others who also came up with that idea but also with established stores who were devoting a portion of their investments toward such endeavors).

All those game-making companies overproduced because they thought that all those retailers would still be around as dumps for their product...not realizing or caring that most of them would be gone in months. Thus, they were left with an oversupply of games and fewer actual sales than they thought they had, leading to the inevitable crash.

 

(Heck, it's happened in regards to comic books thrice so far.)

 

And as far as arcade machines are concerned...I think the companies forgot that after a certain point one achieves market saturation. At their prices, there was only so many they could sell...and, given that they were made to last a long time, chances of a repeat sale for any machine were very slim.

Conversion kits were a cost cutting measure...but, for those to sell well, one has to convince the arcade owner that the new game will do better than the old game. That takes a lot of convincing...something that most gamemakers weren't able to accomplish, obviously.

Between that and the growing power of home consoles (and emulators later), arcades simply can't afford to compete on their own merits. Also, since most of the time an arcade is sitting on someone else's land, if another entity comes along that is willing to pay more in rent, sometimes the arcade, even if making money, is sent packing because it's not making enough money. (That's why Metairie has yet another Oschner clinic instead of a Putt-Putt today.)

 

One could say that doom for arcades was spelled out in the first cry to bring space Invaders or Pac-Man to a home console.

 

Anyway, glad to see that Time actually got it right.

[Trip_Cannon]

Ira Bettelman, vice president of a major arcade-game distributor in Los Angeles, complains of being burdened with inventories of "flops," like Congo Bongo, which he now sells for 40% of its original $2,500 price.

 

F*%#ing Congo Bongo...

[NE146]

Well, at least ol' Clive here got most of it right

 

Video-game enthusiasts contend that the industry is in its infancy, like Hollywood in the silent-movie era. Says Clive Smith, an electronics-industry expert at the Yankee Group consulting firm in Boston: "The previous generation of video games was primitive compared with what is coming. This is not a fad. Interactive electronic entertainment is here to stay."

[+davidcalgary29]

Anyway, glad to see that Time actually got it right.

 

...except for pinning down the actual release date of Atari's A8 line and the rationale for developing it in the first place.

[candiru]

Nice article. Thanks for posting it.

 

Interesting that U.S. Games was only around for a year and managed to put out 14 games. That's really cranking them out.

I knew some of the third-party game developers died quickly, but I guess I never really thought about the timeframe being less than one year.

[spacecadet]

I think the fact that Quaker Oats was a video game publisher for a year is all you need to know about what led up to the crash.

[JimmydelaKopin]

Anyway, glad to see that Time actually got it right.

 

...except for pinning down the actual release date of Atari's A8 line and the rationale for developing it in the first place.

 

Actually, I was referring to the cause of the crash.

Too often I've heard that the cause of the crash was all the crappy games made for the 2600.

Not even all the crappy games made for various systems: the crappy games made for the 2600.

As though games that won't sell from a company only in it for a quick buck can somehow harm console sales and sales of higher-quality games. ...yeah, and Shir-Fresh toothpaste using antifreeze as a main ingredient is going to hurt the sales of Aim and Crest and Oral-B toothbrushes, right.

 

Time's reporters actually did their homework, however. They saw that it was a mushrooming of new fly-by-night retailers that convinced all the gamemakers that there was a bigger market than there actually was that was responsible for the crash. It was these grq's (pronounced "jerks", short for get-rich-quick) that imploded the market--and other markets as well.

Such good reporting is worth accolades, I say.

[opeygon]

so that explains why there are so many games still unopened/shrink wrapped out there