What if the Crash of 84 didn't happen?

[7800Lover]

We've pondered such things in the past before such as what if the NES had tanked or if Atari put out the Famicom? But now here is some food for thought. The Great Video Game Crash of 1984 changed the industry quite a bit. Besides allowing a boom of gaming for the PCs, it also ended the American dominance of the market and led to the rise of the Japanese companies. And a licensing system was instituted to make sure not just anyone could put out a game for a system (started by Nintendo to avoid a major factor of the crash).

 

But chew on this: what if the 1984 crash did not happen? Let's say for one reason or another, the crash was averted. Video games continue to sell and consoles are still in demand; manufacturers like Coleco, Atari, etc don't pull the plug on their systems; stores actually will stock their shelves with Atari 2600s, 5200s, Intellivisions, etc.

 

It's almost impossible to say what might have happened. Would Atari and Coleco still be around today? Would companies like Nintendo and Sega be relegated to third party developers? Would PC gaming have not gotten the shot in the arm given by the crash?

 

Discuss.

[+Psionic]

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=112958

[7800Lover]

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=112958

 

Interesting thread...but my question is what if the Crash didn't happen, not whether or not the consoles could have survived.

[+Psionic]

Interesting thread...but my question is what if the Crash didn't happen, not whether or not the consoles could have survived.

In this hypothetical situation you propose, whether the crash doesn't happen or it does but Atari/Coleco/Mattel survive intact, the outcome is the same...you're arguing over semantics. It's just your wording of basically the same question...only that your wording of the scenario is totally impossible, since Atari and Coleco were going to tank no matter what for a variety of reasons (some of which I explained in great detail in that thread I linked).

Edited December 25, 2007 by PingvinBlueJeans

[A Sprite]

The thread doesn't answer other possibilities.

 

What if Atari had given programmer recognition, and compensated their best employees with a percentage of the profits? What if Activision was never formed?

 

What if Atari had won the court battles against those who tried to make unlicensed 3rd party games?

 

What if Atari employees had their way, and the upgrade to the 5200 happened years earlier, with better controllers?

Edited December 25, 2007 by A Sprite

[+Psionic]

The thread doesn't answer other possibilities.

 

What if...

What if Atari never existed in the first place?

What if hypothetical questions had a point?

 

It's almost impossible to say what might have happened.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly.

[JamesD]

What if the world as we know it ceased to exist!!!! THE HORROR!

 

But seriously...

 

ET wouldn't have seen the light of day or would have at least been a decent title.

 

If the 5200 had come earlier, had 2600 support earlier, came with better controllers, had Pac Man packaged with it and the 2600 had been phased out then the machine would have been popular.

If Atari hadn't screwed up with Nintendo we might not have seen an NES and the Colecovision would have had no advantage game wise.

 

I think the programmers would have bailed no matter what.

Let's see... some recognition, some % of profits... or own your own company and make more profits.

 

Court cases... nah. The third party market had to happen or the games market would suck today.

 

To be honest, it sounds to me like you aren't talking about the video game crash... more like the Atari crash.

Frankly, I think Atari's crash was set up by mismanagement in it's early years.

It was too easy for a while and the company wasn't built to survive the drop in revenue.

If money had been managed better I think it would still be around today.

[A Sprite]

What if the world as we know it ceased to exist!!!! THE HORROR!

 

But seriously...

 

ET wouldn't have seen the light of day or would have at least been a decent title.

 

If the 5200 had come earlier, had 2600 support earlier, came with better controllers, had Pac Man packaged with it and the 2600 had been phased out then the machine would have been popular.

If Atari hadn't screwed up with Nintendo we might not have seen an NES and the Colecovision would have had no advantage game wise.

 

I think the programmers would have bailed no matter what.

Let's see... some recognition, some % of profits... or own your own company and make more profits.

 

Court cases... nah. The third party market had to happen or the games market would suck today.

 

To be honest, it sounds to me like you aren't talking about the video game crash... more like the Atari crash.

Frankly, I think Atari's crash was set up by mismanagement in it's early years.

It was too easy for a while and the company wasn't built to survive the drop in revenue.

If money had been managed better I think it would still be around today.

 

It is about the Atari crash. We already discussed Mattel and Coleco, the Atari crash is all that remained. Only change I can see long term is that we have a larger variety of games sooner. The NES, SMS, Turbografx, Genesis and SNES were all tile/sprite based, and limited to just a few game types as a result. A stronger and more innovative American market might have found an answer to that problem.

 

There were few simulations in the post crash 8bit era, unless you looked at the computers...

Edited December 25, 2007 by A Sprite

[swlovinist]

Great topic. If the crash never happened, then that would mean that companies would still(at the time of 84)l be making and supporting classic game consoles. This would have done alot of things such as:

 

Make many more US companies compete to make great games

Make companies bring out more innovative titles

Generate some serious revenue for Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision

 

In retrospect, this would have possibly changed the entire direction of Atari, as well as brought new US companies to the game market. Who knows, it might of been the Alternative Reality that could have saved Atari.

 

The crash was needed. I dont think we will see one like it again. I have not always thought this way, but I feel that the game market is a part of culture for some time to come.

[DragonmasterDan]

You have to take into consideration the reason it didn't happen. For the crash not to happen one of several factors would have had to occur.

 

Reason #1 people continue to buy the crap that pours out from Atari and other publishers of the era. The market becomes even further saturated than it was with terrible games, ET 2: The Extra Extra Terrestrial for the 5200 becomes a best seller. My guess is as time would go on Nintendo would see a big open market in the US and either license or release the Famicom/NES themselves ( Added in edit: remember, by 1983 it was out in Japan meaning it's already an existing product by the time of the big bang in the US). With the market not having had crashed there's a strong possibility the NES is a big success as it was and it competes with the Colecovision and 5200 or 7800. The next question is what happens to the NES?

It either succeeds due to the high quality of the games being brought over from Japan or fails due to the competition in the US. If it fails in the US then it also begs the question of "Will the video game market crash a few years later when the Colecovision and 5200 or 7800 becomes obsolete, does another Japanese manufacturer (Sega or NEC) take advantage of that?

 

There's way too many variables and possibilities. We need a reason the industry doesn't crash to start speculating.

Edited December 25, 2007 by DragonmasterDan

[flowmotion]

I would have figured that on AtariAge we wouldn't hear overly-simplistic explanations like "ET caused the crash". If Atari wasn't such a mess business-wise, ET would have been just another mediocre mostly forgotten game.

 

Assume there's just a slowdown instead of a crash. Warner Bros cleans house at Atari and doesn't sell them to Tramiel. In that case, Atari would stick with a streamlined version of the 5200 (better joysticks, possible Atari8-compatible computer expansion module). The 7800 probably would never see the light of day.

 

Also, Warner Atari very likely would have purchased the Amiga computer technology and eventually adapted it into a 16-bit era console.

 

I also think it's inevitable that Nintendo and Sega enter the US market -- either by partnering with Coleco/Mattel or on their own.

Edited December 25, 2007 by flowmotion

[midnight magicman]

The thread doesn't answer other possibilities.

 

What if Atari had given programmer recognition, and compensated their best employees with a percentage of the profits? What if Activision was never formed?

 

What if Atari had won the court battles against those who tried to make unlicensed 3rd party games?

 

What if Atari employees had their way, and the upgrade to the 5200 happened years earlier, with better controllers?

 

A sprite (i believe) brings up the most important points here. Not a skewed version of all possible events. Bottom line, Atari (the company) got too big for it's britches & let go of key programmers & assummed their name would carry them no matter how great their next game was (in this case, E.T.).

 

peace

[carmel_andrews]

You could say the crash happened back in 1976 (when warners bought Atari from Bushnell), it became apparent almost from the outset the people were leaving the company...not just any people but people that built the products and technology that Atari were founded on

 

As i've said elswewhere, Warners atitude was...'if bushnell could do it' (remembering that bushnell had no business or sales/marketing experience prior to Atari) 'then so can we', problem was Warner's were replacing those that had left Atari with people that had no knowledge or experience of selling or marketing the product's or technology that atari were founded on and placing these people in charge of those who understood how to sell/market the products and technology atari were founded on....as well as getting atari into developing and producing more product/new product and technology

 

These people that warners bought in may have understood general sales/marketing however the people that warner's were hiring were being handicapped by the board management by preventing them from making any major decisions (remembering that we're talking about a technology company in the embryonic stages of this industries develiopment) in regards to new products, new technologies and future product development

 

And if you don't let people employed in a technology company in a management/decision making capacity make those major decisions, that is what hampers product development and product technology...Basically Warners managment were doing the reverse of what bushnell was doing, Bushnell and co, lacked the business knoweledge and the sales/marketing was pretty basic, where bushnell and co succeeded was in developing product and technology...Warners more more interested in sales/marketing and not so interested in products or technology

[warmachine]

We would have seen awesomeness, such as the portable vectrex, the vectrex color,

and don't even get me started on a vector sinistar.

 

I believe the crash would have happened anyway.

People went crazy over anything video game related to the point that it became a fad

and everyone wanted a peice of it which caused the video game industry to stagnate

and eventually fail to live up to the increasingly lofty expectations that the video game companies

and the media had led consumers to belive.

Edited December 25, 2007 by warmachine

[flowmotion]

carmel_andrews -- you make a good point that Warner didn't have any clue WTF. You read these stories about how Atari had hundreds of employees spread across a dozen buildings and they still had subcontractors writing their games. Or how the engineers protested the 5200 design, but marketing overrode them. etc etc etc.

 

However, ultimately the crash didn't happen because of technology. It's because those sales and marketing geniuses at Warner Atari massively overproduced millions of games that had no customers, and then leaned on the retailers to buy their inventory. What took Atari down wasn't any sort of Silicon Valley voodoo -- it was just retail 101.

 

The video game industry has actually "crashed' many times since (most recently a couple years ago), but at this point everyone understands the business cycle with console generations, and they know how to manage inventory and push out sequels and so on, so it hasn't been such a big deal.

 

That's why I think Warners could have installed competent management at Atari and saved them (versus dumping them on Tramiel, where they were doomed).

Edited December 25, 2007 by flowmotion

[Vic George 2K3]

There was only one major "crash" that happened, and it made people wonder whether videogames would ever be made to be played again.

[A Sprite]

For those who missed the crash. ( That's me...and...Kamaria, plus all you lucky Brits, and anyone else outside our borders.)

 

It was more than just a matter of retailers being burned. Public perception was just as much a part of it as well.

 

Try this experiment at home.

 

Take a Sega Master System. See all the problems with flickering sprites and low colors? Pretend Sega, instead of releasing the Genesis/Megadrive, released another 8bit system instead. Let's call it the Game Gear. Now, imagine after hooking your brand new Game Gear to the television ( sorry, it's not portable - this version is roughly the size of a George Foreman grill ), you see games with exactly TWICE the sprites!

 

That means flicker is finally up to the standards you'd expect from a Colecovision. Awesome, huh? It was well worth the $300 bucks.

 

This is what 2600 fans who upgraded for the 5200 were getting. They replaced 2 player characters and a missile, with 4 player characters and four missiles. Many 5200 games reuse 2600 sprites, with the backgrounds being the only improvement.

 

Back to the example:

 

So you get out your shiny new Streets of Rage 2 cart, which even if the sprites are the same as the Master System version, has better backgrounds. You hit start. You begin to play. You kick one guy in his face's ugly nutsack, flip behind him and splatter his brains on the pavement. Two guys come for you, and you take them both out with your special, which was activated when you used the Zen technique passed down ancient ninja warrior clans of hitting all the buttons at once.

 

Nothing can stop you. You are a ruthless machine. You hit up. Uh-oh, another enemy. You release up, and start attacking. When you stop attacking, you keep moving up.

 

You aren't even touching the controller. Is it broken?

 

The sad answer: Wait a few minutes.

 

The controller breaks. Congratulations! You now have a $300 George Foreman grill that can't even cook a single cheeseburger.

 

But remember, technically it's twice as powerful as the Master System.

 

Wasn't it worth paying the price to be on top of innovation?

 

No?

 

And you break it with a sledgehammer so the demons will trouble you no more?

 

And you let the priest hear that kind of language come out of your mouth?

 

Wow, you are going to Hell.

 

Hopefully Sega is there to greet you.

 

It really was that bad, only Atari was to blame.

 

Note: Sony fans can substitute the words "PSOne" and "PSP" for the systems, and "thumb nub" for the controller, and get roughly the same result. Especially since they've probably emulated the same game anyways. Nintendo fans get to pretend their Wii came with a broken N64 controller. Microsoft fans, you bought the Adam instead.

Edited December 25, 2007 by A Sprite

[cimerians]

I was a teenager and I could not tell at all in 1983 that trouble was looming. All I knew was that I needed to get a computer cause all the cool games were on Apples, Commodore 64's and Atari computers.

 

In 1984 it was wierd, everything was discounted and everything started disappearing.

I finally got my dad to pick up a Commodore 64 and I played that until the NES became big around 87'. (At least where I lived in Chicago)

 

All I can say is that the only magazine out there that I read (Electronic Games) constantly reviewed more and more computer games and they had better graphics. I think the home computer had as much to do with the crash as much as anything else. I remember going through a handful of magazines comparing how many more games a home computer had than anothert. I compared the C64 and an Atari XL and the C64 had a bit more games reviewed so I went with the commodore.

 

Hope my little story sheds a little light as I lived through it.

[DragonmasterDan]

There was only one major "crash" that happened, and it made people wonder whether videogames would ever be made to be played again.

 

Exactly, there have been slowdowns but no crashes. Most notably there was a big slowdown in 94-95 (it turned around in 96 or so). This usually happens between generations as the newer systems don't yet have thriving installed bases and the older systems software sales start to taper off.

[carmel_andrews]

Atari didn't realy survive after Warners offloaded Atari to the Tramiels...The game that Tramiel was playing was 'staying alive, any which way you can'

 

Atari under tramiel was basically starting from scratch again as tramiel's initial focus was computers, he wasn't so interested in the A8 series (the xe system release was basically a swangsong for atari's existing technology) instead just focusing his energies into the ST series and his own R&D infrastructure (as he'd sold off or close all of warners R&D stuff) Videogames like the 26/7800 were little more then an afterthought for tramiel (even when nintendo usurped atari in their own market)

 

True that Tramiel had product/technology experience and related sales and marketing experience more so then Warners...Unfortunately Tramiel neglected to use that to his or atari's advantage

[shadow460]

I said it once, and I'll say it again:

 

The market would have crashed later only to be saved singlehandedly by the mighty Philips CD-i.

 

Bump that, the market would have crashed in 2005, only to be saved singlehandedly by the mighty Hyperscan!

[Technosis]

All I can say is that the only magazine out there that I read (Electronic Games) constantly reviewed more and more computer games and they had better graphics.

 

This is a really important observation.

 

I've talked about in this in other past threads. The writing was on the wall as far as the home games went. They were being eclipsed by the home computers of the era.

 

I myself had gone from the ColecoVision to the C64 and never looked back (I think the original CV ended up in the closet)

[Recycled]

There was a crash?

[cimerians]

All I can say is that the only magazine out there that I read (Electronic Games) constantly reviewed more and more computer games and they had better graphics.

 

This is a really important observation.

 

I've talked about in this in other past threads. The writing was on the wall as far as the home games went. They were being eclipsed by the home computers of the era.

 

I myself had gone from the ColecoVision to the C64 and never looked back (I think the original CV ended up in the closet)

 

 

Yup same here.

 

Most of my friends in high school had a home computer and moved on from the consoles. I would think between 1983 and 1987 or 1988.

A few guys had Atari computers but most of us had Commodore 64's. The other cool thing as kids is that we were able to get computer games very easy by 'borrowing' our friends copies.

 

Everyone that I knew "did those things" back then. Disk knotchers, or a nice razor were also very handy.

[Paul Humbug]

I would think "the" crash or significant slowdown would have happened sooner or later independently from any marketing or whatesoever mistakes.

 

Remember, video games and home computers were still a new brat. Everything new and unknown makes parents suspicious.

 

Main market were kids, not the 25+ lifestyle conscious "new economy" adults.

 

As a kid, you had better arguments on your hand for your parents to buy a homecomputer than a box that just could play games.

 

Believe me, I went through this.

 

Today the market is different. If you wanna play cool games you need a $3000 PC or just a new generation video console for $400.