What 3rd party games caused the crash?

[atarigamer]

Well I dunno about 3rd party games, but I was reading 'The Last Quarter' again last night... and it mentioned that a big reason was due to all the Pac-Man and especially E.T. Carts Atari made that no one bought. I believe they reported a 576 million dollar loss because of it. Don't forget the E.T. Cart landfill ( http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.p...7337&highlight= ), and supposedly Atari had a warehouse full of crushed carts that nobody wanted.

 

BTW, someone revive that good ol' E.T. post (we all miss it, even moycon does ).

[ATARI TROLL]

Did anyone ever get the story on the whole E.T landfill thing as far as an article or what happened afterwards?

[AtariDude]

Here is the information that you were requesting regarding what happened to E.T.

 

http://www.classicgaming.com/features/arti...ticles/etfound/

 

Enjoy the article

[Flojomojo]

So why aren't we in a game crash right now? The economy is weak, unemployment is up, games are $50 a go and "they all look the same."

 

There was more going on in the "classic crash" than a glut of bad games. Home computers, arcades falling out of fashion, video killing the radio star.

 

The straw that broke the camel's back was "Tax Avoiders."

[MegaManFan]

I'd love to own that straw.

[Bivotar]

Like many of you here that were actually around and playing games during "the crash", I really don't recall bad games causing my departure from purchasing and playing Atari and other console (Intellivision, Colecovision, etc.). By the time console gaming had crashed and burned, I was happily playing games on my Commodore 64. Better graphics, could write my own programs/games, bbs'ing, pirating disks (oops, did I just say that) led me away from the consoles and I never looked back. At least until the NES came out years later.

 

I mean c'mon, Firefly or Zork? Winter Games on a C64 or a 2600? Ever since the 2600 came out, there were crap games. To me, the introduction of affordable home computers was as big, if not bigger, of a contributor to the "video game crash" as the glut of crap games.

[Godzilla]

yea i can relate to that too, the c64 became my main game machine right after the vic. I still played my atari, but the c64 deinately took over as 'primary' i think you hit the nail on the head, the emergence of the first true successful home computer killed consoles.

[svenski]

I was looking through some Atari promotional material and stuff by Ingersoll who distributed the 2600 in the early days.

 

I can't believe 2600 games retailed in the UK for anything from £39.99 to £49.99, thats British Pounds, times your dollar by 1.65 to get an idea.

 

Unbelievable. That would have been a monthly car payment or half a mortgage payment back then surely?

[Nukey Shay]

Affordable successful home computers. I dunno if you would include the Vic20, since it's games were noticably a step down from the 2600. Once the Atari and Commodore 8-bits were selling at what the VCS sold for, the console market didn't stand a chance. Despite the number of poor games, I believe that THIS was the biggest reason for the console crash (remember, the home computer software market was relatively unscathed).

[Nukey Shay]

I was looking through some Atari promotional material and stuff by Ingersoll who distributed the 2600 in the early days.

 

I can't believe 2600 games retailed in the UK for anything from £39.99 to £49.99, thats British Pounds,  times your dollar by 1.65 to get an idea.

 

Unbelievable. That would have been a monthly car payment or half a mortgage payment back then surely?

 

If that is what they were selling for, perhaps. Though they rarely crossed $40.00 here in the US at the height of their popularity.

[Godzilla]

Affordable successful home computers.  I dunno if you would include the Vic20, since it's games were noticably a step down from the 2600.  Once the Atari and Commodore 8-bits were selling at what the VCS sold for, the console market didn't stand a chance.  Despite the number of poor games, I believe that THIS was the biggest reason for the console crash (remember, the home computer software market was relatively unscathed).

 

uhm, every single game I have on the vic that is also on the 2600, the vic version is noticeable superior. in ways, the vic is still one of my favorite systems of all time. Just limited enough to force the gameplay to still be 2600 style fierce and fast, but just enough beyond the 2600 for the games to look better too. Vic Omega Race and Shamus and Radar Rat Race and Bandits and Dragon Fire and many others are still the best versions I've ever played.

[Nukey Shay]

Oops...I forgot an IMO

The majority of games that was available in my area seemed to use redefined characters...sometimes with no attempt to hide it (though some games did pretty effectively...my first two carts did - Raid On Fort Knox and Choplifter). But neither was as fun as common arcade games on the 2600 to me. Within a year, I'd already moved on to the vastly superior 800 and C64 machines (rapidly-declining prices made that possible), and I'd bought reconditioned models of both for the same price (together) that I'd payed for the Vic a year earlier.

[AtariDude]

There were a lot of reasons for the crash. Granted having too many games that were of questionable quality which drove the price of all cartridges down was a significant factor but it was not the only one.

 

Home computers were starting to become more affordable. Why just play with a game machine when you could have gotten a computer for maybe 20-30 dollars more and be able to play better games as well as use the computer for more useful tasks.

 

In addition, you had cable television, MTV and music CDs to fight for the entertainment dollar.

 

All of these and more were what caused the crash.

[Agent X]

I also agree that the home computer revolution was the primary cause of the crash.

 

I mentioned in another thread recently that Nintendo (and a lot of their supporters, who are usually Atari detractors) blame Atari for allowing a "glut of poor games" to flood the market because they didn't have a licensing program in place. Yet, Nintendo's licensing program did nothing to improve the actual quality of video games--it only insured that Nintendo profited from the sales of third-party games by forcing the developers to cough up a licensing fee. The quality of the NES library overall was (in my opinion) even worse than the 2600's darkest hour.

 

Were the games that bad in 1983-1984? I don't think so. In fact, many of the best 2600 games were released during that time. But, computers were becoming less expensive and at the same time increasingly powerful. Attention turned towards home computers which cost roughly the same as the high-end game consoles of the day, yet had much better graphics and sound and more complexity to their games...oh yeah, and could do other non-game tasks like word processing and database management.

 

I don't ever remember any of my friends in late 1983 saying that they felt video games were declining in quality. Neither I nor my friends ever got burned buying games by companies with names like "Mythicon" or "Ultravision"--heck, I never even heard of those companies until I started collecting classic video games a few years ago. They apparently had terrible distribution, because most of the games that stood out on the shelves were made by Atari, Activision, Imagic, Parker Bros., Coleco, Mattel. Other than a handful of smaller companies, like Apollo or US Games, that was about it. And again, most of the high-profile games from those companies were great or even excellent by 2600 standards. But, who wanted to settle for "2600 standards," when the Commodore 64 and other contemporary computers raised the standards to a level no mere "video game system" could touch?

[AtariDude]

I too never heard of Ultravision until one member showed a photo of one of their old ads. I even found out that their offices was located right where I pass by every day to work. I went to their offices about a month and a half ago and it was interesting to think that there used to be a video game company here in South Florida.

[Ranthulfr]

One cause of the crash could have been that the Atari 2600 was past its prime, but there was no new "must have" system to fill its shoes. ColecoVision was good but it lacked original games. Intellivision was all about the sports games. I don't think I knew anyone who owned an Atari 5200 or 7800.

[+Nathan Strum]

I don't think there were any games in particular that caused the crash, but there were games that were sympomatic of it. Games that should have served as a warning sign.

 

Certainly, Pac-Man was a terribly received game. It sold well - but the quality was terrible, and that burned a lot of consumers, and made them wary. Word of mouth is extremely influential, as are bad past experiences. It only takes a couple of Pac-Mans or E.T.s to cause people to think twice before buying something else.

 

Apollo was the first third-party company I remember that put out bad games. I thought Space Chase was actually pretty good. I bought Racquetball, since I thought it was cool, but it turned out to be impossible to play. The rest of their stuff though was pretty bad, too. Fortunately, there was a local store where I could play all of the new titles, so I avoided buying too much junk.

 

The next bad company I remember after that was Data Age. Nearly all of their games blew (except Encounter at L-5), and they were one of the first ones to go under. Apollo may have gone out sooner. Not sure. But Electronics Games magazine from back then is peppered with articles of companies announcing titles, then closing their doors within months.

 

But I don't know if the crash was caused so much by a glut of bad games, but rather that there was a glut to begin with. At some point, there were games coming out so fast, that consumers simply couldn't buy them all. Or even a significant percentage of the total. Everyone was cutting into everyone else's sales.

 

I didn't always know which game to get, and at the prices they were charging, I had to pick and choose. So some game companies weren't going to get my money, even if they put out good stuff. Of course, bad games did make an impact. Sometimes, I bought a bad game, and that would make me less likely to buy another. (Like when I bought Marauder. Man... that was a waste of money.) That sort of "once bitten, twice shy" effect caused me to not buy Crazy Climber when I had the chance.

 

Mythicon was near the tail end of the crash. The industry was already on its way down when they showed up with their games. So their 'contribution' to it was negligible. But they were a symptom of what was going on.

 

I think if Atari had put out a successor to the 2600 with a substantial (and good quality) software library, the crash could have been avoided. The NES proved that the demand was still there, if the hardware and software delivered.

 

As I posted in another thread - I think that Atari's original plan for the 400/800 to be released as a console would have done the trick, if they'd followed Nolan's advice to slash the hardware price on it. Imagine a console of that power coming out in 1979! That would have been pretty incredible. Home console games would have been years ahead of where they ended up when the crash happened.

[curtishart]

Don't forget, one of the other reasons people lost faith in Atari was the 5200. Originally they said it was backwards compatible for all 2600 games, but when it was released it wasn't and you had to purchase an adaptor to play your large cartridge library. Plus the 5200 controllers sucked.

 

I don't think you can narrow it down to just one thing that caused the down-fall. There were too many factors that contributed to it. But, unfortunately, I think a rather large percentage of blame could be pointed at Atari themselves.

[Nukey Shay]

...only because the 2600 was so prevelant. If you compared that to other console manufacturers of the time (Magnavox, Emerson, Bally, Mattel, Coleco)...I think that Atari put up a pretty good fight to stay afloat. Orphan computers never had much of a ball in their court (the chicken/egg thing) to gain public support, so it was only natural that the Apple/Commodore/Atari 8-bits were able to weather the storm.

 

BTW could it be that the reason for making the 5200 so similar to the 8-bit computer was that it was an attempt to make the games more easily port-able between the two systems? Kind of a guarantee that there would be no shortage of software titles...even to third parties?

[+Nathan Strum]

BTW could it be that the reason for making the 5200 so similar to the 8-bit computer was that it was an attempt to make the games more easily port-able between the two systems?

 

I think this was absolutely the case. That, and they already had the basic hardware since they'd been building the 400/800's for a few years, so it was cheaper to get off the ground than a new "from scratch" system would have been. The 5200 always felt like it was rushed out the door, to me.