How did you find out about The Crash(TM)?

[+Stephen]

2 hours ago, dr. kwack said:

I remember going Christmas shopping with my folks to Belden Village Mall in Christmas of 84. I was 10 years old and a die hard Intellivision kid. I went into KayBee toys and saw bins filled with games at strangely low prices. Some of them I had never even seen before. I had a paper route by this time and had some Christmas tip money on me. I got three games (Beauty & The Beast, Snafu and Night Stalker) for 10 bucks. I was amazed and wanted to go back after Christmas. Funny thing was, with my new income I was able to afford a new gizmo a couple of my classmates had called a Commodore 64. I quickly shifted from video games to computer games and never really looked back until years later when I started collecting Atari 2600 in high school.

Whoa - howdy neighbour.  Belden Village was the mecca in the early 80s.  Even had several audio stores back then.

[atarifan88]

14 hours ago, dr. kwack said:

I remember going Christmas shopping with my folks to Belden Village Mall in Christmas of 84. I was 10 years old and a die hard Intellivision kid. I went into KayBee toys and saw bins filled with games at strangely low prices. Some of them I had never even seen before. I had a paper route by this time and had some Christmas tip money on me. I got three games (Beauty & The Beast, Snafu and Night Stalker) for 10 bucks. I was amazed and wanted to go back after Christmas. Funny thing was, with my new income I was able to afford a new gizmo a couple of my classmates had called a Commodore 64. I quickly shifted from video games to computer games and never really looked back until years later when I started collecting Atari 2600 in high school.

Good story from another fellow Ohioan!

[Rob Merritt]

I was in my early teens and was aware that a console crash was happening. It seemed natural at the time that everything was going towards computers. There was a feeling that consoles was just a step towards computers and of course consoles would go away once computers became affordable. Yet it didn't. The Intellivision and the 2600 lived on. Colecovision carried on a few years as well as stock from Europe filled the shelves of KB Toy and Hobby. Then Nintendo and Sega hit. Followed by stores dedicated to games. Though at the time, they were half computer, have video game.

[Keatah]

What was it that kept consoles around? The lower cost? Audience demographics? Simple to setup and play? All three? Or something else entirely?

[zzip]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

What was it that kept consoles around? The lower cost? Audience demographics? Simple to setup and play? All three? Or something else entirely?

When you consider in 83 that an Atari 600XL with similar specs to an Atari 5200 cost only $139 vs $269 for the 5200,  and a C64 with a whopping 64K RAM was only slightly more than a 5200 at the time.   It was hard to justify a console cost when you could play many of the same games, and often better versions on the computer,  plus an upgrade path with disks, modems, etc bringing more advanced games.

 

But fast forward to a few years later when the 16-bit computers started coming out.   They were no longer as cheap.    The Atari 520ST was the cheapest of the bunch originally but it only came as a package deal that cost $799 for a monochrome system.   Most other options were over $1000.    Of course prices did fall over time and so did PC prices,  but they still stayed mostly north of $500.  It was shortly after the ST/Amiga era when you started to see consoles make a comeback in a big way, and I don't think this was coincidence.

[jhd]

On 12/28/2021 at 4:46 PM, zzip said:

But fast forward to a few years later when the 16-bit computers started coming out.   They were no longer as cheap.    The Atari 520ST was the cheapest of the bunch originally but it only came as a package deal that cost $799 for a monochrome system.   Most other options were over $1000. 

 

This is a good point.

 

One key difference is that 8-bit systems could be slowly built-up -- e.g. use it with a television set and cassette deck while saving for a monitor and disk drive. With 16-bit consoles, this is not an option.

 

I remember looking at an Atari ST in the mid-1980s. The computer itself was not unreasonably priced; I could afford it. I then discovered that I would also have to purchase an external disk drive (a separate SKU!) that cost just as much as the computer and a monitor. This quickly put the total package out of my price range.  

[MrTrust]

On 12/28/2021 at 3:46 PM, zzip said:

Of course prices did fall over time and so did PC prices,  but they still stayed mostly north of $500.  It was shortly after the ST/Amiga era when you started to see consoles make a comeback in a big way, and I don't think this was coincidence.

 

This and piracy.  Getting pirated console games was nearly impossible for most people on consoles and trivially easy for computer formats.  I still have the Shadow of the Beast Amiga manual where in the back it says, basically, this is our last PC game; we're moving on to consoles because we're sick of our games being stolen.

 

Also, and I know somebody's furiously typing how wrong I am as you're reading this, and you might even be that somebody, but outside of adventure and grand strategy games, the aggregate level of quality on console games was a lot higher on until the mid to late 90s.

 

If you were into arcade-style games, it was no contest whether consoles were better, and if you liked the japanese style of RPG, those were better, too.  What was left you could get playable, if not quite as good console ports of.  Cinemaware, Ballistic, Electronic Arts, etc.

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, MrTrust said:

This and piracy.  Getting pirated console games was nearly impossible for most people on consoles and trivially easy for computer formats.  I still have the Shadow of the Beast Amiga manual where in the back it says, basically, this is our last PC game; we're moving on to consoles because we're sick of our games being stolen.

Agree.

 

Quote

Also, and I know somebody's furiously typing how wrong I am as you're reading this, and you might even be that somebody, but outside of adventure and grand strategy games, the aggregate level of quality on console games was a lot higher on until the mid to late 90s.

Perhaps the quality of software was higher on consoles because the entry barrier for technicals and programming was much higher. And there were less tools. And the tools that were available were 10x more involved than anything on PC.

 

With PC so popular, and BASIC programming magazines available at the grocery store (at the time), it's not hard to imagine all kindsa shit being made.

 

Edited January 2, 2022 by Keatah

[MrTrust]

47 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Perhaps the quality of software was higher on consoles because the entry barrier for technicals and programming was much higher. And there were less tools. And the tools that were available were 10x more involved than anything on PC.

 

Is that so?  I wouldn't know.  I know all systems have their different quirks, but from a programming standpoint, you've got to be good at 6502 or 6800 either way, I would think.  No?

 

Tools I can totally see being a factor.  Even my dumb ass can write programs for the 2600 with the tools we have these days.  Back in 1983, of course, no way.  This is why I find those discussions about whether new homebrews that use co-processors is "cheating" ridiculous.  Fella', if you're using a tool that lets you compile your code and run it in a near-perfect emulator with a click of a button, and hit another button and have an awesome debugger that steps through each line, you're "cheating" even if you're using assembly and sticking to 4k.

 

But I imagine that's just a factor of the budget, right?  When you've got console manufacturers that are purely in the games business, combined with most 3rd parties that are purely in the games business, that's what you're going to get.

[+GoldLeader]

On 12/28/2021 at 11:56 AM, Keatah said:

What was it that kept consoles around? The lower cost? Audience demographics? Simple to setup and play? All three? Or something else entirely?

 

Personally I think you've hit a bunch of it.  And maybe there was an intimidation factor with computers.  I always thought you bought a computer in those days if you wanted to play video games AND you wanted to (learn to) Program.

 

Consoles were tailor made for video games;  The FUN part of the equation, and they were plug and play.

 

Not to mention video game magazines coming back out and being fun again, like the old days (before they also covered computers)...

[Keatah]

5 hours ago, jhd said:

One key difference is that 8-bit systems could be slowly built-up -- e.g. use it with a television set and cassette deck while saving for a monitor and disk drive. With 16-bit consoles, this is not an option.

With Apple II I was able to build the system piecemeal, bit by bit, function by function. Helped make an expensive system affordable. And I felt like I was learning technology in-depth and proceeding at my own pace. Every add-on purchase was a big stink. Always carefully thought out. Planned ahead for. Saved up for. Didn't matter what it was, big or small, HDD, Lowercase chip, joystick extension cable, printer, printer buffer, modem, clock, 2nd floppy drive..

 

5 hours ago, jhd said:

I remember looking at an Atari ST in the mid-1980s. The computer itself was not unreasonably priced; I could afford it. I then discovered that I would also have to purchase an external disk drive (a separate SKU!) that cost just as much as the computer and a monitor. This quickly put the total package out of my price range.  

Yes. When I got into my first real 16-bit rig, I had to buy everything at once. Monitor (no family TV). Extra 512K RAM (base 512k too limiting). 2nd disk drive (to eliminate disk swappage). All rather expensive. Left me with little money to buy software.

 

Getting into the PC was a mix. I got everything straight away, but also got many expansion peripherals later. Initially it was 2 floppies, 1 HDD, drive controller card, CPU/Motherboard/Memory, Power Supply, Videocard, Case, Mouse, Keyboard, Monitor. But it didn't quite feel it was all at once. I had to spec everything out, each part, though absolutely necessary, felt like an individual purchase.

 

Then came CD-ROM, soundcard, modem, network card, memory expansion card, joystick, MIDI, wavetable, 2nd parallel port, 2nd IDE port, Snappy, and so much more.

[MrTrust]

2 hours ago, GoldLeader said:

Personally I think you've hit a bunch of it.  And maybe there was an intimidation factor with computers.  I always thought you bought a computer in those days if you wanted to play video games AND you wanted to (learn to) Program.

 

That's one way of putting it.  I would say it was more of a "What the hell would I do with this?" factor.

 

Let's say it's 1985.  I'm an average Joe Middle American who doesn't run a small business.  Whatever investments I have are pretty much handled by my employer or my bank.  The closest BBS for me to dial into is probably 60 miles away, so every minute I'm using it, I'm paying long distance.  Hard drives are still super expensive.  Floppies are slower than death.  What am I going to program this thing to do that is going to have any pragmatic utility for me?

 

Second question: what pragmatically useful thing can I program it to do that it does so much better than an electric typewriter/word processor, calculator, clipboard, etc. that it's going to be worth ~$2k in today's dollars.

 

I know, I know; just learning the skill of programming is useful in and of itself.  Easy to say that in 2022.  In the 80s and 90s, this was far from obvious for most people, and we were still a long way off from the kind of standardization and compatibility we have today, where generic computer literacy was really useful for the average worker.

[+GoldLeader]

21 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

 

That's one way of putting it.  I would say it was more of a "What the hell would I do with this?" factor.

 

Let's say it's 1985.  I'm an average Joe Middle American who doesn't run a small business.  Whatever investments I have are pretty much handled by my employer or my bank.  The closest BBS for me to dial into is probably 60 miles away, so every minute I'm using it, I'm paying long distance.  Hard drives are still super expensive.  Floppies are slower than death.  What am I going to program this thing to do that is going to have any pragmatic utility for me?

 

Second question: what pragmatically useful thing can I program it to do that it does so much better than an electric typewriter/word processor, calculator, clipboard, etc. that it's going to be worth ~$2k in today's dollars.

 

I know, I know; just learning the skill of programming is useful in and of itself.  Easy to say that in 2022.  In the 80s and 90s, this was far from obvious for most people, and we were still a long way off from the kind of standardization and compatibility we have today, where generic computer literacy was really useful for the average worker.

I agree with this also...

 

Mine was more in response to Keatah's "What kept consoles around?"  In other words,  for a Video game player,  a computer was for games, and (possibly) to learn to program (often your own games I would think)...

[zzip]

7 hours ago, Keatah said:

Perhaps the quality of software was higher on consoles because the entry barrier for technicals and programming was much higher. And there were less tools. And the tools that were available were 10x more involved than anything on PC.

More likely the wide range of hardware on PC.  Consoles began getting 3D-accelerated hardware in the mid-90s, but it took a few years for PC 3D-accelerated cards to go mainstream, so some games had software-renderers and hardware-renderers.   Even 2D performance varied widely from card to card, and driver to driver.   Developers needed to code to perform on a wide variety of hardware, whereas on console they knew that every console had the same hardware so they could focus on getting the most out of it.

[Keatah]

3 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Second question: what pragmatically useful thing can I program it to do that it does so much better than an electric typewriter/word processor, calculator, clipboard, etc. that it's going to be worth ~$2k in today's dollars.

For word processing, even the most simplest package was a lifesaver for me. I hated writing by hand. And typing at that young age was too error prone. The ability to make a spelling change was a magical. Inserting or relocating a paragraph a miracle. Making multiple copies, well, now, we're entering godhood!

 

3 hours ago, MrTrust said:

I know, I know; just learning the skill of programming is useful in and of itself.  Easy to say that in 2022.  In the 80s and 90s, this was far from obvious for most people, and we were still a long way off from the kind of standardization and compatibility we have today, where generic computer literacy was really useful for the average worker.

Today I don't see any sort of programming as useful unless it's career or advanced-hobby oriented. Most tasks and even niche tasks can be done by creative use of existing tools or operating system tricks.

 

I believe Windows ushered in the era generic computer literacy. The days of bigbox and Comp-USA. I will add that computer skills around the 286 through today are defined by the software applications you know in detail.

[MrTrust]

3 hours ago, GoldLeader said:

Mine was more in response to Keatah's "What kept consoles around?"  In other words,  for a Video game player,  a computer was for games, and (possibly) to learn to program (often your own games I would think)...

 

Ah, I see.  This is something I often wonder about.  If you were a video game player before, say, '92, what was the enticement to go PC?  I understand that the 8-bit micros were dirt cheap for a while there, and there were a couple of years where something like the C64 had some of the most sophisticated games out there, but that didn't last all that long.  Did people not know how chunky and slow and cumbersome so many PC games of the era were, or did they just not care?

 

And the ST and Amiga, forget about it.  I own both machines (ST sadly no longer working), and I like 'em both, but maaaaaan they take a lot of patience to appreciate.  Most things run at like 10fps, disk swapping every 5 seconds, only one button, etc.  Graphics, for the time, mind-blowing.  I remember drooling over screenshots in the magazines all the time back then, but in motion, good Lord...

 

I mean, if you had the money for a machine like that, getting a console would have been a trifle.  Why not just game on that?

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

More likely the wide range of hardware on PC.

 

I can see that with IBM compatibles to some degree, but a bog standard A500 or ST520 is capable of playing good games that don't run like molasses in January, right?  Why were so many games from that era so plodding and choppy and using those terrible Karateka controls with the one button.  Those systems both ran mice through the joystick ports; a 2-button solution could not have been that difficult.  Why did people put up with this back then?

 

23 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Today I don't see any sort of programming as useful unless it's career or advanced-hobby oriented. Most tasks and even niche tasks can be done by creative use of existing tools or operating system tricks.

 

Writing macros can still make you more productive at work without it necessarily being tied to career advancement or anything like that.  If you learned old line-item BASIC back in the 80s, you are automatically going to be better at Excel or Google Sheets than a lot of people working in a lot of offices.  Probably not the kind of offices people who hang out here work in, but many such cases.

 

And, yes, you've right about other methods for doing those kind of things, but if you learned programming, you're also probably at R-ing TFM and figuring those things out, knowing how to install extensions, libraries, etc.  Different skills, but usually closely linked.

 

37 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I believe Windows ushered in the era generic computer literacy. The days of bigbox and Comp-USA. I will add that computer skills around the 286 through today are defined by the software applications you know in detail.

 

Can't imagine anyone arguing with either of these points, though I will say that, for the time being, we still have a lot of people in the workforce who use software applications more or less the same way a trained seal uses a paintbrush.  Technically, yes, the seal is "using" the brush in the sense that it is following a sequence of commands that ends with paint on a canvas, but it doesn't understand the paintbrush, let alone have any mastery over it.

 

For a lot of applications, it's not so much a matter of getting someone who already knows it in detail, but just finding someone who is cheap and trainable.  Granted, pretty much everyone is at this level these days, but for some time this was not the case.

[zzip]

3 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

And the ST and Amiga, forget about it.  I own both machines (ST sadly no longer working), and I like 'em both, but maaaaaan they take a lot of patience to appreciate.  Most things run at like 10fps, disk swapping every 5 seconds, only one button, etc.  Graphics, for the time, mind-blowing.  I remember drooling over screenshots in the magazines all the time back then, but in motion, good Lord...

Looking back at the machines,  yeah.   But coming from an 8-bit system, these computers were amazing with their graphics!   We were already used to disk flipping in the 8-bit era,  hell lots of us were stuck with cassettes only a couple years prior.  So floppies seemed amazing.  And 3.5" disks were faster, stored more data and were harder to ruin than our 5.25" disks.

 

As far as speed, again depends what you are comparing it to.  One experience that sticks out was Flight Simulator II.   On the 8-bit it was like 1FPS,  2FPS if you were lucky.   On the ST it felt so much smoother at its 5-10FPS (I don't know what it actually runs at, just that it was a lot smoother), it also had features like picture-in-picture.   But yeah, compared to what came later it isn't great.

 

9 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

I can see that with IBM compatibles to some degree, but a bog standard A500 or ST520 is capable of playing good games that don't run like molasses in January, right?  Why were so many games from that era so plodding and choppy and using those terrible Karateka controls with the one button.

The stock ST didn't have blitter yet to accelerate graphics draws, I don't know what the excuse is for the Amiga though.   It also depends on how the game is coded of course.   Some ST games can move sprites more efficiently than others.  But it was a weakness of the ST that action games tended to be a bit on the laggy side.

[MrTrust]

14 minutes ago, zzip said:

As far as speed, again depends what you are comparing it to.  One experience that sticks out was Flight Simulator II.

 

I had this exact experience.  I started trying to collect those old machines around 2010-11.  Never really had a pre-Pentium computer as a kid.  Always wanted one.  Had every console, though.  I got really into the Atari 8-bits and I was playing all kinds of stuff on those, including that game.  I grabbed an A500 off of eBay; guy messages me that he also found a big box of random floppies and did I want that, too.  Of course I did, and it turned out to be a pretty good haul of games.  First one I popped in was Flight Simulator, and yeah, it was night and day.  I remember I even e-mailed the guy to thank him and was explaining how crazy the framerates on the game were.  Unfortunately...

 

23 minutes ago, zzip said:

But coming from an 8-bit system, these computers were amazing with their graphics!

 

Yeah, but if you offered you the choice between an 800XL/C64 or A500/1040ST today, and that's what you had to use for all your gaming, which would you take?  I wouldn't even have to think for a second.

 

Now, maybe an IBM compatible would make that a tougher choice, but I was a baby then, so I have a hard time conceptualizing what a normal, say, 1987 PC would have been like or what it could play.  I love a lot of games from the CGA-EGA era, but I don't think those kinds of machines were going to be winning any kind of beauty contest against a C64 or 8-bit Atari, or hell, even the Tandy CoCo if my memory is even remotely accurate.

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, MrTrust said:

Ah, I see.  This is something I often wonder about.  If you were a video game player before, say, '92, what was the enticement to go PC?

Other than a few specialty games or hi-res things like Flight Simulator, not a whole lot of enticement, not at all. If I had gotten into PC gaming prior to the early 1990's I might have been turned off. The 486 seemed (in retrospect) like a good entry point. I was not disappointed. Had a ton of fun with Stellar 7 and Nova 9, Commanche, Carrier Command, Outpost, Stunts, Zone Raiders, High Octane, and so much more!

 

1 hour ago, MrTrust said:

Did people not know how chunky and slow and cumbersome so many PC games of the era were, or did they just not care?

I was vaguely aware of it. None of it was in sharp focus. And also of that screechy speaker just as bad as Apple II.

 

I didn't care much because my first impressions of the 8088/8086 machines was all serious business, with few specialty games on my radar. At the time I had piles and piles of Apple II and Atari games it didn't make sense to care!

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

As far as speed, again depends what you are comparing it to.  One experience that sticks out was Flight Simulator II.   On the 8-bit it was like 1FPS,  2FPS if you were lucky.   On the ST it felt so much smoother at its 5-10FPS (I don't know what it actually runs at, just that it was a lot smoother), it also had features like picture-in-picture.

Absolutely. Coming from Apple II, it was a grand experience. The Amiga didn't disappoint here. The only possible drawback was resolution, wasn't as good as PC. And I didn't see an Amiga hardware path to that end. But I was "forced" not to care because of price and the PC being yet another platform.

 

Of the few 16-bit 68000 games I played I did enjoy them. StarGlider 2 was another hit with me. Lots of moods and overtones of Stellar 7, which I'd play on the PC few years later. Would have liked to see S7 or N9 on the Amiga..

 

 

[flickertail]

I never knew there was an crash until I got back into the Atari as a hobby in the early 2000's. That said, I just remember our 2600 joysticks breaking, and being irritated that I couldn't buy replacements. So once the last controller broke, we shelved it.

 

I remember Intellivision stuff being on sale, and my brother bought an INTV 2. Later I bought the ECS home computer attachment that I found on clearance at Kaybee once I was in high school... but by that time the NES was a thing, and all my friends had them. Of course, Kaybee had started carrying Atari joysticks again around that time too. At the time, I didn't know why, but I bought one to revisit our old Atari games. I guess it was because the 7800 had been released... IDK...

 

I thought my first computer was a 386 with a math co-processor and the Geoworks OS... but I just realized, that the INTV ECS was my first computer... Doh!

 

Honestly, I had never heard of a 7800 until I joined Atari Age... I chalk that up to NES being all the rage. I don't remember a single kid my age ever having a 7800. Everyone had an NES though.

 

Kind of think of it, the mid-80s was when grandfather - a crusty depression/WWII era farmer - bought a 5200 for us kids to play when we came to his house. I remember that I was so impressed that he got a game console. It was so out of character for him. It only had 3 games though... Pac-Man, Joust, and Popeye. I inherited the 5200 when we moved him into the retirement home and auctioned his farm. I realized why he bought it when he did, the K-Mart clearance price tag was still on the box: $75.

[zzip]

10 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Ah, I see.  This is something I often wonder about.  If you were a video game player before, say, '92, what was the enticement to go PC?

For gamers, not a whole lot.  The people jumping to PC before that were doing it for "real work" and use the same apps they used at the office or school,  not amazing gaming experiences.

 

9 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Yeah, but if you offered you the choice between an 800XL/C64 or A500/1040ST today, and that's what you had to use for all your gaming, which would you take?  I wouldn't even have to think for a second.

That's actually kind of hard as each has classics that I'd miss.   I might go with ST because it seems to have more games and more variety of games.   Or at least more commercial games, the homebrew scene on Atari 8-bit is much more active.

 

9 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Now, maybe an IBM compatible would make that a tougher choice, but I was a baby then, so I have a hard time conceptualizing what a normal, say, 1987 PC would have been like or what it could play.  I love a lot of games from the CGA-EGA era, but I don't think those kinds of machines were going to be winning any kind of beauty contest against a C64 or 8-bit Atari, or hell, even the Tandy CoCo if my memory is even remotely accurate.

CGA usually looked bad next to even the 8-bits because of the ugly color palettes.  EGA was closer to what Atari ST/Amiga could do, but it's more limited palette often made the games look a bit worse.   A lot of games from that era had no speed limiters so they run way too fast on fast hardware.   You were also stuck with horrid speaker sound as Ad-lib let alone Soundblaster wasn't quite a thing yet

[MrTrust]

19 hours ago, Keatah said:

Other than a few specialty games or hi-res things like Flight Simulator, not a whole lot of enticement, not at all. If I had gotten into PC gaming prior to the early 1990's I might have been turned off.

 

10 hours ago, zzip said:

For gamers, not a whole lot.  The people jumping to PC before that were doing it for "real work" and use the same apps they used at the office or school,  not amazing gaming experiences.

 

And at this time, this is very likely to be an Apple product or an IBM compatible that you're using.  Not very good games machines, relatively speaking.  Not in the 80s, anyway.  I assume that, to the extent anyone used them for actual work, the Amiga and ST machines were more for "creative" work; music, graphics, etc.

 

But nevertheless, there was still a pretty healthy market for PC games on "real work" computers.  To be expected, in sone sense.  If you had a job in the 80s which would have required you to use a computer at home, you were likely a huge nerd; the kind of nerd that liked computer games, and since you already have the machine...

 

But, again, if you've got the money for that (or if your parents do), a console is no more expensive then than today, maybe even a better value proposition up front since they all came with pack-in games and accessories.  So why did so many people bother with PC games of that time, making them, playing them, pirating them, etc.?

 

In the 90s, you get the 486, and then there's a clear, huge technical difference.  Add CD-ROM and you're off and running.  If you had to choose just one gaming machine forever, and you're limited to what it can run natively, it's hard to beat a 486 machine.  Maybe an early Pentium or something, but that's kind of slicing the onion.  Point is, it took damn near a decade to get to that point, so I guess the better question might be, instead of how did game consoles survive, how did computer systems end up being the locus of innovation for as long as they were.

 

It's not obvious to me that this should be the case.  Okay, barriers to entry on console development.  Fair enough, but people had to reverse engineer the 2600 and raise capital in order to start their little indie companies.  Was it that much harder to do it after '82?  Atari and Galoob did it on NES.  EA did it on Sega.  Little rinky-dink Christian video games companies did it on both and more besides.  Was it lower margins?  Both systems had pretty big installed bases relative to any single computer format out there at the time, and piracy wasn't a real concern.  Hardware more limited?  Sure, Starglider was probably not realistic on any home console before, say, 93-94?  Other than that and some things like it, I struggle to think of many 80s computer games that wouldn't have been doable in a relatively low-res version on a pre-Genesis console.  Many of the better ones were.  Perhaps it really was a marketing/demographic thing?  Consoles were for kids; serious gamers played PC games.  I don't think that's actually true, but I get the impression that attitude wasn't uncommon.

[zzip]

13 hours ago, MrTrust said:

It's not obvious to me that this should be the case.  Okay, barriers to entry on console development.  Fair enough, but people had to reverse engineer the 2600 and raise capital in order to start their little indie companies.  Was it that much harder to do it after '82?  Atari and Galoob did it on NES.  EA did it on Sega.

The 2600 is very simple hardware wise, and some of those 2600 third party publishers were started by ex-Atari employees who already knew how to program the thing.  There was no lock-out mechanism unlike the NES

 

13 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Point is, it took damn near a decade to get to that point, so I guess the better question might be, instead of how did game consoles survive, how did computer systems end up being the locus of innovation for as long as they were

It's much easier designing games for computers.  You could walk into any bookstore and find books on what you needed to know,  you had all the tools in the computer, you just needed to buy a compiler/assembler or find a free one.   For the typical console, you needed to sign up for its developer program, pay a fee,  sign an NDA, and only then do you get the documentation and a dev-kit.   Nintendo was selective and had a quality control program that might keep you from publishing.   So I think there was a lot of incentive for the more cutting-edge developers to design on computer first and maybe port to console later.

 

13 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Other than that and some things like it, I struggle to think of many 80s computer games that wouldn't have been doable in a relatively low-res version on a pre-Genesis console.

Controllers may have been a concern too.   Computers started to get games like text/graphics adventures, RPGs, Simulations, "God Games" that worked best with keyboard/mouse.   Sure a lot of these have been ported to console over the years but often the controller mapping doesn't work as well as a mouse.

 

13 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Perhaps it really was a marketing/demographic thing?  Consoles were for kids; serious gamers played PC games.  I don't think that's actually true, but I get the impression that attitude wasn't uncommon.

That definitely was my attitude starting in the NES era.   I had an ST and 16-bit games/graphics while it was clear NES was still in the 8-bit era.  I was into RPGs and Sim-type games while NES games had colorful bouncy graphics, happy music and virtually everything was a side-scrolling platformer.  To me it seemed like it was for kids, or at least a demographic that was 5-years younger than me.  I did consider getting a Genesis for a time, but still the games seemed more geared towards adolescents and younger teens (I was approaching my 20s by that point).  I didn't own a console for many years as PC met my gaming tastes better.   But these days when every console has local storage, they now can easily handle the games that were once confined only to computers

[MrTrust]

8 hours ago, zzip said:

It's much easier designing games for computers.  You could walk into any bookstore and find books on what you needed to know,  you had all the tools in the computer, you just needed to buy a compiler/assembler or find a free one.

 

Right, but we're not necessarily talking about college kids starting games companies out of their dads' garages.  Would this have been the decisive factor for companies like Sierra On-Line, or Epyx, or Origin Systems and the like?

 

9 hours ago, zzip said:

For the typical console, you needed to sign up for its developer program, pay a fee,  sign an NDA, and only then do you get the documentation and a dev-kit.   Nintendo was selective and had a quality control program that might keep you from publishing...

 

Unless you bypassed the lock-out chip, or you chose another system.  NES wasn't the only console going in the 80s, of course.  But like I said, I get there were more barriers to entry.  Of course that's going to be a factor.

 

I'm just saying, looking at what I saw in the 80s, the NES and SMS were head & shoulders above the C64 and the average DOS computer in terms of speed and playability.  Even the 7800 compared very favorably.  Yeah, they weren't going to even sniff at what the Amiga and ST could do graphically, but for every Shadow of the Beast, Turrican, or The Plague, there were 5 others that were junky and barely playable.

 

Love me some Cinemaware games on Amiga.  Have the machine.  Have the games.  They're great.  But when it comes down to actually playing Rocket Ranger?  The NES version is waaay less of a pain in the ass and has just about all the features that matter.

 

That's one reason we never had any of these machines when I was a kid.  My dad was a console guy and was never going to use a computer for anything but games.  When we'd go over to his friends' houses and they'd show off their computers, we'd see a lot of games that were the same or similar to something on a console, but they either looked like shit if it was an 8-bit machine or played like it if it was 16-bit.

 

I just wonder why this didn't matter enough to get PC players to migrate over to consoles for gaming specifically.

 

9 hours ago, zzip said:

Controllers may have been a concern too.   Computers started to get games like text/graphics adventures, RPGs, Simulations, "God Games" that worked best with keyboard/mouse.   Sure a lot of these have been ported to console over the years but often the controller mapping doesn't work as well as a mouse.

 

You couldn't have done Zork on a 5200 or 7800, no question.  You might have gotten a passable version of King's Quest, though, if you'd done some sort of menu system, or map a numeric keypad to different verbs.

 

I'm sure the input device matters, but does it actually influence what platform you choose, or do you just adapt your game to the input device you have?  Dual Stick shooters were kind of a thing in the 80s, then they went away for a couple decades except for Smash TV and Total Carnage.  Sony puts two thumbsticks on a controller, and all of a sudden it's a genre again, and there's a half dozen of them coming out every week.

 

9 hours ago, zzip said:

That definitely was my attitude starting in the NES era.   I had an ST and 16-bit games/graphics while it was clear NES was still in the 8-bit era.  I was into RPGs and Sim-type games while NES games had colorful bouncy graphics, happy music and virtually everything was a side-scrolling platformer.  To me it seemed like it was for kids, or at least a demographic that was 5-years younger than me.  I did consider getting a Genesis for a time, but still the games seemed more geared towards adolescents and younger teens (I was approaching my 20s by that point).

 

Well... yes and no.  Those were the games that got all the attention, and of course, that's what everyone remembers in retrospect.  No doubt, that's a lot of what I played on NES, but I did a lot of Infiltrator, Shadowgate, Ultima, Wall Street Kid, Silent Service, Nobunaga's Ambition, things like that.  And sports/racing games, which were almost uniformly better on consoles.  Genesis started out as a bunch of arcade ports, but we had damn near every EA game for that thing, so it was pretty well rounded.  Not much in the way of sim games, though.  I was always a fan of Fortune Builder on Colecovision.  Lots of fun and still plays better than a lot of similar games of its time.

 

Which is ultimately my point.  You could have done a lot of the kinds of games that were popular on PCs of the 80s on consoles.  Might not have been quite the same games, but close enough for jazz, and for whatever reasons, consoles tended to do a better job in a lot of ways.

 

Seems like these developments really track closely with the aging and tastes of a certain cohort of Gen Xers.  Arcades were big when they were really young, and that's where the big money went.  They moved on to more "serious" or "advanced" games in the late 80s, and then the 486 and 3D cards come out, and the 90s become this sort of graphical arms race and move into more "adult" games.  Then, the damn breaks at the end of the decade and every male younger than 40 is a gamer, and you get this proliferation of platforms and genres.