Researching about the video-game crash of 1983

[Bill_Loguidice]

Just be careful with both "Ultimate History..." and "Phoenix" as each contains a wide range of factual errors. Both are good, fun books, but they're both dated and quite a bit of new research has been uncovered since. Neither mentions much of the home computer industry at all, so you'll have to look elsewhere for that.

As for my thoughts on the crash, it's referenced in the Wikipedia entry for it via Armchair Arcade. For my interpretation of the events as both experiencing it first hand and doing additional research over the years, I'd say personal computing's influence on the console side of things has been exaggerated. The Crash affected everything (all aspects of the market: videogame, computer, arcade, etc.), though it was a popular journalistic assumption at the time that it was inevitable that computers would replace videogame consoles simply because the former did more and, particularly with Commodore's aggressive price drops, the price points weren't that far apart. The reality was it was too many companies trying to get a piece of the pie with too much mediocre product for the fledgling market to support. To add to that, there weren't the equivalents of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo in the race to financially weather the downturn. If Coleco had a stronger base, it could have easily survived the crash with the ColecoVision, and Mattel the same with the Intellivision, particularly if they stopped diverting their resources to their doomed computing ventures. The Intellivision in particular never stopped being sold right into the very late 80's, though of course under two more IP owners.

The bottom line, consumers didn't want to stop playing videogames, and that was proven by the slow, but amazingly successful rise of the NES. The behind-the-scenes stuff was just a mess. Anyway, I could go on, but I won't...

 

[per]

The behind-the-scenes stuff was just a mess.

Especially when thinking about that everything done there (except price-changes and marketing campains) doesn't appear for the customer before a half to two years afterwards.

 

[Bungo Pony]

Ah, the video game crash. What an interesting time it was!!!

I remember buying a copy of Night Stalker for 99 cents in the late 80s. Atari was trying to re-capture the market with it's Atari 5200. When that failed, they released the 7800 which was mostly backwards compatible with the 2600 cartridges. I remember the 7800 came packaged with that crappy Food Fight game.

The Colecovision tried entering the computer market with their Adam Computer. They also sold the "Expansion Module 3" (I think it was #3) which turned your existing Colecovision into a computer. The Adam was both a great computer, and a crappy computer. The initial batch of them that shipped was incredibly buggy and would erase your data tapes if you turned it on and off with the tape in the drive. That's how I lost my superior copy of Donkey Kong

Coleco had some great games, but their crummy buggy computer pulled them into the video game crash, and people were eventually able to buy an Adam computer at Princess Auto for less than a hundred bucks. Again, it was a great time to get hardware and software for your now non-supported and obsolete computer and game consoles because it was dirt-cheap from companies trying to get out of the business.

Nintendo re-captured the spirit of video games with it's Nintendo Entertainment System, but I'm getting ahead of myself...

The NES was actually a re-branded game system called the "Famicom" which was successful in Japan in the mid-80s. If you can get ahold of some early NES cartridges, you can crack them open and find a Famicom game inside with an adapter for it to work on the NES.

The NES was successful because the games were great. I recall being at K-Mart in the late 80s with all the display units. There was a C-64, an Amiga, an Atari 7800, and an NES. The NES was the one that got all the attention with the C-64 in second place. The Atari gathered dust with it's dumb Food Fight game along with the Amiga with it's boring juggler demo.

Then enter Sega, Turbo Grafix 16, Gameboy, etc etc, and the rest is history.

 

[carlsson]

As a side note, one of the application designs for the original Lorraine project was as a video game system. Apparently once Commodore had bought it from Amiga, they focused on it becoming a multimedia computer. If things had turned out differently and no crash, we might've seen the very first 16-bit video game in 1985. Given the right set of publishing companies and pricing, it could've been an interesting break to the Atari 7800, NES, Sega and what else would've been on the market.

 

[saundby]

My simplest take on 83 was that the hardware market had too many suppliers for the money in the market. On both computers and consoles, and those machines sold as either-ors. It was a normal market consolidation,consumers had already been downselecting the vendors, the investors just got caught up with what was happening in the market in 83, and pulled out from under the weakest vendors or fled the market in general (defense and transport were both drawing off investors from other areas.)

On the 7800, its release was delayed from 83 to, what?, 85 or 86. This was too bad, as I feel it would have broken the self-fulfilling prophecy of a crash in the console market in 83. As it was, they sat on it until the NES showed the fallacy to the conventional wisdom that the console market had "run its course."