The Truth About The 1983 Gaming Crash
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 มิ.ย. 2024
- The video game crash of 1983. One of the most famous yet misunderstood events in gaming history.
Crash of 1977: • The Forgotten Video Ga...
Itty Bitty 8 Bit by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-...
Artist: incompetech.com/
8bit Dungeon Boss - Video Classica by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-...
Artist: incompetech.com/
Half Bit by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-...
Artist: incompetech.com/ - เกม
This is the best video I've seen on the crash. You go in depth and look at the underlying causes. The 3rd party issue was why nintendo had so much control of the market during the 3rd era. It's very apparent to me that people needed a new console to give them more complex and longer games. The head of Warner Communications didn't understand what he had just bought when Atari sold them their company. Nolan bushnell tried to tell him but he didn't get it.
the 1983 crash did not occur. Arcades made record revenues in 1983 and everyone who was playing Atari and Intellvision got bored and moved to the Commodore 64 featuring massive amounts of pirated games. People were still playing lots of video games. Mattel and Atari got left in the dust.
As someone from the era, it was a interesting time. My parents bought me the Atari 2600 back in 81, the Atari 5200 back in 83, the ColecoVision in 84, and eventually the Commodore 64 in 86. I was a fan of them all. The ColecoVision was the better console out of the second generation of consoles beating out the Atari 5200 in graphical capabilities. Kinda, like the PS5 and the Xbox One today. Both could produce really good graphics for the time but the ColecoVision was a bit more powerful and a better build system overall. Not including the Commodore 64. Why didn’t these second generation of consoles sell well? A couple of reasons. One, neither console manufacturer had a killer first party title that excited anyone and made them want to go out and splurge on their consoles. Two, these consoles came out in a era where upgrades was still a new phenomenon and people at the time just didn’t believe in upgrades. It was an old school way of buying products where u bought something once and u kept it until it ceased working. Today upgrading is norm. It’s what we do.
5200 was hurt by bad joysticks and mediocre sound, but you are right, the lack of development of any great games was a problem, a problem caused by the collapse of the 2600 and publishers going out of business. So after that initial blast of early upgraders who were excited by "arcade ports that are slightly better", there was no growth.
ColecoVision was more interesting, some good games, but sticks that also turned off newcomers, and the lack of anything exciting after the initial blast of games meant you had no system sellers other than "closest to Arcade Donkey Kong" to that point.
But yeah, by 84, everyone I knew who cared about games had a C64 or Atari 8 bit computer, but as he says, nowhere near in number to compare with the 2600. Plenty of parents were like "fool me once".
@@blikketty77 I forgot about that. Donkey Kong was actually a great pack in title for the ColecoVision! By comparison, the Atari 5200 packin title was Breakout. Pac-Man would have been a far better choice in my opinion. The Coleco Adam came with the worst packin ever lol, Buck Rogers. I actually knew someone who had that system. Unfortunately, it was way too complex for us kids at that time. He could never get it to work right. I remember being wowed by how different it was from your everyday console at that time. The cassette games, keyboard, etc.
This is your best vid and yet it's gonna get slept on when it comes to views. Disheartening.
This is a really well documented video I like these kinds of videos the most
No it wasn’t it’s shit
Solid video, but feel like the Colecovision is misrepresented. The Adam killed Coleco, Colecovision weathered 83-84 pretty well.
They needed Pac-Man and/or Ms. Pac-Man. Instead they went for the Adam, the Atari 2600 plugin and the Gemini, when they should have done a campaign saying, "Give Atari to your little brother, you're done with it."
@@sandal_thong8631Atari’s division for other consoles, AtariSoft, made Pac-Man for the ColecoVision. I owned a copy of it back in 1983.
The best important thing to consider is that there was not much structure for the video game industry between the beginning and the crash because video games where viewed as and sold as toys and where made mostly by Indy devs because video game design was like being a cocktail waitress under the table instead of a career that you go to college for.
The 2nd issue with this video is saying ColecoVision was a failure. CV survived the crash and sold the whole time, it was all profit. The ADAM computer that Coleco produced bombed and eventually caused them to drop out of electronics in general. The ADAM computer was a huge money sink and Coleco lost more trying to salvage it. Early in 1985 Coleco announced winding down of the Adam but that they would keep the CV going because it was still bringing modest profits but of course not enough to make up for those Adam losses. CV was discontinued later in 85.
Also in 85, since the crash had little to do with games as you pointed out, Mattel who lost money still saw a market of buyers because people still wanted games, the crash was caused by companies, not consumers, so spun off a company called INTV to finish developing and releasing games and get new games on the revised InteliVision 2 and III. they would continue selling the InteliVision until 1990.
Coleco's Cabbage Patch Kids also stopped generating revenue. But yeah, the ColecoVision sold 2 million from late 1982 through 1983, so was not a failure (Intellivision sold 3 million from 1980-1983 or so). Adam failing was a huge loss.
I think they also made a mistake producing a plug-in adapter that played Atari 2600 games. (Maybe market research showed parents wanted backwards-compatibility?) Buying the adapter meant you didn't buy 1 or 2 ColecoVision games, then if you did buy an Atari 2600 game that was another lost sale. I think Intellivision tried to do the same saying they could then play the most games, and Coleco followed up with the Gemini that played Atari 2600 games without the ColecoVision. Now if the plug-in had been for 5200 or Atari computer games, then people could play _good_ versions of Pac-Man, Missile Command, etc. on ColecoVision. Though I think before they shut it down in 1984, Atarisoft did release a few games for ColecoVision.
Still, someone should have done an ad campaign, saying this system (Atari) is from 1977 and isn't going to get any better, so give it to your little brother and buy the next generation system.
The cokecovisuon was a success. It exploded when it came out packed with donkey Kong.
I think the main reason why the video game crash happened was because that there were too many games for the Atari 2600. It also was NOT home computers that caused the crash because Commodore actually survived the video game crash of 1983.
And not to mention that Nintendo's "innovation" was two years old when it came to the US, at a time when console lifecycles averaged about eighteen months.
The worst myth is that Nintendo saved the entire gaming industry when they really were just the first to get their foot in the door in America and probably caused alot of damage by monopolizing the entire region. Basically no retailer could sell other consoles and third parties couldn't go the competition or sell more than 5 games per year.
Absolutely. They did "save" the industry but as you said and I pointed out later in the video, that's because nobody else stepped up. Atari, Coleco, Mattel and Magnavox all stopped making consoles.
And I will discuss Nintendo's monopolistic practices when I make a video about the third generation of consoles.
@@RealCynicalGamer my point is, during the third generation of consoles, the first console to get into a region was that regions most dominant console. Sega was able to take both Brazil and Europe because they beat Nintendo to those regions.
Spongemattb so wait... they didn’t save it?
Well if Nintendo didn’t step in, no one else would’ve done it then. Back in 1985 when the nes was about to release, people thought Nintendo was crazy for entering a dead market.
And when the nes became successful, sega and Atari re entered the market after they saw Nintendo succeed. Without Nintendo stepping in, sega and Atari wouldn’t have bothered making another console.
Amazing video, I had no idea about the retail practices and how powerful the Activision was at the point in time.
Very informative video. Well done!
I'm currently working on a college project and my research page specifically for my website regarding the evolution of game software abilities and I've got to say, this is the most informative yet straight forward summery of the game crash I've come across yet and has been incredibly insightful. I really appreciate the time and effort you put into making this video. I really wanted to showcase how the games crash and stagnation of innovation contributed to the lack of software improvement until Nintendo revitalized the games industry with its innovative consoles and games., and with information I gained from this video, I'm able to present that.
Great video Chad, I found it very informative and it's refreshing to hear the real reasons as to why the market crashed here in North America in 1983. I always found it baffling how people thought that 2 games were a huge cause if not the only cause for the crash, sure they may have made consumers lose faith in games a fair bit but they couldn't have sank a multi billion dollar industry all by themselves, that's ridiculous. Anyway I most definitely look forward to your coverage of the 3rd generation, these videos of yours remind me of Gaming Historians videos but with a different feel and from a slightly different angle than his videos but hey I'm all for more videos like that as I love me some gaming history and history in general and I'm always fascinated to learn new things I may have learned incorrectly or didn't know at all. Keep up the great work, I look forward to more
3 years later and history is about to repeat itself again.
Good research! I'll definitely have to check out your other videos, hope you go viral
I have a question, where did you get this information from? I have been going online to see if anything there backs up the claims but so far I have only found articles that spout those myths.
Yeah, a lot of myths about the crash, and even the production quantity of Pac-Man and E.T. But I agree with the notion that good third party games cut into Atari's revenue, not the bad ones. There were 27 games that sold over 1 million: 6 from Activision, 3 from Imagic, 2 from Parker Bros., 1 from Coleco. Two of those could have been licensed and made by Atari like Frogger and Donkey Kong, while the others were originals. I don't think investors could handle profit going to different companies after Atari was 70-80% market share in 1981 and dominated with Asteroids, Missile Command and the previous year's Space Invaders.
I do think computers had an impact, despite his statistics. Parents would rather buy a home computer that could also play games then the next generation console. And games did sell for computers.
Could it have been the sheer size of Atari’s monopoly on the console market that helped contribute to the crash? Perhaps monopolies that large are unhealthy for any industry.
I'd agree with that. If Mattel had licensed Space Invaders for Intellivision and that console took off instead of Atari, then Atari might have ramped up development in 1980 to get something to market by mid-1981 to compete. Still Atari had Missile Command and Asteroids from their arcade division (later Atari Games) so might have come back in 1981. It would have been a more competitive market if by the end of 1981 there were several million Intellivisions sold instead of maybe 2 million, and less Atari VCS/Sears Arcades sold.
It's interesting to look at the ads for Intellivision: one said they had better sports games, which was true. Even some Odyssey² sports games were better than Atari's in 1978-9, though that system didn't get any better. But the next one was whiny: "We have space games too." Too late. Commodore then mocked both Atari's space games ad and Intellivision's with William Shatner saying buy the VIC-20.
ColecoVision probably had the same problem as Intellivision: Atari got the must-have game Pac-Man, so Atari sold another 2-5 million consoles in 1982 (plus 1 million 5200s in 1982-3). ColecoVision scored a coup getting Donkey Kong (another must-have game) and were smart enough to make it the bundled game (Intellivision's was Poker and Blackjack). Result: they sold 2 million consoles end of 1982 through 1983.
Fantastic video! Thanks for taking the time to make it.
I appreciate the support
@@RealCynicalGamer The Crash occurred in Public in the Spring of 1984.
Do you have a bibliography for this video I could look at in preparing for a debate based on the crash of 83
What a refreshingly insightful and thought provoking video. A very well researched and crafted piece. I really enjoyed it!
@GodZpeed X7 What a refreshingly insightful and thought provoking comment. A very well researched and well crafted piece of literature indeed. Well done GodZpeed X7!
You say it wasn't oversaturation, it was retail glut, but glut means an over abundance of supply. It means the same thing
I never said it wasn't, but context matters. As I pointed out in the video, there was an oversaturation of games on store shelves. But that was caused by many publishers overestimating demand and producing too many cartridges that were never sold, so stores like Sears had to slash down the prices in order to clear inventory. That created a glut in the market. It was not an oversaturation of "bad" games as many people frame it.
@@RealCynicalGamer Alright, that makes sense. As I research this topic I've started to wonder if the amount of shoddy games helped the crash because of the third party domination of the market. Even if investors wanted to invest more into gaming they had to choose among a sea of third party developers who went as quick as they came. Do you agree? Or do you think that bad games had nothing to do with it and it was all overproduction + bad retail practices?
Well a lot of the "bad games" you hear about like Pepsi Invaders never even made it to store shelves. As far as ET goes, as I said in the video, the crash happened before that game even released. Yet historians often point to that game as a major contributor to the crash as well as Pac Man. I would say the 83 crash has 2 major causes: 1) Retail Glut 2) Third Party Competition (Atari's stocks plummeted as they lost more marketshare). The failure of the 5200 and Colecovision prolonged the crash. The industry only started to recover after Nintendo entered the market, revitalizing the industry.
@@RealCynicalGamer That makes sense. Thanks for the quick reply. I'll be looking forward to your content
I would say first the loss of investor confidence, then loss of retailer confidence, finally loss of consumer confidence. In another video I heard there was a chip shortage in 1981 so retailers couldn't get what they ordered, so over-ordered in 1982, plus more retailers wanted in after seeing sales of Missile Command and Asteroids in 1981, but probably didn't know what to order in 1982-3.
Decent video, but Colecovision was successful and weathering the crash, it was the Coleco Adam that tanked Coleco.
Can you list some sources because I am interested in looking into it as you made some pretty convincing points
Anyone could make games on the Atari 2600 even I think a dog food company made a game or so on it. That was truly the wild west of gaming.
I've seen this video before I typed the comment I commented on before I typed this comment if that makes any sense. Anyway I know it was not the over saturation of games like you said but the fact that Purina made a video game as part of there promotion for there brand is still fucked up.
@shinkansen Hype: anyone could have made a game for Atari 2600 but they would have to have advanced skill because Atari was programed from scratch unlike today where everything is mass produced CGI generated from HDR scans of people are environment.
I think they said _Chase the Chuckwagon_ was made in 3 days, and didn't involve chasing anything. It was a giveaway for those who sent in proof-of-purchases. I feel sad for all those kids who ate dog food to get a video game. At least other kids drank the Kool-Aid to get _Kool-Aid Man._
Very good explanation, thanks!
To extrapolate on Spike's excellent points, it's important to credit Nintendo's marketing strategy for their success, rather than just nebulous "innovation" as your video puts it.
When Nintendo of America brought the Famicom over to the US, they were careful to avoid marketing it as a video game system (as those were seen as a dead market at that point), and instead opted to market it as a toy. Incidentally, this has a lot to do with why that "girls don't play video games" trope existed in our culture for so long--at the time, toys were sorted by boys and girls in major retailers, and NOA opted to go with the boy side of things.
One other major oversight is Nintendo's licencing agreements, with third-party developers signing contracts that disallowed them from making games for other systems. With most of the major devs at the time firmly under Nintendo's wing, it's no wonder that they quickly dominated the market, despite being up against technically superior options.
Pac-Man for Atari 2600 was released in April of 1982, not July. I drove 25 miles and spent $35 on that piece of crap.
😆
March. Kids played anything Pac-Man related because of the fever. I don't remember ever being allowed by my parents to return toys and games for an exchange as a kid. E.T. must have been unplayable by little kids for that to happen, but I don't know how many Pac-Man games were returned. It was the best selling cart at 8 million, and they probably unloaded another 2 million bundled with consoles in 1983.
Nice job. It was a lot of work putting together this video, I am sure. I always wondered what had happened to the video game market during that time frame when I was in high school from 1982-1986. I really was not much of a gamer because I felt like I could better spend my time practicing music or building model kits. Arcades were where my friends spent their time and I just could not justify wasting my hard earned money losing time after time: so, if I was to play a video game, it was on the Atari. The Atari 2600 was all we had until my mom bought an Apple IIe, but I had graduated from high school by that point. My grandmother bought the Atari in 1979 and gave it to us in 1981. The player one joystick button never worked properly as the button was always "on;" meaning, the picther in baseball was continually pitching. The Activision games were the best ones and are still my favorites. There is a prize for achievement and I still take great pride in earning the Barnstorming patch. By the time the NES came out, I was in college and had no extra time to play video games. The whole gaming scene had changed in just a short time. Your video gave a pretty good explanation as to why that happened. Thank you.
Looking at your data I can’t come to the same endpoint you’ve presented here-I don’t think the ‘83 crash was caused by _one_ single factor, but a all of them together in a narrow timeline. Kind of like that escalating dominos meme from a few years back. The first domino that fell was Atari losing publishing control in 1982. Then again, if there’s something I’m missing, do let me know.
Except I never stated that one single factor contributed to the crash. I listed multiple factors including retail glut and the lack of regulation in the game publishing market, along with the failure of the Colecovision/5200.
@@RealCynicalGamer Ah, okay, I didn’t catch that part. Thank you.
@@Minnesota_Fatts pay attention to the video lol
Hello
I´m in the process of making a documentary for youtube about the Origins of Video Game Industry, covering from the very begining with the first videogames and first mainframe computers, until the late 80's. This video is very helpful and very interesting because it gets deeper into the causes of the 83 crash.
I was born just in the 83 but in Europe (Spain), and it is very interesting to know how the game industry worked in the 80's in USA. And why the industry crashed between the finals of 82 until the NES launch in 85. Of course, the industry did not suffer any crack in Europe in the 80's nor in Japan. On the contrary, the early 80's in Europe were the golden era of software development for microcomputers, the expansion of the game industry for us, also for Japan with the famicom and the first Sega consoles.
That´s why it is very interesting to have this information, in first hand from a USA person who has investigated about this.
You have explained the many reasons of the crash very well. But i still think that bad games like ET or pacman (the famous but not the only) and the many low quality clones of other videoconsoles contributed to the crash, because they started the loos of confidence in the consumer.
It still happens today and the good sales for a bad videogame is one thing that you cannot get out of the argument. A bad videogame can sell well, but the consumer may not buy another videogame from that company in the future. In an era with the lack of videogame information like in the early 80's, with no reviews about videogames, the consumer could not trust in all the games of the market. Specially when he bought a bad one, he cannot know if the next game he wants to buy is a good one or pure crap.
It is very interesting to know the high prices for the very first 3rd console generation made in EEUU. The Atari 5200 - 7800, the next coleco ect
I think that it is also a very important point. Just remember that high price consoles of the 4rd generation like Atari Jaguar, Philips CDi, Pioneer LaserActive, panasonic 3DO and NeoGeo MVS also failed because of the same (this last was a failure on home sales but not in the arcades of course)
Also it is very interesting to know, that third parties like Activision did not share any profits with Atari, and that all the unsold copies from a game could be refunded by the retailer (a nonsense in Europe, even in the 80's)
That's a very heavy reason why Nintendo used a lock chip in the NES Cardtridges, not only to avoid piracy, but also to have control of their console market. All the other companies did the same in the future consoles until today.
Nintendo also started in the EEUU in the same way, with the promise of a refund for the retailers for the unsold products, but i think that they changed that in the next years, when de company was very integrated in the EEUU market.
Very interesting, thanks for the poin of view man. I hope my English is not too bad.
I think the fact gaming was so big at the time, caused it. Companies that had nothing to do with games, made consoles. Like BBC, Vtech. They thought they could make big money but that wasn’t the case. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial wasn’t a bad game, people just didn’t know what to do. PAC-MAN however, that was awful. There are many causes of the video game crash but I think these are the mains. While yes, the Atari 5200 and Intellivision controllers were like Telephones, that was a gimmick that we just didn’t allow into the industry.
Hope You All Enjoyed Reading This If You Have. Have a Great Day
I’d played it and it’s not to bad, only issue is that it looked nothing like the arcade
I would say E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was more playable and winnable than Raiders of the Lost Ark; the latter could only be won if you sent away for the walkthrough. (I couldn't figure out how to dig, or find the Yar until I read how on the internet.) But E.T. was a defective game because of the pixel checker that made you fall back in the pit. Older kids might figure it out, but not younger kids, so their parents took the game back. It also might have succeeded had it been a bicycle chase game, or a better version of Pac-Man, which Spielberg suggested. How many Pac-Man clones were there in 1982?
Pac-Man was bad, but Pac-Man fever was such that kids would play anything: lookup K.C. Munchkin and Coleco Tabletop Arcade. Donkey Kong was also bad, but it was a must-have game too. The third disappointment (fourth if you count Raiders of the Lost Ark) that sold over 1 million.
You got several things right, but also some stuff wrong. First off, the corn to cartridges comparison is silly. Yeah, they can't return corn. But in retail, with hard goods, clothes, automotive, office supplies, books, albums, cassettes, etc, if stuff did not sell back then, it absolutely would get sent back to the vendor for a refund (usually back to the distribution center and then back to the vendor) , or cleared out for a greatly reduced price, or thrown away, and depending on the purchase agreement, the vendor would refund some portion to the retailer for the unsold stuff. All through the 70s, 80s, 90s, etc. So, cartridges were not in any way "unique" in this regard just because it was a new industry. One thing you did get correct was that when publishers went out of business, with no publisher to take the hit, that hit was taken by the retailer or by a middle man, which also put some of them out of business or made them skittish about buying and selling video games. Returning unsellable hard goods to vendors from retail only really stopped when shipping and computerized inventory systems caught up and allowed for "just in time" inventory in the 2000s.
Atari publishing more copies of pac man and e.t. than consoles existing, was insanity, another point you got right. But Pac Man especially had a bigger impact to people that owned the Atari 2600s. It showed in stark detail the delta between arcade and the 2600 was wide and getting wider. I can vividly remember parents of friends of mine, grown men and women in their 40s and 50s, literally angry at how bad Pac Man was, and how annoying the sounds were. When the people who control the pursestrings are pissed off, we have a problem. And Arcade games didn't stop advancing in 1980. If the 2600 could not do PacMan in a way that was fun, what chance would it have vs Zaxxon, Time Pilot, or Robotron?
In regards to "home computers didn't cause a problem and neither was there a console glut", it's complicated but related to the same. Some people quit buying games after Pac Man and E.T. But some people went out and bought Atari 8 bit home computers. And the ColecoVision, 5200, and Commodore 64 all came out in 1982, and all of them were capable of games that looked slightly more like the arcade versions, tho the 5200 was handicapped by it's terrible sticks and meh sound. Did these new options kill the 2600? No, but they sure made 2600 owners and publishers realize that there was nothing coming to save them.
One thing, only people who actually lived through it will remember is, one thing that helped kill Atari, was the rise of cable tv. The simple fact was, most of us had one, MAYBE two tvs in the whole house. And so, whereas if you went to a friends house after school in 1980, 81, yeah, you'd probably be playing Atari. Well, guess what, by the time you went to that same friends house in late 1982 or 1983? Most of us were watching HBO or MTV instead of playing video games, never mind all the other networks. This also fits right in with the death of the local arcade. Simply put, kids had entertainment options at home they never had before.
I appreciate the impetus for you making the video. Too many people want a simple story such as the E.T. thing, kind of like how people recite that "grunge killed hair metal" in the 90s, when much like the video game crash, it's way more complicated, and much more about marketing, trends, and how people try to create a "unique" identity through music.
I am writing an essay on the video game crash and of all the sources I have used, this has been the best yet. Good work!
1. 4:28 Pac-Man came out in March 1982, and sold over 8 million copies from my sources. I've heard the 12 million production figure was a myth, but I believe they were overproduced, perhaps to 10 million, the same number of consoles sold from 1977-1981. For some reason they stopped putting out new catalogs in 1982; I suspect they took them out of unsold Pac-Man boxes to save a few pennies. They bundled Pac-Man with new consoles in 1983 (along with Combat) so maybe unloaded another 1-2 million.
Also not sure if they over-produced E.T. to the tune of 2 million more than was sold, or how many were returned, but they said they sent less than 1 million unsold E.T. games to the landfill in New Mexico.
It's amazing to think that Atari carts that sold over 1 million were failures, but like a Hollywood movie (think Star Wars sequels) that makes hundreds of millions of dollars, it might not make enough or what they expected to compared to cost because they were not good. (E.T., Pac-Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Donkey Kong for Atari were disappointments, which are a b****.)
2. 6:18 Agree. Wall Street is made up of greedy cowards. Atari's _PROFITS_ weren't what they expected. Other companies would go into losses the next year. A video I saw the other day did show Billboard's chart (possibly for December 1982) with Pitfall! at number 1, Pac-Man still at number 4, Donkey Kong still up there, while E.T. fell off the top 10, possibly due to returns. So this may undercut my previous argument. Still, unsold carts cost money to produce, and that takes away from profits of those that did sell.
3. 7:48. Besides wanting credit, the programmers also wanted a part of the profit in sales, and not just a coupon for a free turkey at Thanksgiving like the guy got who made Space Invaders which sold 6 million, Atari's real second-best selling game; Pitfall! was fourth after Donkey Kong's 4.18 million sold. Before 1982, the lawsuit with Activision resulted in them paying a licensing fee in order to make games for the system. I don't think it was profit-sharing, but maybe a flat fee? Perhaps that's what opened the way for all the companies to release games in 1982.
4. 9:24 Agree with this cause of investor panic. People were buying games that sold over 1 million from companies other than Atari! But if it had been a competitive market in 1981, people would have bought games from someone other than Atari.
5. 9:55 Interesting about the glut and saying these 3rd-party companies with no hits shut down. They seemed to release new games in both 1982 and 1983, so looks like they shut down in late 1983. I heard Imagic had a return policy, but without their 1983 games succeeding, or them being a big company, they shut down too.
6. 12:43 Mattel's Intellivision (incl. Intellivision II) sold 3 million, Odyssey² 1 million, Atari 5200 1 million, while Atari 2600/VCS/Sears Arcade sold 10 million before 1982 and another 5 million by either end of 1982 or 1983. So Atari didn't quite sell 10x as many as Mattel (unless you are counting the figure 30 million sold by 1992 or 2004), however I would agree with the figure that they had 70-80% of console market share, so it was their industry to lose.
7. 15:05 ColecoVision was a success, selling 2 million in late 1982 through 1983 due to the must-have game Donkey Kong being bundled. Coleco made some bad choices taking away their profits like the Adam computer, and creating both a plug-in Atari and the Gemini to play 2600 games instead of pushing their own sales and saying "Give Atari to your little brother, you're done with it." Every sale of those Atari clones was at least one or two of their games they didn't sell.
8. 18:01 Disagree that computers had no responsibility in the console crash. Obviously money that went to computers and computer games didn't go to consoles and console games. I think your chart that has "PC" on it is wrong, and doesn't really include Commodore, T.I., Apple and Atari computers and games sold on those formats. Comic book ads in 1983 had screen shots for consoles and computers so they must have sold something. When I stopped buying Atari carts in 1983, I started buying carts for my VIC-20, such as Pole Position, Clowns (same as Circus Atari), and Omega Race.
9. 21:00 Atari was not losing money in 1982, their _profits_ weren't increasing 50% but increasing 15% as you said earlier which wasn't good enough. (Mattel with Intellivision at the start of 1983 was losing money, as their attempt at a computer failed too, and people didn't want their console and its games.) Maybe they lost money in 1983. But they released 33 games in 1983, so they tried to glut the market too!
I think you left something out about a chip shortage in 1981 that resulted in retailers not getting the quantities they ordered. As a result they ordered more in 1982, thinking they would get a percentage, but got the whole order. Also more retailers that year wanted to sell video games and they ordered a bunch of games that didn't sell.
A lot of people say this was a North American problem and highlighting the fault of the investor panic seems to agree with this. What was different in Europe and Brazil with the PAL system carts? Someone said they were a year behind, so maybe lame games that didn't sell in North America didn't get remade for PAL?
And to address your point about low-quality games: sure, the price dropped after retailers realized that they couldn't sell them otherwise, but it's not like these garbage games magically appeared out of the blue! They were there before the crash, and listed for full price. A lot of people got burned long before the crash was even starting.
Nintendo of America also capitalized on this with their "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality", displayed prominently on the face of each game box. This "Seal of Quality" actually didn't refer to the game contents at all--rather, it just meant that the game would actually run on the NES hardware.
But their marketing never pointed out this distinction, and the consumers were just fine with making the assumption that the Seal meant that you were getting a good game.
Lots of nice stuff here but there are two major errors. The overestimated in demand by TP publishers was due to the demand by lower cost software, as many publishers, including those that made good games, under cut major TP publishers like Activision etc. Due to this a lot of earlier games got high demand and forced companies like Imagic to drop prices. However almost all expected similar demand which was impossible. Leading to many games in bargain bins while more expensive games were usually In glass or behind the counter. This software price war was directly related to the computer hardware and software price war and may not have happened as it did, so computers were partially involved.
I can see some of that. Why pay $30-$40 for a new game in 1984 when there were a great number of good games from 1982-3 selling for less. Even Atari dropped their prices for their games from 1977-1980 to $10, when they probably should have purged their catalogs (and store shelves) of most of those games. Twenty-seven games sold over a million copies, but how many kids could afford to get them all at $30 each?
I agree computers had to be involved. A computer sale was money that might have gone for a console, and a computer game sale might have been a console game sale.
Atari abandoned the first generation of gamers. Gamers didn't want or care about VisiCalc, juggles rainbow, and conversational french. How you gonna sell 12 million consoles in 82 yet only have less than 20 VCS programmers out of a staff of 10000. Atari deserved to fail.
I think they said they outsourced the launch games for the 5200, then outsourced games in 1983 like Jungle Hunt and Moon Patrol, which look good, though the controls on the former were sluggish and I can't get very far in Moon Patrol.
Computers took the torch at this time for gaming, the crash is a myth. Just a point of view for some people who lived in the US.
In regards to the belief that computers took over, that may have its origins in Europe where home computers absolutely did take over from consoles during this period. At one stage the crash was portrayed as a global thing online and Brits on forums would always dispute there was a crash (because it really didn't apply to us) this argument could've then been taken up by Americans?
The other possibility is that computer sales in the US happened in an irregular manner, maybe much of the sales of computers were area specific and higher in certain states? So perhaps for some people it felt like everyone swapped over to computers whilst in other states/areas computer sales were very low? Just putting that out there as speculation.
Europe (and Brazil) may have been 1 year behind North America. I also think that lousy games that didn't sell in 1982 in North America, wouldn't be published in Europe.
Best part of the 83 crash, I got my first Sears TeleGames woodgrain beauty, along with many other lower-income families getting their first 2600s. As a kid, going from begging for one to having one with a library of about 30 games in the same day was a dream come true, only to shift to me begging for an NES which I wouldn't get till Christmas 1990 (though that certainly didn't stop me from enjoying what rapidly grew to a library of over 100 games from discount bins for my 2600).
I'll frequently defend ET as merely a subpar game IF you read the manual (it was certainly not as complex as Raiders of the Lost Ark, which required two joysticks, but ET still had a lot of moving parts, not helped by the clunky hitboxes for pits, which were easy enough to overcome once you got used to moving an extra couple pixels away from them). I do remember a couple kids so enthralled with the ET hype train they would've believed you if you said buying a cart would bring in the second coming of Christ- even the best game in the universe isn't going to live up to that expectation, and a below-average game is going to seem that much worse by comparison. And if you didn't even read the instruction manual (it took me a couple years of playing it, only opening the booklet once I became a preteen), it was going to seem that much worse.
I also can't remember a single family complaining about the 2600 port of Pac-Man. In fact, the first time I EVER heard anything negative about it was after I got dial-up internet access in college during the mid 90s (I'll admit I was a bit too young to even care about gaming magazines when it came out, even up until Nintendo Power gave walkthroughs).
Maybe there are some people who saw Pac-Man as a disappointment out of the box. It's pretty bad in retrospect and I'd rather play Ms. Pac-Man today. But Pac-Man Fever was such, that kids would play anything Pac-Man before it came out, including the Coleco Tabletop Arcade.
@sandal_thong8631 looking at the sales numbers, deducting returns, yes some people were disappointed. But the vast majority kept their copies and the port is a top bestseller for the 2600.
@@kamikaze9699 I saw a video that showed Billboard's top video game sales, perhaps for December 1982 or January 1983, it didn't say. Pitfall! was number one, Pac-Man was still number 4 after being out for months, Donkey Kong was still high, but E.T. was out of the top 10.
It should have been a bicycle chase (years before Paperboy was in the arcade), and Raiders should have been a truck chase, just as the arcade game Wild Western chased a train on horseback.
@sandal_thong8631 Raiders had the same problem as ET- you had to read the instruction manual. Raiders used two joysticks for a one player game. It was pretty solid, but it took me a couple years before I read the manual (same for ET, though I read that one sooner as I had access to it).
@@kamikaze9699 Raiders was a failure for an adventure game. There was almost nothing I learned on my own. Everything I did was from the manual, including hints in the manual, or years later from a walkthrough on the internet, since I couldn't figure out how to dig for the Ark to win. Some "solutions" cost you points like using the grenade but the score was not visible; at the end of the game you had to count dots. Also the top score was supposed to put Indy up to the Ark, but the programmer took away a few points at the last minute so that could never happen.
I played three Scott Adams text adventure games on the VIC-20 and won all of them without a hint book. When I heard that Adventure was based on a text game, I wondered why they didn't make more like that since I read it sold over 1 million.
Instead we got E.T., Raiders, and Swordquest. Even Haunted House was much more limited than Adventure and Superman; they could have made 24 screens for rooms of the house instead of 4 with 6 rooms. I was able to win Riddle of the Sphinx at a friend's home (with manual) and again when I got it on the cheap in the 1990s (without the manual and before I found it on the internet).
But remember donkey Kong and mario bros were one step closer to the FAMICOMS release in North America.
Xbox had the Burger King game
Rip sears
Who does atari belong to now? Like who profits from the 'new' atari consoles.
I think they said Warner split Atari in two (or three) in 1984 with them keeping the arcade division calling them Atari Games, which might have made games for NES under Konami name; while Atari went to the guy in the video and stayed with him through the end of the 1980s and perhaps until the failure of the Jaguar.
I feel like the Johnson & Johnson game was kind of good
Im old enough I can tell you that store display @4:14 is def toyrus,
it was a good documentary
Well your voice are changed when back in 2013
damn....biggest redpill of the year easily,amazing video man
Sorry but what actually caused 1983 crash ?
) i didnt hear it correctly)
Interessantes Thema, aber sehr unangenehme Stimme.
I don’t like Walmart, go to Costco or Amazon instead
Also a third final issue, Nintendo did not really take off until late 1987. In 1985 the gaming industry was recovering and the 7809, NES, and Sega Master system were shown/announced at the 1985 fes, and we're shown at the 1986 ces, all 3 released the same year. You explain a lot of important lies and misinformation in your video about the crash, but I believe it's slightly pointless since it still ends on the Nintendo saviour myth.
Video Games from 82 - 87 hadn't evolved. That is why kids lost interest in Arcades and Video games in general.
Once Nintendo came out with Mario Bros, finally kids see a potential of what Video Games can be...
This is just patently untrue. It wasn't that the games didn't evolve, it was that more difficult and complicated games were not that enjoyable in an arcade setting.
You quickly die 3 times in Mario Bros, or any number of NES games you play again. You die quickly 3 times playing Afterburner or R-Type or lots of post 1985 games, you weren't so up to throwing another 25 cents at it the number of times it would take you to figure it out.
Cable TV has as much to do with the death of arcades and Atari as anything.
I lived through the crash. To say Pac man and ET did not contribute to the crash is not correct in my opinion. I was at Disneyland that summer of ET being released. They had tents set up with tons on 2600's set up for people to play. They were empty. Most parents felt better about buying their kid a computer than a PC, and Pac Man on the 2600 looked really bad, even back then. The crash would have likely been a slump if the industry had been more robust I suppose. Nintendo proved that.
I think he explains that et and Pacman were a symptom. The crash already happened.
The other players couldn't sell as many consoles as Atari did for the VCS/2600/Sears Arcade, but the screenshots and advertisements made kids feel that Atari was low class, and if you had it, you weren't getting a new system, but maybe a computer.
I watched a video on Intellivision's games and even though I felt I had a second-rate system, in retrospect I probably would not have enjoyed the Intellivision's games as well as I did Atari's. I learned it was released with Poker and Blackjack, and I didn't have a brother to play Major League Baseball or Auto Racing with, for instance.
Haunted house was worser
BORDERLANDS 2 SUCKS!
Turkish subtitle ?
Someone: It happened because there were so many bad games.
Me: And yet despite everything Nintendo did to revive the industry, the NES still had a large quantity of games that ranged from mediocre to terrible, and the connections with Nintendo meant that more third party devs and pubs had access to major retail shops including the low-tier ones like LJN.
Just to say something, this is probably my new favourite video about the crash. Retro Game Living Room had my favourite one for a few years now, but checking this one out now made me go "Oh yeah, now there's two". I'll be checking the 77 video out soon, this is great stuff.
You pay $30 or so for an original game or an arcade adaption and it's only so-so on Atari, makes you not want to buy another Atari cart. I'd say there's some truth about buying games for $10 or $20 instead, which hurt new full-price releases. I wanted Star Gate in 1984, even though I had Defender, but have yet to get it. After Jungle Hunt, I didn't buy any more Atari games for years, but bought carts for my VIC-20 instead (including Clowns, the same game as Circus Atari). Years later I bought Donkey Kong Jr. on the red label, not realizing it was Coleco's 1983 and almost as bad as Donkey Kong.
A new emulator system is coming out having Surround, Haunted House and other old games that take time to load when you turn them on. Who's that for? They should at least give us the post-1982 games that are not as cheap to get on eBay. Or better yet, the original arcade classic games like I got on Playstation, though they didn't release enough of those.
You sound so pisssed off...
Pewdiepie is great
8 bit computers didn't cause the crash but they helped accelerate it. Why buy A Colecovison when you can buy a Commodore 64 for the same money which has longer & BETTER games and can run business & educational software too?
i had both and as soon as I got my C64 (Christmas 84) the Colecovision saw a lot less use..
If that were true, that wouldn't be a crash but a readjustment. Maybe that could explain why the Atari 5200 and Colecovision failed, but not why the entire industry crashed. Those are two separate discussions.
@@RealCynicalGamer The Colecovision actually sold very well throughout 1983 and even 1984. It was the godawful ADAM computer that did Coleco in. Colecovision wasn't even discontinued until early 1985 because of all the financial losses incurred with the ADAM. Had Coleco stuck to the Colecovision I could see it as having been the defining console of the 80's beating out the NES, SMS, and (possibly) even the Commodore 64.
Colecovision outsold the 5200 and it's horrible controllers by a 4-1 margin..
"Why buy A Colecovison when you can buy a Commodore 64 for the same money which has longer & BETTER games and can run business & educational software too?"
An interesting question. That's pretty much why consoles were seen as low-brow in countries like the UK during the early to mid-1980s. The Atari VCS was an awesome machine, but pretty much started to fizzle out a bit around 1982 when the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 arrived.
That said, these systems could still play games. For most companies, it was their only option. People still enjoyed video games, they just now had to get them on computers. That and superior specs allowed for more innovative games.
You're definitely correct about the Coleco Adam. That was pretty much what killed both the Colecovision and the company itself. It was so bad that it sucked up all the money made from the Cabbage Patch Kids toyline. Yikes.
The home PC market had its own small crash in '84 due to the conclusion of the price war between Commodore and Texas Instruments that drove down margins. Then you had Commodore lose focus with the market not knowing who the TED line was for while Atari (a major player with the 800) completely fumbled the launch of their XL line while bleeding money from its arcade and console division.
I did hear recently that Atari computers played games at the same computing level as the 5200, so why buy the latter, which maybe was overpriced? Plus there was hostility between the console division and the computer division there so they wouldn't work together. Since they didn't retire the 2600/VCS/Sears Arcade at the end of 1981, there was no room for the 5200, which had maybe one game in 1982 that wasn't on the 2600. If they had and released Pac-Man only on the 5200, that's what would have sold 5 million in 1982-3, I'm sure. But they figured out how to manufacture 2600s cheaper in Hong Kong and Taiwan so made their money that way, even though it was short-term.
All of that is false. Nintendo saved the industry. Also bad games DID cause the trash and it wasn’t absurd. The market WAS flooded with low quality games
Care to explain why the ridiculous amount of bad games on the NES somehow didn't cause another crash?
If people didn't buy bad games (other than Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, E.T., and Raiders of the Lost Ark) then they wouldn't be disappointed. Investors panicked due to Atari not repeating 1981 due to competition with games kids wanted. Retailers with unsold games that couldn't return them were upset. Imagic had three good games that sold over 1 million. They had a return policy, but their other games didn't sell as well, and I don't remember hearing about their 1983 games (that also didn't sell).
Nintendo, by limiting the number of chips their third-party developers could get, made them ration them for games they had confidence in that would sell. So that may have been a good thing to prevent a glut.
This video game crash of 1983 happened because kids stopped buying video games. Why did they stop buying video games? Because all the games released were just rip-offs of previous games. Kids got tired of playing flat two dimensional games that had no depth. It's that simple. I know--I sold my Atari 2600 to buy a 5200 and realized the games just looked a littler better, but were not any more fun.