The 1990 figures I give are a survey of 14 companies by ELSPA and EXCLUDE Ocean. The 1992 figures are again from ELSPA and should be broader. The narrow scope of the 1990 survey may explain the PC's high share. Also I had two chums called Jamie at school. One had a C64, ST, Amiga and a SNES, the other had a CPC, Amiga, Megadrive and SNES. Not all at once clearly. + Rod Hull has pointed out I said Amstrad purchased Commodore. This would have been brilliant and I would STILL be dining out on that but clearly meant Sinclair. Blame the half bottle of "Ordinary Claret" consumed prior to recording. Hic.
Or just how many computers there were on the market in 1984, many of which sold a few thousand and were never heard of again. The whole thing consolidates down to some major players who were making large numbers of machines. Amstrad selling 300,000 Spectrums every Christmas for example (equally split between the UK and Spain).
Loved my Dragon 32 ! 😊 I worked in a computer shop in Liverpool city centre from when I left school 1986 till 1990 it was booming and the best years of my life!
Return of the Ring is still a game I have fond memories of on the Dragon. When I eventually made it to the Forest Moon the change of view was spectacular and then I died because I couldn't breath lol
Spot on. Everyone I knew had a computer and a console. Console games were expensive and uncopyable so most gaming was done on our spectrums, c64s and later Amigas with the odd console game purchased as a treat. I had a master system alongside my c64, and a megadrive/mega cd, pc engine, jaguar and 3d0 to keep the Amiga company before getting my first pc in the mid 90s. I never knew anyone with a nes, it looked a bit drab and crap compared to Segas offering and no shops near me ever stocked it until the turtles pack, by which time it was positively prehistoric. First time I knew about the 1983 American crash was when youtubers started wittering on about it. It was never mentioned in the uk mags back in the day.
Yes the American state of affairs only became known to us in the internet era. At first it was interesting. Now it's annoying because people keep claiming it happened here!
I didn't get my first console until Christmas 1992 (Sega Master System 2) and even then, I was still using my original CPC464 I got Christmas 1984/1985 and still used it until I got my 6128 late 1994.
+ australia... similar to the UK market. I think there are too many younger people commenting on topics that they were not around at the time. i had c16 in 1985, then c64, then 386pc. My first console was a N64.
I don’t remember seeing consoles in WHSmith’s but I might not have been looking. I remember Asda and Boots selling 8-bit home computers and them being set-up with demos.
That Register article was so shoddy that I blocked them on BlueSky. My Mum got me a Sinclair branded ZX Spectrum +2 (copyright 1986), and then we got a SEGA Master System II with Alex Kidd which must have been 1990 or so. Last Hurrah my arse.
I had Saturday job in Argos ‘93-94 and seemed like we where selling as many master systems as we where Power Rangers toys. Catalogue number 364/1758 was burned into my brain like 980/1444 (AA batteries)
@@BenRattigan So cheap by then and with Sonic bundled it would have been an attractive package for first time games players. People forget that surge the machine had at the time and how 'hip' Sega was.
Spot on. Nintendo had NO European presence until 2001 according to companies house UK. That's after the N64 had been all but abandoned. Prior to that, they relied on third parties and concentrated only on Japan and USA. The USA "video game" crash opened up America for them but here we had our own market which reinvented movie licenses, and some cutting edge technologies like polygonal 3D hardware that still shape the industry The NES was mis-sold in toy stores as you have said many times. The market was for home computers for enthusiasts, and consoles were relegated to toy stores. I don't remember it reaching popularity here until the SNES with some excellent re-branding, i remember Gamesmaster featuring Mario 3 (perhaps on the first episode) and that went a long way to convincing gamers who were spoilt by some excellent local 16-bit developers like Sensible and Rare to start to consider moving to consoles in the later 90s.
I used to work for T.H.E. Games (not to be confused with THQ) in the mid to late 90s - we were basically Nintendo's UK arm back then, handling import, marketing, and distribution (even setting up a temporary production line to repack N64s for the Mario/GoldenEye bundles).
@elbiggus - I actually visited that place (THE Games) as part of a training thing for a part-time job with a now defunct DSG store. They showed us a very early prototype Ocarina of Time that only ran B&W on PAL TVs and a room full of people actually playing the game in preparation for the tips helpline thingy. I went downstairs and saw where they were still fixing NES consoles and fire gen gameboys in the late 90s Seemed like they actually knew about games. I also visited Sony London on the same day, and they were all wearing suits and congratulating themselves on using Drug culture to sell things to kids. The Sony guys were 100% sure that PSX Bugs life was going to out sale everything that Christmas.
Always remember my friend saying he was going to sell his C64 and get either an NES or a Master system. I said he was mad. It never came to pass and he got an Amiga a few months after I did in 1987/1988.
its unfortunate how the past is always portrayed from an American perspective. for the last 30 years gaming in Europe and the usa has been very similar but it wasn't always like this and a lot of people don't know that .the same is happening with a lot of other things like the history of tv. i used to assume tv in my country was just as advanced as the us or uk but we were far behind . even more recent things like the history of the first cell phones and the early internet is being made more confusing . it will probably even happen with things that are going on right now in the future .
Yeah, I read this earlier and thought it was complete rubbish. No mention of Boots? What about the fact that our 6th form still had Arcs in 1994 and was only looking to replace them with PCs in 1995 and beyond. The fact that Amiga and ST lasted well into the 90s, as did many 8-bits. In 1992 I was still considering a BBC Master 128 with disc drive from Watford Electronics! Back in the day I knew precisely one person who owned a Master System and one person who owned as NES. It was only with the Mega Drive and the SNES that console buying took off. 1984 was a golden era of home computing!
I agree re the market crash/consolidation. Don't laugh, I almost bought an Oric! Went for the Spectrum instead, that would have been 83-ish. The C-64 had not yet hit the UK market. Other machines I saw were the TI 99/4a, Dragon 32/64, of course the closely priced to the spectrum.. Oric. For some reason a camera shop nearby was selling the Camputer Lynx, I really wanted an Atari 800 but it was too expensive (Just like the BBC, AND about the same price!). The Vic-20, Acorn Atom and ZX-81 were all obviously a previous generation (limited ram) and falling by the wayside.
8 bit computer sales probably did peak in 1984 but people didn’t stop using them after that, instead it created a healthy user base that was added to in the years after that for games companies to sell games to. Arguably Christmas 1984 is when things properly get going.
There was definitely a "gold rush" and too many systems. There always was definitely a lot of platforms that vanished, Texas Instruments, Oric, Vectrex, Spectrvideo etc.... It pretty much settled on C64, Spectrum, Acorn, Amstrad and Atari until the Amiga game along. Some did skip the 16-bit machines and go onto consoles.
Possibly, but Amstrad were knocking out huge number of Spectrums, CPC's and PCW's after that. The PCW sold 7 million alone. What changed was the sheer variety of manufacturers in the marketplace. It consolidated from around 20 to Commodore and Amstrad as the major players then Atari later coming back in as well. You quickly get to a point in 87 and 88 where Amstrad were selling a third of all personal computers in Europe.
Companies didn't go under because nobody was buying computers, they went under because nobody was buying their computers. People buy computers that are cheap and have games. Why would developers write games for a computer when they know everyone is buying a different computer. Christmas 1984 was when commodore and Sinclair wiped out the competition, because nobody else could raise enough capital to produce enough computers cheaply enough. Amstrad sneaked in afterwards as they knew how to manufacture consumer goods. I think the rapid growth in the home computer market did take people by surprise. When shops are selling three products instead of a dozen, then consumers stop noticing demand as the sales process becomes very smooth and the shelf space can be smaller.
@@phill6859 Alan Sugar paints a vivid account of Christmas 1985 when Dixon's rang him up asking for cheap computers as they reckoned he had surplus stock. But he had large markets in France and Spain unlike Acorn so told them to get stuffed. In fact Christmas '84 Amstrad France couldn't satisfy demand but Amstrad didn't have enough stock. The benefits of spreading yourself wider unlike Acorn which relied on just the UK.
This story annoyed me - people really need to stop talking about "the video game crash of 1983" and instead call it the far more correct "poor marketing decisions of one US division of Atari in 1983". Even in the US the home computer market was booming in 1983 - the C64 was selling like hot cakes, the Apple II was doing good business, and Atari's home computer division was doing pretty well especially when compared to its console division. Here in the UK I didn't know a single person who owned a console until the 90s (one friend had a SNES), and it wasn't really until the Playstation era that me and my friends began drifting away from our Amigas.
The largest selling console every year during the 1980's in the UK was the Atari 2600. Which gives people an idea of the state of the console market in the UK during the decade!
Christmas 1984 was the end of the golden era of the 8 bit computer dominating the UK market before the arrival of 16 bit computers and consoles and PCs.
The ST doesn't sell in any volume in the UK until 1988. The Amiga, 1989. In the whole of 1990 the NES only sold 80,000 in the UK. If you had actually watched the video you'd have seen the stats. Instead you parrot the 'alternative facts' from that lazy article. Hmmmm.
@@safirahmed I along with many others read that article and, armed with actual sales figures, think it is total rubbish. If you can wade your way through the comments on the article you can see people actually quoting sales stats. The PCW doesn't even launch until mid 1985 and sells 7 million. The CPC has its first Christmas in '84 and sells 3 million. It's reckoned Amstrad shifted 3 million Spectrums AFTER they purchased the rights in April 1986. That means 2/3rds of all Spectrums (the best selling machine every year from 1982 until 1990) were sold AFTER 1984. The best selling console in the UK through most of the 80’s in the UK was the ancient Atari 2600. The SMS began selling in volume from ’89 onwards. We have NES figures for 1990 which say it shifted 80,000 in the UK. ST and Amiga? For June 1988 Gallup (the official software chart company) give a 5% market share to the ST and the Amiga on 1%. Meanwhile the Spectrum has 47% of the market, C64 has 21% and the CPC has 17%. So the market mid 1988 is basically the 8 bits, with tiny percentage of 16 bit and console sales so negligible they don't even register. That's 1988, the absolute peak of the 8 bit era not 1984. So that’s actual figures showing the state of the market, not a story some ‘journalist’ pulled out of his backside.
Heh. I saw Ajax’s snarky post about this, but I’ll happily now dig into you screaming into the void for 20 minutes. Weird from The Register too, which is usually well researched.
It has gone downhill in the last few years and the comments section is now a mess of people stanning for 'hostile states'. Mind you Slashdot is even worse.
I remember most of my school friends having Spextrums, Amstrad or a few BBC Micros. (I don't remember ever seeing a single C64 live in the flesh) Sega, Nintendo I recall at around 92/93 picking up popularity, along with plenty of former 8bit users upgrading to an Amiga. I used to read The Register as it seemed to be targeted to the UK IT industry in many articles, but haven't for a while now.
The Atari VCS was huge initially, I remember that from late 70's and from a couple of well off friends, but after that consoles didn't really register (see what I did there?) in my mind until the early 1990's. I'm sure there were people in the UK, later in the 80's with a master system or NES but I certainly didn't know anyone with one. This guy obviously lived in a parallel universe to me!
The VCS was pretty much the best selling console in the UK for every year in the 80's because it had virtually no competition and was carried by high street stores.
We had a NES with duck hunt and also a Spanish knockoff Spectrum 128k with 48k basic and a cooling fin down the right edge which would burn skin from the side of your hand after 5 mins of gameplay before that/at the same time. I remember the (younger) lads across the road from us had a master system with Alex kid. Another slightly older lad we knew I believe had a C64 or possibly an ST. His dad was a computer nut though. He also got all the consoles…both Nintendo and Sega from the megadrive and SNES upwards.
The Amiga wasn't out in 84... Even when it came out in a year later it was prob till the a500 came out.. And Clive Sinclair resented the idea that his computer even played games, and resentment of his mate who left and set up a computer company called acorn. Clive was a brilliant inventer . But .. Yep.. Just but ... Shame really... But I find that many people re write history of events.. Even nowadays..
You misspoke 'Amstrad bought Commodore'.. Anywho, it made me think, what if Amstrad bought Commodore?.. Amiga addon card for PC? A bit like the AMS PC that had the built in Sega? I'd buy that for a dollar!
Sugar would have been slightly better management, although not by much given how Amstrad killed its PC line by shipping hard disks they hadn't tested with their computers properly.
I don't remember anyone with a C64. I knew more people with an MSX (1). Mean Machines didn't even launch until 1990. That article is completely fabricated. As is the norm these days.
The writer's clearly sn American writing about the British market, you can tell by the American spelling (catalogUE, realiSe) Consoles didn't take over from computers over here until the arrival of the Sony PlayStation in 1995 and that was only because the only computer around at that time were the PC and the Mac which were *FAR* more expensive than any console. There were just no computers that could compete on price.
He's not. He's British and in his early 50's. The problem is that with the new American ownership of The Register they have insisted on American spelling and a big focus on American politics and tech stories.
In a sense he was kind of right, but not for the reasons he stated. 1984 was the last gasp of the UK computer hardware boom. After this point (a process started the previous year) the engineer-led companies faded away, in the UK at least, and the marketers took over. Alan Sugar was the exemplar of this. When he took the market the magic of the early years was well and truly over, and it's fitting that Amstrad wasn't covered in this piece. The Amstrad machines were consumer electronics, an entirely different animal. Really no different to an Amstrad VCR - off-the-shelf technology, well-presented for the mass market, built in the Far East with no real soul.
No more 'off the shelf' than many machines. The Speccy is basically a load of off the shelf components plus a ULA. The CPC was intended to be off the shelf but ended up with it's own gate array. Plus Roland Perry led a team of people who had a very tight timescale yet still exceeded the spec with things like 27 colours not 16.
It's just lazy journalism. I got my first computer, Amstrad CPC 464, must have been Christmas 1985, when I was 9. Likely bought from Dixons. I had it until 1988/9 (I managed to blow the circuit board, poking it with a screwdriver 😄🤷🏻♂️). Some of my mates at school at the same time had Amstrads or Commodore 64s. There was no way 1984 was the end of 8 bit, for many, it was just the beginning. In 1989/90 I got the Amiga 500 Screen Gems pack then the Amiga 1200 Comic Releif pack (1992?) and a SNES (1993?) followed by a PC and Playstation 1 around 1995. 8 bit was definitely going strong for me up to 1989, before I hopped to the next best thing and since then, for the past 20 or so years, I've rebought nearly all those systems again from eBay, apart from the SNES and PS1 but have upgraded to a PS3 now 😂. 8 bit still going strong in 2024/25 for me 👍🏻
OK, this is only received wisdom (so not to be trusted) but until the 16 bit SNES and Mega Drive, I thought that the biggest selling console each year was the Atari 2600! You could pick up games at every market and many specialized shops. Certainly in my social circle it is only really when the Playstation came out that I really noticed any of them having that console rather than computers as that games machine of choice.
It was the biggest selling because there was nothing else available. Used to get flogged via those catalogues where you pay in instalments, I've heard stories of 2600's being sold in newsagents for 20 quid in the mid 90's!
@@chinnyvision Well, The Sega Master system was out there, I saw people buying games for it at a stall/shop at the Epsom indoor market (I was there for Atari 8 Bit games). I did see a Nintendo display at Boots one Christmas season but only the robot was getting any attention. I don't remember seeing any stock after that but I wasn't looking for it! (You know how your mind blanks the things that are there but you are not looking for!).
SMS turns up in the late eighties when Mastertronic took over distribution. But it's 1990 before it's selling in any numbers and you can see the 1991 and 92 market share in the video. NES was really lagging the SMS as well.
@@chinnyvision2 It was out, I remember going to the indoor market in Epson to a computer shop in there, that would have been 88/89 ish, they had Atari 8 bit stuff that was not budget label I was looking for and were a bus ride away. Sega games were there in stock and always someone buying one when I went there. Now I wasn't looking at console stuff so may not have noticed (you know how memories work, unless it is what you are looking for or out of the ordinary, you brain blanks it) but I didn't really recall seeing console carts in boots/smiths until the 90's, you wanted those you went to the Virgin Games center. Nintendo? I remember seeing a winter/Christmas display in boots, including the robot, next spring it was all gone. Never really saw one again in the wild again until they started popping up at car boot sales. Sega however was slowly appearing everywhere as the 90's moved on. Especially true when Atari left the market, Commodore folded and so the competition just dried up. But by then I had already joined the PC Master Race😉
Although I agree that the article exaggerates the decline, I don't think it is rewriting history. Loads of people got their home computers around 1984, and kept using them for the next five or six years, which means they didn't buy a new one. I don't know what the sales of the Spectrum were from 84 to 90, but I would imagine 84 was the peak year.
Amstrad sold huge numbers of Spectrums. 20 million quid worth (at wholesale prices) in the 6 months to Christmas 1988. Amstrad made 300,000 +2's in the first production run that hit the shops in September 1986. They sold so well they had to get 50,000 more made and that's not including all the end of line old machines that had been sold to Dixon's at cost which I think accounted for a few tens of thousands. Not accounting for the 7 million PCW's sold which only launched mid 1985.
@@chinnyvision2 I'm not disputing that the Spectrum continued to sell well throughout the 80s, I'm just speculating that 1984 may well have been the peak year that consolidated its user base, but I don't have the figures for that.
@@HappyCodingZX The Speccy had momentum from day 1. Barring the weeks around the launch of the C64, it dominated the sales charts. Of course this helps but arguably if it wasn't for the Amstrad redesign in 1986 and the cost reductions it may have faded sooner. I found some other figures that indicate the Spectrum also sold 300,000 in the 6 months to Christmas 1988 so we can assume sales were pretty steady for the Amstrad machines. Of course in the early days everything went nuts but it was the Wild West with machines sinking without trace despite initial surges in the hardware charts published in PCN.
@@chinnyvision2 well, as I said, I'm not saying the Spectrum wasn't popular throughout the 80s and that it suddenly got replaced by consoles. It does seem to me however that it was at its zenith at the end of 1984 as a premium machine that everyone wanted. From then on I think it was surviving on its established base or as a cheap discounted alternative for those that couldn't afford anything better. So in that sense, it was the beginning of the decline, if not the end of the machine itself.
@@HappyCodingZX Well you have Amstrad entering the market in '84 with the CPC which, initially, was marketed as a computer that bridged the home and business. So the market moves on. But there's no way Amstrad would have paid all that money for the Speccy rights if they didn't think they'd make it back. It was positioned as the budget machine in the Amstrad range. But the article implies home computers were done by the end of 84 which is clearly rubbish. You don't even have the 128k Spectrums, the CPC is still a small part of the market and the ST and Amiga haven't even launched. Games consoles selling in any significant numbers didn't happen until 1990. '84 was only the peak of the tinpot manufacturers selling machines with no support. You wanted a Sord M5 for Christmas 1984 you could buy one. An Oric or Dragon would be no problem. All these machines would be dead within a year or so. The market matured and consolidated but still sold big numbers.
The 1990 figures I give are a survey of 14 companies by ELSPA and EXCLUDE Ocean. The 1992 figures are again from ELSPA and should be broader. The narrow scope of the 1990 survey may explain the PC's high share.
Also I had two chums called Jamie at school. One had a C64, ST, Amiga and a SNES, the other had a CPC, Amiga, Megadrive and SNES. Not all at once clearly.
+ Rod Hull has pointed out I said Amstrad purchased Commodore. This would have been brilliant and I would STILL be dining out on that but clearly meant Sinclair. Blame the half bottle of "Ordinary Claret" consumed prior to recording. Hic.
I thought this was going to be some deeply technical video about processor registers.
I could have watched this yesterday evening when I was drunk.
I remember back in the day when even mentioning The Register gave you Kudos.
I think there is also confusion between release dates of products and the point at which they become popular, which can be many years.
Or just how many computers there were on the market in 1984, many of which sold a few thousand and were never heard of again. The whole thing consolidates down to some major players who were making large numbers of machines. Amstrad selling 300,000 Spectrums every Christmas for example (equally split between the UK and Spain).
It's been so long since I read "el reg" I'd almost forgotten all about it.
"Biting the hand that feeds IT" was their tagline.
That's the one.
Loved my Dragon 32 ! 😊
I worked in a computer shop in Liverpool city centre from when I left school 1986 till 1990 it was booming and the best years of my life!
Return of the Ring is still a game I have fond memories of on the Dragon. When I eventually made it to the Forest Moon the change of view was spectacular and then I died because I couldn't breath lol
👍
Spot on. Everyone I knew had a computer and a console. Console games were expensive and uncopyable so most gaming was done on our spectrums, c64s and later Amigas with the odd console game purchased as a treat.
I had a master system alongside my c64, and a megadrive/mega cd, pc engine, jaguar and 3d0 to keep the Amiga company before getting my first pc in the mid 90s. I never knew anyone with a nes, it looked a bit drab and crap compared to Segas offering and no shops near me ever stocked it until the turtles pack, by which time it was positively prehistoric.
First time I knew about the 1983 American crash was when youtubers started wittering on about it. It was never mentioned in the uk mags back in the day.
Yes the American state of affairs only became known to us in the internet era. At first it was interesting. Now it's annoying because people keep claiming it happened here!
I didn't get my first console until Christmas 1992 (Sega Master System 2) and even then, I was still using my original CPC464 I got Christmas 1984/1985 and still used it until I got my 6128 late 1994.
As a higher cost item with it's serious software base, the CPC hung on longer than people realise even if the new games had dried up.
+ australia... similar to the UK market. I think there are too many younger people commenting on topics that they were not around at the time. i had c16 in 1985, then c64, then 386pc. My first console was a N64.
I don’t remember seeing consoles in WHSmith’s but I might not have been looking. I remember Asda and Boots selling 8-bit home computers and them being set-up with demos.
That Register article was so shoddy that I blocked them on BlueSky. My Mum got me a Sinclair branded ZX Spectrum +2 (copyright 1986), and then we got a SEGA Master System II with Alex Kidd which must have been 1990 or so.
Last Hurrah my arse.
Indeed. Might as well have been written by AI. What a way to run a once great site (ok that was 15 years ago at least).
@@chinnyvision2 On a par with the BBC article that forgot that we had a computer industry at all, or that they themselves had a computer.
I had Saturday job in Argos ‘93-94 and seemed like we where selling as many master systems as we where Power Rangers toys. Catalogue number 364/1758 was burned into my brain like 980/1444 (AA batteries)
@@BenRattigan So cheap by then and with Sonic bundled it would have been an attractive package for first time games players. People forget that surge the machine had at the time and how 'hip' Sega was.
@@chinnyvision2was sonic released on the master system then?
I always thought it was a megadrive and up release?
Spot on. Nintendo had NO European presence until 2001 according to companies house UK. That's after the N64 had been all but abandoned. Prior to that, they relied on third parties and concentrated only on Japan and USA. The USA "video game" crash opened up America for them but here we had our own market which reinvented movie licenses, and some cutting edge technologies like polygonal 3D hardware that still shape the industry The NES was mis-sold in toy stores as you have said many times. The market was for home computers for enthusiasts, and consoles were relegated to toy stores. I don't remember it reaching popularity here until the SNES with some excellent re-branding, i remember Gamesmaster featuring Mario 3 (perhaps on the first episode) and that went a long way to convincing gamers who were spoilt by some excellent local 16-bit developers like Sensible and Rare to start to consider moving to consoles in the later 90s.
Indeed. The 1990 Turtle pack was the first time the NES had any high street impact of note. 80,000 sold that year.
I used to work for T.H.E. Games (not to be confused with THQ) in the mid to late 90s - we were basically Nintendo's UK arm back then, handling import, marketing, and distribution (even setting up a temporary production line to repack N64s for the Mario/GoldenEye bundles).
Almost everyone I knew that had a console had a Mega Drive and John Madden football. Everyone else was slowly moving to either the Amiga or ST.
@elbiggus - I actually visited that place (THE Games) as part of a training thing for a part-time job with a now defunct DSG store. They showed us a very early prototype Ocarina of Time that only ran B&W on PAL TVs and a room full of people actually playing the game in preparation for the tips helpline thingy. I went downstairs and saw where they were still fixing NES consoles and fire gen gameboys in the late 90s Seemed like they actually knew about games. I also visited Sony London on the same day, and they were all wearing suits and congratulating themselves on using Drug culture to sell things to kids. The Sony guys were 100% sure that PSX Bugs life was going to out sale everything that Christmas.
Always remember my friend saying he was going to sell his C64 and get either an NES or a Master system. I said he was mad. It never came to pass and he got an Amiga a few months after I did in 1987/1988.
"Biting the hand that feeds IT"
its unfortunate how the past is always portrayed from an American perspective. for the last 30 years gaming in Europe and the usa has been very similar but it wasn't always like this and a lot of people don't know that .the same is happening with a lot of other things like the history of tv. i used to assume tv in my country was just as advanced as the us or uk but we were far behind . even more recent things like the history of the first cell phones and the early internet is being made more confusing . it will probably even happen with things that are going on right now in the future .
Yeah, I read this earlier and thought it was complete rubbish. No mention of Boots? What about the fact that our 6th form still had Arcs in 1994 and was only looking to replace them with PCs in 1995 and beyond. The fact that Amiga and ST lasted well into the 90s, as did many 8-bits. In 1992 I was still considering a BBC Master 128 with disc drive from Watford Electronics! Back in the day I knew precisely one person who owned a Master System and one person who owned as NES. It was only with the Mega Drive and the SNES that console buying took off. 1984 was a golden era of home computing!
I knew someone who had a job servicing Arcs for school in 1998!
@@chinnyvision2 I was almost expelled for "creating a virus" on the Arcs at school.
Stop getting computer's wrong... lovely Partridge hat-tip!
I agree re the market crash/consolidation. Don't laugh, I almost bought an Oric! Went for the Spectrum instead, that would have been 83-ish. The C-64 had not yet hit the UK market.
Other machines I saw were the TI 99/4a, Dragon 32/64, of course the closely priced to the spectrum.. Oric. For some reason a camera shop nearby was selling the Camputer Lynx, I really wanted an Atari 800 but it was too expensive (Just like the BBC, AND about the same price!). The Vic-20, Acorn Atom and ZX-81 were all obviously a previous generation (limited ram) and falling by the wayside.
8 bit computer sales probably did peak in 1984 but people didn’t stop using them after that, instead it created a healthy user base that was added to in the years after that for games companies to sell games to. Arguably Christmas 1984 is when things properly get going.
There was definitely a "gold rush" and too many systems. There always was definitely a lot of platforms that vanished, Texas Instruments, Oric, Vectrex, Spectrvideo etc.... It pretty much settled on C64, Spectrum, Acorn, Amstrad and Atari until the Amiga game along. Some did skip the 16-bit machines and go onto consoles.
Possibly, but Amstrad were knocking out huge number of Spectrums, CPC's and PCW's after that. The PCW sold 7 million alone. What changed was the sheer variety of manufacturers in the marketplace. It consolidated from around 20 to Commodore and Amstrad as the major players then Atari later coming back in as well. You quickly get to a point in 87 and 88 where Amstrad were selling a third of all personal computers in Europe.
Companies didn't go under because nobody was buying computers, they went under because nobody was buying their computers. People buy computers that are cheap and have games. Why would developers write games for a computer when they know everyone is buying a different computer.
Christmas 1984 was when commodore and Sinclair wiped out the competition, because nobody else could raise enough capital to produce enough computers cheaply enough. Amstrad sneaked in afterwards as they knew how to manufacture consumer goods. I think the rapid growth in the home computer market did take people by surprise.
When shops are selling three products instead of a dozen, then consumers stop noticing demand as the sales process becomes very smooth and the shelf space can be smaller.
@@phill6859 Alan Sugar paints a vivid account of Christmas 1985 when Dixon's rang him up asking for cheap computers as they reckoned he had surplus stock. But he had large markets in France and Spain unlike Acorn so told them to get stuffed.
In fact Christmas '84 Amstrad France couldn't satisfy demand but Amstrad didn't have enough stock.
The benefits of spreading yourself wider unlike Acorn which relied on just the UK.
This story annoyed me - people really need to stop talking about "the video game crash of 1983" and instead call it the far more correct "poor marketing decisions of one US division of Atari in 1983". Even in the US the home computer market was booming in 1983 - the C64 was selling like hot cakes, the Apple II was doing good business, and Atari's home computer division was doing pretty well especially when compared to its console division.
Here in the UK I didn't know a single person who owned a console until the 90s (one friend had a SNES), and it wasn't really until the Playstation era that me and my friends began drifting away from our Amigas.
The largest selling console every year during the 1980's in the UK was the Atari 2600. Which gives people an idea of the state of the console market in the UK during the decade!
Germany as well, all my friends had computes (C64 mostly, later Atari and Amiga), literally nobody had a console.
Christmas 1984 was the end of the golden era of the 8 bit computer dominating the UK market before the arrival of 16 bit computers and consoles and PCs.
The ST doesn't sell in any volume in the UK until 1988. The Amiga, 1989. In the whole of 1990 the NES only sold 80,000 in the UK.
If you had actually watched the video you'd have seen the stats. Instead you parrot the 'alternative facts' from that lazy article. Hmmmm.
@chinnyvision2 I had watched the video did not parrot the facts and clearly you missed the point of the article you criticised.
@@safirahmed I along with many others read that article and, armed with actual sales figures, think it is total rubbish. If you can wade your way through the comments on the article you can see people actually quoting sales stats. The PCW doesn't even launch until mid 1985 and sells 7 million. The CPC has its first Christmas in '84 and sells 3 million. It's reckoned Amstrad shifted 3 million Spectrums AFTER they purchased the rights in April 1986. That means 2/3rds of all Spectrums (the best selling machine every year from 1982 until 1990) were sold AFTER 1984.
The best selling console in the UK through most of the 80’s in the UK was the ancient Atari 2600. The SMS began selling in volume from ’89 onwards. We have NES figures for 1990 which say it shifted 80,000 in the UK.
ST and Amiga? For June 1988 Gallup (the official software chart company) give a 5% market share to the ST and the Amiga on 1%. Meanwhile the Spectrum has 47% of the market, C64 has 21% and the CPC has 17%. So the market mid 1988 is basically the 8 bits, with tiny percentage of 16 bit and console sales so negligible they don't even register. That's 1988, the absolute peak of the 8 bit era not 1984.
So that’s actual figures showing the state of the market, not a story some ‘journalist’ pulled out of his backside.
Heh. I saw Ajax’s snarky post about this, but I’ll happily now dig into you screaming into the void for 20 minutes.
Weird from The Register too, which is usually well researched.
It has gone downhill in the last few years and the comments section is now a mess of people stanning for 'hostile states'. Mind you Slashdot is even worse.
I remember most of my school friends having Spextrums, Amstrad or a few BBC Micros. (I don't remember ever seeing a single C64 live in the flesh) Sega, Nintendo I recall at around 92/93 picking up popularity, along with plenty of former 8bit users upgrading to an Amiga. I used to read The Register as it seemed to be targeted to the UK IT industry in many articles, but haven't for a while now.
It got purchased by Americans and has gone downhill. They even use American spelling now in case the poor dears get confused.
The Atari VCS was huge initially, I remember that from late 70's and from a couple of well off friends, but after that consoles didn't really register (see what I did there?) in my mind until the early 1990's. I'm sure there were people in the UK, later in the 80's with a master system or NES but I certainly didn't know anyone with one. This guy obviously lived in a parallel universe to me!
The VCS was pretty much the best selling console in the UK for every year in the 80's because it had virtually no competition and was carried by high street stores.
We had a NES with duck hunt and also a Spanish knockoff Spectrum 128k with 48k basic and a cooling fin down the right edge which would burn skin from the side of your hand after 5 mins of gameplay before that/at the same time.
I remember the (younger) lads across the road from us had a master system with Alex kid.
Another slightly older lad we knew I believe had a C64 or possibly an ST.
His dad was a computer nut though.
He also got all the consoles…both Nintendo and Sega from the megadrive and SNES upwards.
The Amiga wasn't out in 84... Even when it came out in a year later it was prob till the a500 came out..
And Clive Sinclair resented the idea that his computer even played games, and resentment of his mate who left and set up a computer company called acorn.
Clive was a brilliant inventer . But ..
Yep..
Just but ...
Shame really...
But I find that many people re write history of events..
Even nowadays..
And when it did reach these shores it was very expensive indeed, only dropping to £399 for Christmas '89.
You misspoke 'Amstrad bought Commodore'.. Anywho, it made me think, what if Amstrad bought Commodore?.. Amiga addon card for PC? A bit like the AMS PC that had the built in Sega? I'd buy that for a dollar!
Oh bugger. Did I say I'd had half a bottle of wine. I guess people know what I meant!
Sugar would have been slightly better management, although not by much given how Amstrad killed its PC line by shipping hard disks they hadn't tested with their computers properly.
I don't remember anyone with a C64. I knew more people with an MSX (1). Mean Machines didn't even launch until 1990. That article is completely fabricated. As is the norm these days.
1984
The writer's clearly sn American writing about the British market, you can tell by the American spelling (catalogUE, realiSe)
Consoles didn't take over from computers over here until the arrival of the Sony PlayStation in 1995 and that was only because the only computer around at that time were the PC and the Mac which were *FAR* more expensive than any console. There were just no computers that could compete on price.
He's not. He's British and in his early 50's. The problem is that with the new American ownership of The Register they have insisted on American spelling and a big focus on American politics and tech stories.
In a sense he was kind of right, but not for the reasons he stated. 1984 was the last gasp of the UK computer hardware boom. After this point (a process started the previous year) the engineer-led companies faded away, in the UK at least, and the marketers took over.
Alan Sugar was the exemplar of this. When he took the market the magic of the early years was well and truly over, and it's fitting that Amstrad wasn't covered in this piece.
The Amstrad machines were consumer electronics, an entirely different animal. Really no different to an Amstrad VCR - off-the-shelf technology, well-presented for the mass market, built in the Far East with no real soul.
No more 'off the shelf' than many machines. The Speccy is basically a load of off the shelf components plus a ULA. The CPC was intended to be off the shelf but ended up with it's own gate array. Plus Roland Perry led a team of people who had a very tight timescale yet still exceeded the spec with things like 27 colours not 16.
It's just lazy journalism. I got my first computer, Amstrad CPC 464, must have been Christmas 1985, when I was 9. Likely bought from Dixons. I had it until 1988/9 (I managed to blow the circuit board, poking it with a screwdriver 😄🤷🏻♂️). Some of my mates at school at the same time had Amstrads or Commodore 64s. There was no way 1984 was the end of 8 bit, for many, it was just the beginning. In 1989/90 I got the Amiga 500 Screen Gems pack then the Amiga 1200 Comic Releif pack (1992?) and a SNES (1993?) followed by a PC and Playstation 1 around 1995. 8 bit was definitely going strong for me up to 1989, before I hopped to the next best thing and since then, for the past 20 or so years, I've rebought nearly all those systems again from eBay, apart from the SNES and PS1 but have upgraded to a PS3 now 😂. 8 bit still going strong in 2024/25 for me 👍🏻
OK, this is only received wisdom (so not to be trusted) but until the 16 bit SNES and Mega Drive, I thought that the biggest selling console each year was the Atari 2600! You could pick up games at every market and many specialized shops. Certainly in my social circle it is only really when the Playstation came out that I really noticed any of them having that console rather than computers as that games machine of choice.
It was the biggest selling because there was nothing else available. Used to get flogged via those catalogues where you pay in instalments, I've heard stories of 2600's being sold in newsagents for 20 quid in the mid 90's!
@@chinnyvision Well, The Sega Master system was out there, I saw people buying games for it at a stall/shop at the Epsom indoor market (I was there for Atari 8 Bit games). I did see a Nintendo display at Boots one Christmas season but only the robot was getting any attention. I don't remember seeing any stock after that but I wasn't looking for it! (You know how your mind blanks the things that are there but you are not looking for!).
SMS turns up in the late eighties when Mastertronic took over distribution. But it's 1990 before it's selling in any numbers and you can see the 1991 and 92 market share in the video. NES was really lagging the SMS as well.
@@chinnyvision2 It was out, I remember going to the indoor market in Epson to a computer shop in there, that would have been 88/89 ish, they had Atari 8 bit stuff that was not budget label I was looking for and were a bus ride away. Sega games were there in stock and always someone buying one when I went there. Now I wasn't looking at console stuff so may not have noticed (you know how memories work, unless it is what you are looking for or out of the ordinary, you brain blanks it) but I didn't really recall seeing console carts in boots/smiths until the 90's, you wanted those you went to the Virgin Games center.
Nintendo? I remember seeing a winter/Christmas display in boots, including the robot, next spring it was all gone. Never really saw one again in the wild again until they started popping up at car boot sales. Sega however was slowly appearing everywhere as the 90's moved on. Especially true when Atari left the market, Commodore folded and so the competition just dried up. But by then I had already joined the PC Master Race😉
Sounds like it was written by chat gpt.
That is being unfair on the ability of Chat GPT to search for a few facts!
Although I agree that the article exaggerates the decline, I don't think it is rewriting history. Loads of people got their home computers around 1984, and kept using them for the next five or six years, which means they didn't buy a new one. I don't know what the sales of the Spectrum were from 84 to 90, but I would imagine 84 was the peak year.
Amstrad sold huge numbers of Spectrums. 20 million quid worth (at wholesale prices) in the 6 months to Christmas 1988.
Amstrad made 300,000 +2's in the first production run that hit the shops in September 1986. They sold so well they had to get 50,000 more made and that's not including all the end of line old machines that had been sold to Dixon's at cost which I think accounted for a few tens of thousands.
Not accounting for the 7 million PCW's sold which only launched mid 1985.
@@chinnyvision2 I'm not disputing that the Spectrum continued to sell well throughout the 80s, I'm just speculating that 1984 may well have been the peak year that consolidated its user base, but I don't have the figures for that.
@@HappyCodingZX The Speccy had momentum from day 1. Barring the weeks around the launch of the C64, it dominated the sales charts. Of course this helps but arguably if it wasn't for the Amstrad redesign in 1986 and the cost reductions it may have faded sooner.
I found some other figures that indicate the Spectrum also sold 300,000 in the 6 months to Christmas 1988 so we can assume sales were pretty steady for the Amstrad machines.
Of course in the early days everything went nuts but it was the Wild West with machines sinking without trace despite initial surges in the hardware charts published in PCN.
@@chinnyvision2 well, as I said, I'm not saying the Spectrum wasn't popular throughout the 80s and that it suddenly got replaced by consoles. It does seem to me however that it was at its zenith at the end of 1984 as a premium machine that everyone wanted. From then on I think it was surviving on its established base or as a cheap discounted alternative for those that couldn't afford anything better. So in that sense, it was the beginning of the decline, if not the end of the machine itself.
@@HappyCodingZX Well you have Amstrad entering the market in '84 with the CPC which, initially, was marketed as a computer that bridged the home and business. So the market moves on. But there's no way Amstrad would have paid all that money for the Speccy rights if they didn't think they'd make it back. It was positioned as the budget machine in the Amstrad range.
But the article implies home computers were done by the end of 84 which is clearly rubbish. You don't even have the 128k Spectrums, the CPC is still a small part of the market and the ST and Amiga haven't even launched. Games consoles selling in any significant numbers didn't happen until 1990. '84 was only the peak of the tinpot manufacturers selling machines with no support. You wanted a Sord M5 for Christmas 1984 you could buy one. An Oric or Dragon would be no problem. All these machines would be dead within a year or so. The market matured and consolidated but still sold big numbers.
I stopped reading the register in around 2008 when I realized their insanely libertarian slant
jjjk
Sorry..
No it wasn't..
Revisionism..