Thoughts on video game crash of 1983 /vr/?

I didn't notice it at all at the time, but I was too young to be paying much attention to new releases. I just kept playing the games my father had already bought, while writing my own in BASIC.

>>3763695
I wasn't born yet in 1983, but I heard the crash only affected consoles, and if you played on PC at the time, you never noticed any drought.

>>3763695
It only crashed the American market, which had nothing of value.

>>3763695
It's partially my fault
I got into computer gaming and stopped buying console cartridges

>>3763710
This.
The crash is overplayed nowadays. It only really affected the home console market. Arcade and PC market was largely unaffected.

I'm exactly the right age and location for the crash to have hit me the hardest. There were two whole video gameless years between when "Atari" stopped being a household word and when "Nintendo" became one and those two years were when I was 7 and 8 years old.

FUCKING WASTED

>>3763710
>>3764420
The home computer market was not hurt by it either. It should be called "The North American Home Console Market Crash".

>>3763695
There was no video game crash, it's greatly exaggerated, the only thing that happened in 1983 was Atari going bankrupt from shitty management.

Really it just seems like something Nintendo fans romanticize so they can brag about how the NES saved the industry

nintendo fixed it its ok

Atari was the sacrifice necessary to build the Home console market from scratch. They literally paved the way for Nintendo with their mistakes to become the leaders of gaming.

>>3764648
>nintendo
>mistakes

only post 2004 did they make mistakes kys

>>3764618
It hit arcades too. From 1982 to 1984 the number of arcades (in the US anyway) doubled and then like almost 75% of them shut down.

>>3764653
>What is the virtual boy and 64DD

Also he was talking about Atari's mistakes, not Nintendo's.

>>3764653
>thinking he meant nintendo's mistakes
>being illiterate
Jesus Christ.

>>3763951
You and everybody else. That's what the crash was: console sales crashed and people moved to PCs. Consumers had no problems playing games, it was only bad for the console manufacturers.

>>3763695
It's no where near as bad as people make it seem it was unless you worked for Atari back then.

>>3765918
There were quite a few third party game developers who shut down after only a couple years or less of business. Most of them were releasing crap but there were quite a few good games that came out during that window. The crash wasn't bad for consumers and was really only bad for companies trying to cash in on the video game craze.

A damning reminder why stakeholder oriented business models are shit

>>3764597
Why didn't you just play at the arcade gramps?

>>3763715
Not completely true, Pitfall 1 and 2 and Adventure were pretty amazing.

But I agree to a degree, part of the reason modern console gaming sucks so much is that it's dominated by Americans.

>>3763695
I think it will happen again soon. I have a PS4 and don't play it. I don't want an Xbox One. All the games I play are on PC or PS1.

>>3763715
>It only crashed the American market, which had nothing of value.
>>3767131
>But I agree to a degree, part of the reason modern console gaming sucks so much is that it's dominated by Americans.

I disagree to some extent in regards to modern gaming. Since the end of the 6th gen I have enjoyed relatively few Japanese games. After the PS4 came out I really mostly stuck to western games. They are finally starting to embrace the PC, but it's too little, too late. They aren't formulaic like Western big budget games like CoD, Battlefield, NBA 2k/Madden, all the normie games etc., but I don't have as much of an urge to play them.

>>3764628
Absolutely. I'm a big PS1 fan so I tend to romanticize how Sony was betrayed by Nintendo and got revenge by making a forward-thinking CD-based system.

>>3766959
I did on Sunday afternoon when my dad would take me to the mall after church and actually let me run around unsupervised with a few dollars spending money but a 7 year old can't just go to the arcade whenever. I had to wait until my dad wasn't watching TV to play at home but that was still a lot more often.

>>3767956
I'm not well versed on the controversy between Nintendo and Sony when they were making the CD expansion for the SNES, but I thought both parties were at fault for the business side not going through.

>>3768067
There might have been some dispute over royalties, I don't remember that part really, but Sony had no idea what Nintendo was planning. They literally came to CES and found out on the floor when Nintendo announced the CD-i that they were developing with Phillips. No one was told beforehand and they were shocked.

It allowed my family to get our first console.

I was just a kid then, but the next year in 1984 retailers were selling video game stuff at discount prices so my old man bought an Intellivision (2nd model) that came with 2 games. We spent the next 2 years buying games (and trading with my Uncle who had one too) and playing them at home. Then Nintendo started to become big in 86-87 and everyone wanted a NES.

But it wasn't really that bad, at least for consumers. It just hit retailers the most as the home console market was flooded with too many systems & games and became over-saturated. Once the crash hit the retailers you could get these systems (Atari 7200, Intellivision, Colecovision etc) and their games dirt cheap so it wasn't bad from consumer's end.

>>3766957
And yet we keep doing them anyway.

Fucking humans never learn from their mistakes until they run out of money. Second video game crash when?

>>3768067
>>3768112
Wasn't it because they couldn't agree on how to split the profits?

>>3768182
I remember in 88 we could go to the flea market and pick out any Atari 2600 games for a dollar and that was awesome. Yeah we had an NES but you really didn't get a new game outside of birthdays or christmas unless you rented them but they weren't yours. So it was great getting Atari games cheap and sometimes they were even cheaper than a dollar like 4 for a dollar type deals.

>>3768592

From 90 until 95 I was finding Atari 2600 games for a quarter or 50 cents all the time. Built up a collection of around 400 games. Then lost them later cause of Katrina.

>>3764616
I like the Japanese name for the gaming crash, the "Atari Shock".

>>3764618

That's underselling it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atari_2600_games

Notice how the number of games released went from 100+ in 1983 to one in 1985.

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>>3763695
....So how accurate is this guy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4iW57DdCTw

90% of the "experts" on the video game crash of 1983 seem to be youtubers born between 1985 and 1990

I wish there were some actual oldfags I could talk to about it because I want to learn about it without the romanticised millennial view but they're a dying breed

>>3769945

That documentary Microsoft made is on Netflix now. Some of it is cringy and time filling like the geek in the Delorean but some of the stuff with Howard Scott Warshaw and the Atari staff at the time is fantastic and the gaming history talking heads they brought in like Seamus Blackley along with actual historians are relevant and have a lot to say about it.

It's not all good, but the build up to the dig is amazing. I don't think I was ready for the feels afterwards.

>>3764597
I was about 10 when the crash happened. And it was great for me. Now instead of getting maybe 4 games a year I could go buy at least one a week with my allowance.

>>3769975
What's the name
Of it

>>3769945
To the average person it was just a brief time when video games weren't cool for a while.

>>3770309
And if you were a PC gamer, arcade gamer, or not American, the "great crash" was a total non-event. It really only affected the US console market.

1983 game crash is a media invention made to glorify Nintendo. At this point the meme is much bigger than reality

>>3763715
Atari 2600
Atari 5200
Intellivision
Colecovision
Vetrex
Atari 400/800/1200

The problem was that there too much good stuff.

>>3771018
I don't see anything good in that list.

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>>3771018
None of those are bad consoles.

The problem was that anyone could make a game and sell it in stores; there was no quality control, and no way to really distinguish between quality games and bootleg-tier stuff like pic related.

>>3770235
Agreed, but there was a significant decline in other kids to play WITH and the coolness factor from being a gamer plummeted. On top of that, while kids were aware their 2nd gen games were about worthless their parents wouldn't let them take them to school and trade them to me for candy - which was my wheeling and dealing commodity in elementary school.

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>>3771050
sounds familiar

>>3769975
Heh, I think I'm in the background of one or two scenes. Was a pretty fun time.

>>3763715
>>3764420
>>3764616
>>3770506
Man, you people just cannot resist being triggered. Guaranteed every one of you also deride "casuals" despite the fact that mainstream gamers are the ones who decide if gaming is cool or not. Of course I'm sure you also claim to not care if gaming is cool or not even though you totally do. Probably some of you even got INTO retro gaming because of mainstream interest in it putting it on your radar.

Just start referring to it as the "casual crash" and move on. Spend your time on something more constructive.

>>3771025
Edgy as fuck.

>>3771076
Today we got peer and professional reviews on the internet as well as videos showing game play. This did not exist in the '80s, people bought games almost blindly without knowing what they got.

>>3771141
The "casual crash" will be the name of the event where people get sick of microtransactions on a global scale or they get regulated into oblivion.

>>3772249
>This did not exist in the '80s, people bought games almost blindly without knowing what they got.
Still do.
>peer and professional reviews
Lol not really no. Peer reviews aren't worth shit and professional reviewers don't exist. There are people who make money on it but they're always amateur hour shit.

At best you might be able to find footage of games today possibly and even then a lot of it is still going to be from very bad gamers. You can get an idea of some things, but largely it's still fairly blind buying and worse for most people.

>>3771050
>Shit
>From Eurosoft
It's like poetry