The North American Video Game Crash of 1983

A lot of gamers already know about these cataclysmic events. There was a time, believe it or not, when video game consoles were all but extinct. There were too many poorly made consoles and games, and the system just wasn’t the well-oiled machine we’ve come to know today.

Here are some factors that lead to the crash.

1) Too Many Consoles and Games

Intellivision, Atari, Odyssey and Coleco Vision were some of the most known. But they all looked so similar, and they had interchangeable hardware and software. It was so easy to make the hardware that anybody and everybody was making them.

This included games too. For example, Purina (That’s right a dog food company) had one called Chase the Chuck Wagon and Kool-Aid came out with one too. The similarity and stupudity of each game made it so consumers began to lose their confidence in the gaming industry.

2) Pac Man and E.T. for the Atari 2600

Speaking of bad video games, let’s talk about the two most infamous ones. Oh man, these were awful. I’m so glad I was born in the 90s.

Pac Man: the beloved classic arcade game became a knock off, get-rich-quick scheme for Atari. There were 10 million Atari Consoles and the company produced 12 million copies of the game, thinking that people would buy an Atari 2600 just so they could play Pac Man. Many games were returned. Click the video to see why.

E.T.: heaven help us. This game was programmed, manufactured, and produced in just six weeks. The end result was a nasty adaptation of any game with everything looking exactly like how the game was made, sloppily.

In fact, this game was so bad, that nearly all of the copies were returned back to Atari, and the company buried them in a New Mexico landfill. Don’t believe me? Neither did many people considering there were no official records released by Atari about the event. It was a pure video game myth until ten months ago. IGN released a video where people uncovered the gaming burial site and found millions of intact E.T. video game cartridges.

3) Third party developers

Atari wasn’t very nice to its developers. A lot people were left in the dust when it came to credit. Many left Atari and started making their own stuff with the knowledge they had from working with Atari. Hundreds of games were produced that were then compatible with any console, making it hard to keep track of rights for games.

4) PCs Pulled Double Duty

Why buy a video game console when a computer allowed you to play games and help you with your homework and prepare you for a job?

The graphics for the games were a lot better too. The computers could handle the amount of data a good game needed in order for it to handle the gameplay.

How The Gaming Industry was Saved

Many consumers lost their trust in video games for close to two whole years. People were buying crappy games out of bargain bins in thrift stores and/or leaving their consoles untouched. The creativity and magic of the industry had fallen.

Then, in 1985, a lovely company called Nintendo came in and saved video games for North America. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), first of all, did not look like any other video game console out there. The controls were not joysticks, the colors were simple, and the game was hidden from the players view. Its design was so simple that the intrigue as to how it would actually play was high.

The NES also installed a lock chip on the hardware, making it difficult for any “hacker” to come along and steal the company’s hardware design. THEY TOOK THE TIME to create great games and were not in the industry to hurt the consumers.

Nintendo, even to this day, has seals of approval that prvoes that what you're playing is their game, and those who try to copy it will be punished. Xbox and PlayStation do this as well.

Now we only have 3 major consoles that each have their own handheld gaming devices as well. While we still have a lot of games to choose from, we have the tools necessary to weed out the bad at an alarming rate.

So thanks Atari for teaching us a lesson that the video game industry has never forgotten.

We’ll see you next week!