Talk:Video game crash of 1983

Crash of 1983 or 1977?

There is another article called Video Crash of 1977 that auto directs to the Pong article. I dont think this is correct...

The article about 1977 referred to the moment when Pong and Pong clones fully saturated the market and the distributors and manufacturers suddenly could not sell any more Pong style games. Since it really was a single-game phenomenon it was integrated into the Pong article. Coll7 20:03, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

North America only event?

This reads like a purely U.S. story. What happened elsewhere? _R_ 11:08, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I live in the US and have never heard of this before.. I suspect it's somewhat exaggerated. Suppafly 22:23, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Not really. Because the video game industry was a comparatively small and specialized market at that point, it's not really that well known outside of gaming enthuisasts, but it's absolutely essential to the history of the industry, and is referred to quite often in the literature. I am going to go ahead and edit the article to make clear that it's talking about North America: as far as I know, it didn't have much impact overseas, and, even if it did, I'm not qualified to comment on it.... -Seancdaug 04:10, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

I agree strongly with Seancdaug, whose edits looked good to me (and whose improvements I tried to build upon with my edits). The news story was all over TV for months, both when the market exploded and when it crashed. The TV ads blanketed the screen. You couldn't go into a toy store or electronics store without seeing the games front and center. And when it all went away it happened very fast and very dramatically -- a multi-billion dollar business largely just disappeared, and took major American companies with it. As the article says, when the market returned years later it was heavily controlled by Japanese companies. The games were sold some in Europe, but were not the phenomenon there that they were in the US, in part because of the high manufacturing costs and price points. Coll7

This article needs to state clearly that the 1983 crash was for the most part a North American only event. Consoles were really popular in North America whereas Personal Computers were more popular around Europe and Asia like the Amiga, MSX1, MSX2, Amstrad CPC, Spectrum, BBC Micro, (even the NES was marketed as a computer in Japan and not a console) etc etc etc. When the North American crash happened, it barely effected Europe and certainly not Japan. The NES is considered by many North Americans as the saviour of the 1983 crash, however in many countries in Europe the Sega Master was FAR more popular than the NES. Even today Consoles remain far more popular in American than they do in Europe. 25 year old Americans think fondly of their NES/Intellivision, many 25 year old Europeans think fondly of their Amigas/Amstards/Spectrums. - UnlimitedAccess 16:37, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Your point is well taken. I added a new second paragraph to concisely place this issue front-and-center. See if you think this does the job. Coll7 00:44, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

While I agree it is important to clarify that the so-called crash as essentially a North American event, I disagree with the assertion that home computers were more popular than consoles in Europe - especially since many of the computers you reference were not even released until after the crash. The crash was already underway when the MSX platform appeared in 1983, the Amiga and MSX2 were both 1985, and most Spectrum models were released in 1984 or later. --Sir Smedley 23:39, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

List for bankrupt companies

Will somebody sort a list of companies that went near or purely bankrupt at that time rather than mention them in sentences? --SuperDude 04:40, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

• It's not really that simple, and my personal fear is that it will give a false impression of the impact of the crash. While lots of smaller third-party developers did go under, lots of other companies were seriously impacted while never going "near or purely bankrupt": Coleco and Atari were never, to my knowledge, in immediate danger of closing down, and Mattel was hurt and pretty much withdrew from the gaming industry, but has plenty of other activities to keep them aloft. Any list the likes of which you suggest would be so full of caveats, provisos and explanations that I personally can't see how it would be very useful for spot referencing. – Seancdaug 17:08, May 11, 2005 (UTC)

Atari lingered but later died -- today's Atari is really the French company Infogrames, who bought the name. Coleco did go bankrupt. Mattel raised money, at the cost of a deep dilution of shareholders below 50% of the refinanced company, resulting in a loss of control. (ii.e. The people who put in the new money controlled the company, not the prior shareholders.) Activision lingered, then died and also had its name bought for a now-successful company. Lots of the small publishers of the day came and went -- might be able to assemble a list of them. Coll7

Cut "Shakeout" sentence in opening paragraph

I propose we do this. The paragrph argues with itself, and it's confusing. Coll7

I implemented a draft based on this suggestion and in general cleaned up the opening -- see if you think it's an improvement or if I cut something you believe was of value. Coll7

Edit of 8/28/05

A recent edit had added some important points but the author had been misinformed on some technicalities of how platform owners control their machines. I built on the prior author's edits and corrected the business practices content. At that point the article was big enough that it looked like it should have subheads, which I added. I also moved one reference to coin-op games to a different location in the article. All comments, corrections, suggestions etc. are welcome. Coll7 04:47, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Cleanup

I've cleaned up a lot of little niggling errors and performed a general copyedit of this article. I also fixed some awkward sentence constructions and the capitalization of sections so they adhere to the Wikipedia standards a little better. I removed the sentence: "It seems that the people actually cared about the quality of the games being sold." from the fifth paragraph of the Causes section because it seems, well, obvious. People don't like to spend money on crap, which isn't a new sentiment, nor one specific to the 1980s.

Advergames helped cause the crash?

The article makes it sound like games ment to advertise brands helped the crash:

This court case legitimized third-party development, and companies as ill-prepared as Quaker Oats rushed to open video game divisions, much to the amazement of both Wall Street and consumers. Unlike Activision, they did not have top designers to create the games. Games such as Chuck Wagon and Kool-Aid Man were less-than-stellar examples of games companies would make in the hopes of selling their product and taking advantage of the video game boom. While heavily advertised and marketed, the games were poor and didn't catch on as hoped.

Seems to makes the case that Kool-Aid and Quaker Oats were big players in the crash. Them and other companies who wanted to use videogames as advertisements for their other non-video game products

Actually, those are two very different cases, and maybe some editing needs to be done to clarify:

• Quaker Oats was the most visibly bizarre of a number of companies that either rushed in as startups or "diversified" into games once it appeared that big, fast money was there. That rush of unqualifed manufacturers of very weak games was a major cause of the crash. Thanks to them, about twice as many games came to market in 1982 as the market could bear, and many of them were very lame. When they flooded the discount tables in 1983 it killed the full-price market, which is why the HW companies now manage inventories so tightly.
• The adver-games were a minor sidelight. They were more a symptom that we had entered the mainstream than a direct contributor to the problems. The sponsors paid for their development, then made them discounted giveaways to use as promotion, and there were very few of them.

So the Quaker Oats Man was indicted and convicted. Kool-Aid Man turns out to have been largely an innocent bystander and should not be charged. Coll7 18:12, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Edit of 10/10/08

This started out as an attempt to clean up the issues raised by an anon poster (who made good points) in the Talk section directly above this one. Almost all the changes are in the Causes section. In trying to make things more clear I ended up adding a bullet-point summary for Causes, moving around a number of paragraphs, adding subheaders, etc. and editing some text to restore the flow. There's a little new content there (about reverse engineering and programmer raids) but mostly it's an edit pass rather than a rewrite once you see how the paragraphs all settled back together. I also caught a clever little vandal edit that had crept in unnoticed. Please review and see whether I did in fact make the issues more clear after the re-sequencing. Coll7 02:07, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

G4 called it a Video Game Crash, did anyone else?

I first heard the phrase "Video Game Crash of 1983" on a documentary of the Atari on G4, surely there must be more references to the video game crash than that, could you please tell me what your sources were, I am just curious if the media did indeed call it "Video Game Crash of 1983" (Tigerghost 19:20, 17 December 2005 (UTC))

I just did a fast Google search on the independent words (video, 1983, crash, game) and got lots of listings, including GameSpot, Dot Eater etc. The term was used a lot contemporaneously (the three largest game dev employers of January 1983 were all basically out of the business two years later, so it felt like a "crash"), and gradually started to standardize over the years. I don't think it's the only way people refer to that time, but it is by far the most common. I've heard phrases like "When ET tanked the industry" or "when the video game bubble burst" as well. Coll7 02:46, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Console bias

I have a bit of a problem with the very last line of the article: "As consoles continued gaining momentum in the 1990s, the computer market as a whole faded from view as a major platform for retail games, despite many notable individual successes."

If I may, I just want to quote some facts from the Computer and video games article:

• Console and portable software sales: $6.2 billion, up 8% from 2003 [1]
• Console and portable hardware and accessory sales: $3.7 billion, down 35% from 2003 [2]
• PC game sales: $1.1 billion, down 2% from 2003 [3]

As one can see, console games are clearly the leading seller but I'd say that the computer "as a major platform for retail games" has far from "faded from view". If noone has a problem, I'm going to go ahead and removed that line.

I agree completely that the recent edit that said this was inaccurate. Your phrasing sounds good to me. Coll7 23:10, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Move to Home Computers

Wasn't this just a case of technology moving from "video consoles" to "home computers"? The home computers released at this time (Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum etc.) were really the "next generation" in that they were on a par with the "8-bit era" of consoles. Why is this referred to as a crash? The arrival of cheap home computers was considered to be a massive boom - video games had never been so popular! I don't undersatnd why such a distinction is made - surely these home computers are just "programable video consoles" with keyboards? Similarly, shouldn't the Amiga and Atari ST home computers be classed alongside the "16-bit" era of consoles? Gp100mk 08:53, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

In North America it was a crash because the surviving computer game business in 1984 was a small fraction of the size of the prior video game industry in 1982. The number of jobs dropped from many thousands to many hundreds. The biggest game companies had $40M in software sales instead of over a billion. In the UK I understand it was different, but in the US 1984-87 was a very tough time compared to 1980-83. Should we edit the article to make this more clear? Coll7 22:44, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Just to provide some hard numbers, according to this, video game sales in 1983 reached $3.2 billion USD. Three years later, they bottomed out at $100 million. A decrease of $3.1 billion in sales is certainly a crash. There are also numerous circumstantial events that support the claim that what was going really was a crash, such as Nintendo's two year odyssey to get any major American distributors interested in the Famicom after two major redesigns and two years at CES, and the well-documented lengths to which Nintendo ultimately went to distance the NES from earlier game consoles. Though the C64 and the Spectrum were influential, they were less than a drop in the bucket compared to the major pre-crash consoles (the 2600, the Intellivision, and the Colecovision), or the NES after 1987 or so. Overall, these were important years for personal computing (the first hard disk-based IBM PCs were hitting the scene, as was the Macintosh), but for video gaming in particular, it really was a significant and prolonged dry spell. – Seancdaug 01:04, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I definitely think that "crash" should remain in the title. However, you make a good point about systems like the Atari ST and Amiga. None of the articles on the history games really talk about them, while they were noteworthy gaming systems. jacoplane 01:53, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

In North America the Atari ST was a disaster -- I don't believe ANY game made money for its publisher. The Amiga's potential drew great passion, but when the Tramiel's bought it and rushed it to market on the cheap they doomed it with an unstable OS ("Guru Meditation Mode" was a line that would make you scream whenever it crashed, which was a lot) that broke the hearts of users. By comparison to C64, NES or Genesis they fell far short of success... despite the wonderful power they displayed. Dunno about the UK and Europe results, however. Coll7 22:11, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

In the UK, the period 1981 - 1985 was known as the "Home Computer Boom", reaching it's height in about 1983/1984 hence my assumption that the video game crash was simply a move to home computers (although I am now aware that things in the US were different). I don't have any information regarding sales figures etc, but this is the time when lots of home computer and games stores started opening in the UK, with some computer hardware such as the C64 tape drive selling out due to the huge demand (showing evidence of a boom), and the time that lots of people became interested in video games for the first time. Gp100mk 09:56, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Should this appear in "History of..." menu

As we have established that this was a North American only event, why is it still important for "Video game crash of 1983" to appear in the "History of..." menu on the Right Hand Side in between "Second generation" and "third Generation". Whilst the crash certainly needs to be mentioned in lots of places, surely it is only important for each generation to appear in this list, given that the crash was irrelevant to the rest of the world?

Although the sales battle occurred in North America, the effect of the crash was to erase the American manufacturers and clear the field for Nintendo, Sega and later Sony to inaugurate the next era, which was/is indeed global. The percentage of electronic entertainment dollars spent by consumers during 1978-83 was also much smaller in Europe compared to North America during this era (in much the same way that Europe now leads North America in mobile acceptance), so the percentage of global sales and jobs erased by the crash was very large when taken on a worldwide basis. Coll7 20:09, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

"Predatory Pricing" Description Changed

I removed the "predatory pricing" language from the The Impact of Home Computers section because I don't think that term accurately describe Commodore's behavior.

If they actually intended to literally drive all other competitors from the market and then jack up their prices again, and if they had some plan to keep competition from reentering the market once their prices were raised to super-competitive levels, that would indeed be a predatory pricing scheme. Using vertical integration to reduce prices and capture additional market share, without something more, is just normal old price competition. Dhf 01:37, 28 May 2006 (UTC) DHF

Changed ET's description

ET DID sell well, today it's the most common 2600 game. The problem was that they produced more cartridges than there were consoles.

It's funny how I disproved both of those beliefs in my research for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600). I do need to get a good list of Atari's 2600's top 10 selling games though. --SeizureDog 21:55, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Delisted as a Good Article

I've gone through a lot of research in bringing the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600) up to snuff, so I'm pretty well up to date about what did and did not actually happen around this time. This article is a horrible mess of lies, rumors, and mistruths. This is the sort of article that needs to be sourced out the ass to be reliable and yet only has 2 true citations. If I have time, I'll probably get around to working this article up to a decent standard, but as it stands it is horrid.--SeizureDog 22:04, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

The article claims that one of the causes of the crash was the marketing of home computers as an alternative to video games. Yet on this talk page, someone pointed out that the home computer market was much smaller than the pre-crash console market. Is this one of those inaccuracies? Obviously both of these can't be true. Ken Arromdee 07:52, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I went in and cited sources for many of its facts. Still more can be done, but this is a start. Coll7 07:10, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I'd tend to agree about the Computer claim beeing an inaccuracy. If anything, the growth of the home computer market and its agressive advertising came about *because* of the video game market crash. Many video game companies (initially) survived the crash by moving exclusively over to home computer games until the console market was revived in '86. --Marty Goldberg 19:29, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Actually, if you go back and look at the marketing campaigns of that time, you see that the "buy a computer, not a video game" campaign started when consoles were still healthy. The number of games sold per C64 was lower than for consoles, and for all their success the aggregate installed base of computers was far lower than for consoles, in part because the computers were so much more expensive. In North America that double whammy meant the home computer games market was a pale shadow of the console games market, so none of the major players survived such an attempted move, though several tried. Activision of today is a new company that bought the name from the ashes of the old Activision along with some game rights, but the early '80s Activision lingered for years only because they had Tax Loss Carryforwards so the government wrote them big checks for a few years to balance the taxes they paid during the glory times. Same for Atari, whose name was bought by Infogrames. Where Atari alone sold over $1,000,000,000 in games in North America to lead the industry in 1982, as I recall Broderbund as market leader sold about $35,000,000 (about 3.5% of Atari's revenue) as computer game industry leader in 1984. So whoever tells you that consoles died and then C64 rushed in or that computer games were a safe haven in 1984 didn't live through it. The tiny percentage of people who kept jobs in games in North America in the mid-80s were like dazed survivors and counting themselves lucky. Hope the eyewitness account helps! Coll7 05:44, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Excuse me sir, but I *DID* live through it. You are applying hindsite to push a *theory* that no other published author or professional historian subscribes to, nor people in the industry. Nobody said "consoles died and the C64 rushed in", and accusing me of saying that is being irresponsible. What is clearly stated and commonly accepted is that the home computing gaming market was much more limited until the console crash, in which it *grew* to fill the void ("the personal computer industry grew because of the crash"). Computer games, as stated were an *attempted* and temporary safe haven until Nintendo revived the market. You wouldn't by chance happen to be the same guy that was trying to push this theory over at the AtarAge forum that everyone disagreed with? --Marty Goldberg 13:37, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Fake headlines changed

I hope I'm not overstepping my boundries, but I changed the part with the two fake headlines (Video Game Market Booming!, Video Game Market Crashing!, or something to that effect) because headlines rarely use exclamation points. If someone has an ACTUAL SOURCE of a media outlet that used those headlines, rather than some Wikipedia user just making the headlines up, it should be changed. But I think now the paragraph has a more encyclopedia-like, less cartoonish feel to it. 65.30.45.235 19:27, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

Creation of Major Header for European Market 1983-85

A recent edit mixed new data about European games from this time in with what previously described itself as an article about a North American event (as per the opening paragraph). This created some inaccurate content.

To preserve the European data while fixing the problems I created a new major header for The Games Market in Europe 1983-85 and took the new European part of the text and re-inserted it pretty much verbatim there. I know a lot about North America during this time, but need others to clarify the situation in Europe. We can flesh this out with help from informed editors.

I'll go looking for sources to cite on the North American events, though I believe that once we do so the content will hold up pretty much as currently written (though how the fatal soup of blame was proportioned between the various factors listed can be debated endlessly). We could also ask for a peer review by people involved in the industry at that time so we go directly to primary sources.

Please post comments and suggestions below. Coll7 06:16, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

The creation of a seperate Euro section is a good idea, however see my comments in the previous section regarding your push of the computer market as the cause of the crash. No other major reference (Game Over by David Scheff, Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven Kent (based on direct interviews with people who were in the industry at the time), Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Video Games) makes mention of your theory (and it is theory - something that it clearly states in the Wikipedia guidelines that is not to be included in entries.) They do however talk about the contributing factors that are in the commonly accepted version, which was presented in the edit I reverted back to. I am a professional in the industry, and I am also a professional historian that is paid to interview people in the industry from the time, write articles and publish said material. Not one person I have interviewed from the time (and the list is lengthy) has ever stated what you're pushing. Nor has any of the other people interviewed by other professional authors of the time (including Steven Kent and Leonard Hermann, who I also have talked with) ever stated that, and that fact is correctly reflected in their books - which are considered the standard references on this subject. Likewise, citing a reference to a stub about the reasoning behind a cover of a computer magazine is not a reference to support your case. 1)It did not state anywhere about the crash being caused by computers (in fact it lended credence to the original position). 2) It is an intro written by the editor of a magazine promoting his magazine and its (then) new format for commercial purposes, hardly a historical reference other than possibly a discussion on marketing. Your Artie Katz written electronic games source (where it discusses its change back to that name) also does not support your position. And in fact the co-founder of that magazine (Bill Kunkel) wrote an entire chapter in his book Confessions of the Game Doctor, based around the very "renaming" subject that covers the whole crash period and its factors . Nowhere does it state what you're trying to, and in fact once again states material regarding the commonly accepted view of the video games crash.--Marty Goldberg 14:09, 6 September 2006 (UTC)