Companies that bowed out with the crash

Remembering the heyday of Atari, Intellivision, and Colecovision got me thinking about some of the third party game developers that either went under or just got entirely out of the business with the "great crash of 83". Companies like Imagic, Parker Bros, 20th Century Fox, and CBS. Now, my question is: Why? Obviously companies such as Mattel, Parker Bros, Fox, and CBS exist to this day, so why did they never re-enter the game development arena again on platforms like NES and the 7800? I am guessing that Imagic and Parker Bros. made pretty good money from their 2600, 5200, Intellivision, and Colecovision games, so why would they not want to try their hand at success on the platforms that followed? Even if they were gun-shy after the great fallout of '83, they had to see that things had turned for the better after NES began to rule the world around '87 or so. Did they get burned so badly in the great crash that they could not muster the backing among shareholders to re-enter the video game sector? For all intents and purposes, Imagic ceased to exist in the mid 80's, so they must have been irreparably harmed by the crash, but all the others I have named remain to this day. So, the mystery is, why did all these companies permanently bow out of the video game wars after 1983?

P.S. Before anyone shouts me down on dates or "facts", I am not the world's expert on when Imagic officially ceased operations, or even Parker Bros. now being a subsidiary of Hasbro (but, yes, they are still in existence). Mine is only an educated guesstimate. I have seen too many of these threads turn into needless attempts to prove that the replier is a genius and the original poster is an imbecile. Let's keep the posts civil at best. Just a necessary disclaimer.

Parker Bros did make games for Sega after the Crash.

I was to young to real understand anything back then so my frame of reference my be way off. Games were much easier to make back then. There are many stories off kids making games in there bedrooms and making a fortune. Also many smaller companies simply ripped off other peoples games. With new systems it wasn't that easy anymore. coupled with the burn they simply bowed out. In short what Sega Fan said.
The NES was super successful but it did take a couple years to really take off. Oddly enough later in its life all sorts of odd companies were making games for reminiscent of the Atari days.

Parker Bros. actually did stop making videogames after the crash. They re-started when Tonka took over the SMS, as they'd just merged. That's why there's an SMS port of Montezuma's Revenge. I don't think they were actually the same people (as far as people developing games), they just used the name. Eventually they were acquired by Hasbro, who saw no need to continue using the Parker Bros. name for videogames.

Imagic was hit hard by the crash, because they'd been very big on Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision. They'd also been a bit too liberal with their finances. They officially went out of business in 1986, however, they'd done almost nothing in 1985-86.

Just prior to the crash, Mattel had spun off their gaming/electronics division into a separate company (Mattel Electronics), which sunk in 1984. Some employees started a new company, called it INTV, and bought the rights to the Intellivision. INTV did make some games, but not many, and unlike Mattel with their M-Network label, INTV made games exclusively for the Intellivision. Eventually they just stopped, when the Intellivision market shrank to zero.

Imagic pretty much got wiped out by the crash. They were the 3rd largest publisher on the 2600 and like most companies, they probably had a ton of unsold product when it all came crashing down.

Activision owns the rights to a lot of the Imagic software titles, meaning that Imagic was selling properties to get out of the fire the crash had created.

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Originally Posted by sega fan

I'm no expert but I think that two big things probably lead to these companies not re-entering the games industry. One is that the 8-bit consoles were harder to devolop for. Keep in mind, these company teams spent time learning how to fine-tune games for the pre 8-bit consoles. Almost all of it was almost irrelevent when the NES and Master System came out and had different toolsets and means for programming. Two was that after everyone bailed out, nobody cared enough to get back in. I'm sure these big companies made money off of games but it probably wasn't enough to justify going back in after leaving.

Just my 2 cents, nothing official.

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Actually, those are some points I had not thought about. The NES dev kit was probably more difficult for your average programmer to work with, along with the fact that Nintendo got strict with their rules and regulations.