Pac-man still strong today.
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Pac-man still strong today.
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Point made. I could only find 10 2600 games that were tragic failures that are partially responsible for the crash not that they were entirely to blame.Quote:
Originally Posted by tz101
These aren't so called "Know it all" topics. These are my opinions. I post them because I would like to have a discussion about them.
I hate the Porno games. For a reason. They're HORRIBLE. Just blatant knock offs of other good games.
As for E.T. People & history blame it for the Crash. I don't. That's why its at #10.
In my opinion, E.T. is bad. But its not terrible. Its actually well designed for a game that was developed in five weeks.
But Pac-Man 2600 is a pile of SHIT.
Here's an idea for you MrSega. Just stop posting.
Yep.:cool:Quote:
Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118
This thread is stupid. Some of those games are super rare. A game that hardly anyone even heard of at the time can't possibly have contributed to the "crash". Nor did people stop buying Colecovision, Intellivision, and Atari 5200 because of stuff that was on the VCS. VCS was in a natural decline anyway, due to its age.
There's a big difference between informed opinions and uninformed ones, and this certainly falls under the latter.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrSega
Seriously this is a topic I wish I had seen more intelligent conversation about. The whole "Great Crash" myth has always bothered me. Nobody I have seen use that narrative can back it up with anything but a list of how many publishers went out of business at the time. I suspect it was just a market slump like what happened in 1993-96. The cause probably was nothing more than entropy.
This thread is making my head spin...
I thought the crash was in 1983.
So the story goes.
Actually, it was something like that. There were some differences compared to pretty much every hardware cycle after, though. For example, Atari didn't really have any new hardware to get excited about to keep the slump in check (TG-16, SNES & Genesis owners getting excited for Saturn, N64, Playstation as an example). Let's remember the 2600 came out in 1977, and the 7800 came out in 1984. There was also the Activision vs Atari case, which opened the doors to 3rd party publishing. This made it possible for companies to try to make a quick buck by releasing crap and me-too software. A lot of this software wasn't bad, per-se. The software was painfully mediocre.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
So you have the combination of the following:
Market fatigue (video games no longer a novelty, and largely seen as a fad)
Uninspired software (there's a reason most of the Atari lassics people still like are from the first half of that console's life)
Market Saturation (for the era, the consoles of that generation, and the 2600 specifically had reached market maturity...everyone who was going to buy one had bought one, and had all the games they wanted for it. There's also the fact that there were 6-7 consoles on the market not including PCs, which were also becoming affordable for the mass market. The market can't handle that many consoles now, and the game market is several orders of magnitude larger now)
Lack of Innovation (People, in general, are looking for the next big thing. Yes, the 7800 was one the horizon, but Atari wasn't making a big deal about so the players that might have been interested weren't really aware of it, and it wasn't really much of an improvement over the 2600, anyway.)
So, yeah, It's similar to the US Great Depression in that it happened relatively early on in the macrocosm of a given market. Was very painful for the markets involved, but lessons were learned, and subsequent crashes as slumps (while painful) were nowhere near as bad because protections were put into place. For example, its generally quickly apparent how much hardware the current game market can handle. The overage tends to get drummed out very quickly.
Obviously, there is more to it then this (there's a lot of stuff I've left out, and some of this is conjecture. I acknowledge these things). But based on what I recall from the time, and what I've read since then, I would consider this a basic overview.
You would be correct. A lot of the fall-out, to be fair, continued through-out 84.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zebbe
Another thing that people don't realize is that even sales of arcade games were affected by the crash of 1983. This was video gaming in general. 10 Atari Games didn't have shit to do with the entire downfall of the video game market.
Arcades weren't really affected, so much as they had their own problems.
Yeah, at least according to David Sheff's Game Over the Arcades were still going strong in 1984 and 1985 when Nintendo was doing its North American research.