The State Of Video Gaming In the 70's And 80's

[KitsuneNight]

in the usa and europe before and after the crash

this came up in the ps2 vs dreamcast thread and it hought it was worth splitting it off in to its own thread
with quotes from gamevet
abf
j factor
and myself

Yeah. Odyssey cartridges don't contain code. The way the Odyssey works is very very weird. It's not a real game console any more than the Pong units are.

It also wasn't very successful. It was the first, but I'm not sure that it made a big impact on what followed. Probably its biggest claim to having an impact on the industry is the fact that Pong was a ripoff of one of its games. Even without Pong, it was only a matter of time before an arcade video game took off. Once there was a hit, the next logical step is to make a home version.

I'm sure people could explain away all kinds of great inventions, but there's no reason to believe that things would have been the same without the Odyssey... computers were definitely going to take off, but dedicated videogame consoles that attach to TVs? Maybe, maybe not.

When I was a kid, the Sears catalog was filled with Pong clones and other videogame devices, like Atari's Stunt Cycle game. Everyone remembers the pong clones, but they seem to forget the other weird videogame devices that came before the VCS.


http://www.gooddealgames.com/article...20History.html


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_(video_game)

^ most of those are pongs though

unless you meant the rca studio II
the fairchild channel F ( what does the F stand for ? fairchild ? fairchild channel fairchild ? )
atari video pinball
and atari video stunt cycle

but those are only a hand full in a sea of pongs old computers museum has a whole section devoted to nothing but pong machines http://www.old-computers.com/museum/default.asp?st=3
they have 112 pong machines on display
112 machines just for bloody pong !

Pong's popularity was a result of the arcade game being a hit, and Pong was not the 1st videogame to exist. If Pong didn't do it, another videogame would have came along that would have. Baer may have invented video tennis (if you don't count Tennis for Two), but it took a slick salesman like Bushnell to find a way to make the product more enticing to consumers. Let's not forget that there was a videogame crash in the 70's and it was the VCS that helped bring that market back to existence.

The arcades are what fueled the home console boom and the arcades crashed right around the same time that the consoles did in the early 80s.

was there a crash in the 70's too ?
probably the glut of pong consoles

Pretty much. Even Magnavox had like 4 different Odyssey systems within 3 or 4 years. The video arcade business took a nose dive as well, but with the release of Space Invaders the market started to boom.


http://www.neiu.edu/~cjhudso2/timetable.htm

Yeah, it was the second one, following Computer Space, a quite unsuccessful game.


Perhaps so, but it didn't happen that way, so how can we be sure? Pong's success is what inspired others to try, after all.


Well, I think that as much as anything the new cartridge-based consoles helped CAUSE that crash, or at least make it worse, yes? I mean, the Fairchild in '76, and RCA and Atari systems in '77... that's the same time that many Home Pongs were still releasing, but people were getting tired of those one-game systems as you say... and then here come these new things which can do a lot more. The Home Pong thing would probably ahve crashed, sure, but I can't help but think that the first cart-based consoles probably helped speed up their decline...


True, though arcades did continue to exist; it wasn't until the mid to late '90s that the arcade business in the US REALLY failed.


While this is technically true, it did not come anywhere remotely near replacing what was lost -- computers just continued on or increased in sales slightly, I think. This idea that people all just shifted over to playing games on computers is something of a myth; most people didn't do that. Far more left consoles behind and just stopped playing games for a while -- the numbers we have for computer and console sales makes that pretty clear.

I've posted those computer sales numbers before and I'm not going to waste my time posting them again.

I will say this. I had a C64 in the 80s. My dad had a TRS-80 CoCo (32K) and a Tandy 1000 in the 80s. We had 1 Atari VCS and some pong clone before that. That's 3 computers to our 1.5 consoles.

Most of my friends either had an Apple II, Vic-20, or C-64 by 1985. There was no myth about it, computer games were very popular during and after the console crash. The bigger myth is that the NES was an overnight sensation in the US, which is totally untrue and that it somehow saved videogames, even though everyone was still playing them on computers, even in our school classrooms.

If the NES had never came out, I really can't say I would have missed it. I barely played the console when I owned it, because I was still playing Amiga and C64 games before finally buying the NES in 1988.

the crash had no effect on europe
the c64 spectrum cpc msx atari st and amiga thrived here and to a lesser degree the ibm machines
if the nes was never released i doubt the european gaming scene would have given a damn

Then you could link that? I think I've seen computer sales numbers before though, and there is no big jump in '83-'85 of gaming PCs, I don't believe. Sure, some people had computers, but most didn't yet have computers at home. That would come later, in the early to mid '90s for many.


I know I'm a bit younger, too young to remember the crash myself, but I've never used any of those computers before, and didn't know anyone who had any of them either. Well... probably. One friend did have a Tandy, but I'm not sure which model. I don't think they got it before the early/mid '90s, though... not certain. The only computers I remember using in the '80s were Apple IIs I think... that's what they had in elementary schools, Apple IIs and later a Mac or two. We didn't have a computer at home until we got a PC in early '92, and apart from that one Apple II and Tandy all of my other friends had PCs or Macs at home. If any had had older computers at some point (or their families had), I have no memory of it; those computers didn't really survive past the mid '80s as major platforms here, I don't think, unlike Europe. Anyway though, if all of your friends had computers in the mid '80s, I would guess that that's an exception, not the rule -- and I think the sales back that up.

Anyway, back to the point: After the crash, computer games grew in popularity a bit. But console game and hardware sales fell much more.


Well, as far as hardware sales go the NES's peak of popularity in the US was 1987-1990, so on that regard at least you are right -- the NES definitely wasn't an immediate hit. It took a few years to get going.

To say there is no big jump in '83-'85 is just plain wrong. There absolutely was a jump during that time period. The C64 came out in mid-'82 and hit its stride the following year. The Apple IIe came out in 1983. The Atari 800XL (best-selling Atari 8-bit model) came out in 1983. The TRS-80 CoCo 2 came out in 1983 as well.

and thats about it
lets see if this thing will take off

[GriskaGyoran]

State of the art gaming? I, Robot comes to mind.

[midnightrider]

Yes, there was a crash in '77, for the reason you suspected. The reason it's not remembered as much as '83 is that it didn't last beyond the year, as the VCS(2600) would release that year.

The Fairchild Channel F would be a victim of this crash, despite being the first home console with programmable cartridges. One of their electric engineers, Jerry Lawson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Lawson_(engineer)), was the inventor of the cartridge, and thus the reason we've had a console industry that allowed us to buy the games we wanted since the 2nd generation.

[KitsuneNight]

^ i never knew there was a pong crash
course it stands to reason ti would have happend because of the glut of pong machines how many bloody times can you play pong
anyway ?

the vcs must have been a revelation or at least something amazing
it plays games and to play another game you just replace this small cardridge here you dont have to actually buy a whole new machine !

[gamevet]

^ i never knew there was a pong crash
course it stands to reason ti would have happend because of the glut of pong machines how many bloody times can you play pong
anyway ?

the vcs must have been a revelation or at least something amazing
it plays games and to play another game you just replace this small cardridge here you dont have to actually buy a whole new machine !

My parents got our family a VCS sometime @1978. It really didn't take off until Atari got the rights to Space Invaders. Before that, most of the games were simple stuff like Breakout, Hang-Man(Ugh), Chess, Backgammon and Outlaw. Combat (came with the console) was pretty much the best of the lot until Space Invaders arrived.

[KitsuneNight]

^ im always bemused when i hear just how important space invaders was

[gamevet]

^ im always bemused when i hear just how important space invaders was

Space Invaders was so popular, that a lot of early issues of video game magazines back in the day, used to call it the 1st videogame. It was as if Pong had never existed before it, or most people never really thought of Pong as a video game for some odd reason.

I've never played Pong at the local bowling alley, roller rink or arcade. The only videogame I remember playing at those venues, was Tank (I was too young to realize it was a videogame) and then Space Invaders. I remember being floored when I saw and heard Space Invaders for the 1st time. It was totally different from anything I had ever played before it.