The Video Game Crash of 1983

In the early 1980s, video games were big business. Groups like Atari, Magnavox, Mattel, and Coleco all had consoles on the market, and sales grew at a fever pitch. Unfortunately, the industry collapsed in 1983 and nearly killed video games altogether. Thankfully, the industry was able to rebound and today stands stronger than ever.

[FallenAngel1984]

What a time it was for there to be a lot of console manufacturers existing at a time.

[PhoenixUp]

Atari originally could've saved itself if it had distributed NES as the Nintendo Advanced Video Gaming System in North America like they originally negotiated with Nintendo.

The deal was set to be finalized and signed at CES in June 1983. However, Atari discovered at that show that its competitor Coleco was illegally demonstrating its Coleco Adam computer with Nintendo's Donkey Kong game. This violation of Atari's exclusive license with Nintendo to publish the game for its own computer systems delayed the implementation of Nintendo's game console marketing contract with Atari. Atari's CEO Ray Kassar was fired the next month, so the deal went nowhere, and Nintendo decided to market its system on its own.

Ironically Nintendo itself would soon later become familiar with spurring a potential business partner at CES, only for that business partner to market its own system and become a bigger deal in the console industry.

[chris235]

ah the good old days

[GrimDragon]

lol I still remember the wtf face I had when I played E.T.

[JackBNimble]

Lol ... So do I, I never could figure out what was going on and what I was supposed to do.

Worst game ever

[Relientk77]

I still play every now and then for laughs

Falling in those pits gets annoying fast though

[uth11]

It was the first game i got with my 2600. It was not hard to figure out..

It doesnt deserve worst game ever, not when there are worse, more perplexing games on the same platform, like the Swordquest series

[AmUnRa]

Yeah i know that time, i have been gaming from 1978 till now and still gaming.
Pong was my first game, and i remember a lot of games....

I have a memory about some bad games, bud one was much worse than bad, it was a trainwreck....do any of you remember that ET game??
No wonder they burried hunderd of thousands off ET cartridges under the ground😂😂

[uth11]

Best way to understand the early 80s game bubble: Remember Pokemon Go? everyone rushed to play that for a while and it became a craze. After awhile most got bored and now relatively few people still play.

Same thing happened when Pac Man appeared. It created a craze around videogames. Lots of people following the craze were followers of fads and not true gamers. They got bored and moved onto the next fad. Many gamers still left started abandoning consoles in favor of computers like the C64.

It wasnt due to a single bad game being released or over supply. The amount of hype was unsustainable and the industry grew too fast and needed to correct

[OB1Biker]

Well Pac man may not be a good example. It's been popular for years. I was more into arcades at the time and then got computers.

[MartinB105]

"Unfortunately, the industry collapsed in 1983 and nearly killed video games altogether."

When is this US-centric myth going to die? The videogame industry was never at risk. Outside of the US, the industry remained healthy and videogames were as widely played as ever. Europe had the Spectrum and C64 to thank for that. Does anyone honestly believe that had Nintendo not "saved" the US from videogame doom, people would not have just flocked to these other systems instead!? Sure, it may have taken a little longer for the US to recover, but videogames were already an inevitability by 1983, crash or no crash.