Why was USA behind in videogaming after VCS/apple 2/C64
Usually USA lead in that field, but after VCS/C64/Apple ][ USA decided to go nuts over NES, when here in Europe we embraced the Amiga/ST with 1000s of excellent games coming from the UK/European coders.
What went wrong? Why didn't USA go with 16-bit Amiga/ST but revert back to 8-bit NES?
Did it have something to do with the PC, slowly creeping up from behind? Brainwashed by Nintendo's marketing strategy?
Let me know why the 16-bitters failed in the USA.
There was a gaming crash in the 80's in the US. Even Nintendo had to invent ROB to get the NES into stores at all, by marketing it as a toy instead of a videogame.
I think that a lot of people moved on from C64s and Apples to Windows based PCs and got into computer gaming. That's the way that it was with me and most of my friends at least. For as good as NES games were they just couldn't compare with the depth of a good PC game IMO.
Last edited by Griking; 10-12-2011 at 03:38 PM.
Maybe with ROB, but in general Nintendo was avoiding the "toy" image. Hence the "entertainment system" title rather than pushing it as something for kids that just plays video games (even if that was the reality) and redesigning the system to resemble a VCR rather than the candy-coated look of the Famicom.Originally Posted by BlastProcessing402
Anyway, Japan took over just because there were so many great games with fresh ideas. They also knew to keep price points reasonable and accessible to everybody. Atari was stuck in the past and only got more and more disappointing as the years went on. Most other Western companies trying to throw their hats into the ring had no flippin' clue what they were doing, like with the CD-i and 3DO. The Amiga is a whole different conversation since it's a computer and not nearly as accessible as something reasonably cheap that you just hook up to your TV and play games on. And even now, while there are Amiga fans, most retro gamers don't feel the Amiga game library is as strong as those on NES, SNES, Genesis, etc.
I know that as a kid in the early 80's, after the NES hit the market, Atari was almost a dirty word for quite q while. Too many dissapointing ports, too much third party ass, too much money for unpolished games. And that stigma stuck with them, despite some gems they produced.
Actually, there was a pretty vibrant Amiga gaming market here in the US, although admittedly not as huge as the European market and admittedly it was largely based on piracy. I would agree that the ST was a much bigger flop and other than Federated and local Atari dealers/mail order, I never really saw the games available at US retail.
I know I was able to buy Amiga games at Gamestop/EB/Babbage's/Software Etc., the Navy Exchange, local Commodore dealers, mail order and even at smaller department stores like Fedco. As others have pointed out, however, it was quickly eclipsed by the PC as the primary home computer gaming platform in the US. I had several school friends whose parents bought the PC as a serious business/word processing tool but allowed them to install a SVGA card, a sound card and joystick making the PC a solid gaming machine. Also, by the time the Amiga and ST were really hitting the height of their popularity in late 1989 through 1991, people had already switched over to the Sega Genesis rather than the NES. In fact, there was a local Amiga dealer in Los Angeles that was giving a discount if you bought an Amiga 500 and a Sega Genesis at the same time. I don't think the 16 bitters so much failed as just the Amiga and ST did over here.
I figured it was that so many little start-up companies made PC clones. Amigas were used extensively in video editing in the USA, though.
Americans wanted business machines, and IBM projected that better than Commodore (toy computers) or Atari (video games).
Plus, the convenience and price of a console was pretty tempting. Why spend thousands on an Amiga and time to configure it when you can buy an NES and just play? Sure, it was less impressive technologically, but the games were still fun.
The main thing they were avoiding was "video game" not toy. It was a pretty brilliant move on Nintendo's part, as buyers for the toy and department stores weren't going to touch a video game system with a 10 foot pole at the time. The redesign was part of that as well, sure. Anything to keep it distinct from the systems from before the crash.
The way that I remember it.
Hmm,
I guess we've always looked at it as two different markets. Computers and Consoles. But with that said. The Pong generation here in the US was done, arcades were seedy and closing in my hometown, consoles were expensive and ports of your favorites sucked. I go out on a limb here and blame Atari, because it held the lion share of the console market back in the day. The issue was Atari, kept releasing and re-releasing the same games/console with marginal updates in graphics and sound. The 5200 was a hardware nightmare and the last hope the 7800 was shelved, and then later released once Nintendo got in the game.
Atari's name was tarnished here in the US. We got a IBM clone from Epson ( 8088 based dual floppy thing ) for $1,500 and it was for school. So I wasn't able allowed to install games on it. But later on I did and CGA graphics and PC sound chip sucked bad.
I can still remember being amazed by what the Nintendo could do. I convinced my brother to go halves on it so I saved up paper route money and we got it. I couldn't believe that Super Mario Bro's was in my house. Next up SMS, Genesis and then SNES
Last edited by homerhomer; 10-12-2011 at 06:19 PM. Reason: grammer
The Japanese just simply made better games back in the 80's & 90's.
I strongly disagree. There were tons of really good games made by US companies, it's just that most of them were made for computers and not consoles.
This. Most big hit PC games of the 80s and 90s that I can recall were North American produced. Nintendo, Sega and later Sony totally dominated the console market. I'd say the Japanese ruled the console world pretty much unchallenged until Microsoft launched Xbox in 2001.
QFT. The misconception that there was a gaming crash is completely incorrect and I cringe every time somebody says it like that. Yes, there was a crash within Atari which impacted console gaming severely, but the market had already already started to move towards computer gaming rather than console prior to the bulk of Atari's issues. The decline of Atari and the rise of Commodore created a market ripe for computer gaming to take over, which is what happened.
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The 80's were ruled for the most part by Arcade game ports on consoles. The majority were American-designed games, though many were Japanese.
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But consoles such as Colecovision, as well as Intellivision, and Vectrex, also crashed out… and while console gameing may have been on the outs, they were tooled to be expanded into computers… Coleco and Mattel has their computer add ons on market (Atari never delivered their expansions for either the 5200 or 7800)
And I can only recall on my own experience, but computers and gaming never took hold in my community while I was growing up in the 1980s… they were restrictive in their price, and I had only known a handful of kids whose family had a computer of any type… when the NES had come to market, by 1988, Almost everyone I knew had one… I remember reading an article in the Detroit Free Press sometime around 1990-1991 and it had a stat that 1 in 3 homes had a NES…
I will say I was never aware that there was a "crash" in the mid 1980s, but I was at the age of 8-10 during the peek of the "crash"
I really think the Amiga's failure over here was from lack of consumer exposure. If more people simply knew about it, I think it would've sold itself. I mean, the games it had in the late 80s looked like what most people never saw outside of arcades until the early to mid 90s. It was quite literally a 16-bit video game console disguised as a computer, but with all the benefits of the latter.
I would've worn my dad's ear off trying to get him to buy it had I known about it in its day. I think a lot of other kids would have too.
You might be right that it was geographic in nature and possibly socio-economic. I grew up in a middle-class to upper middle-class area in San Diego, California and I would say at least a third of the kids I went to junior high and high school with had access to a PC or other computer at home in the late 80s and early 90s. Some of them still had C64s, Apple IIe and other word processing system as well even if they didn't play games. I will say that in my high school of 1500 kids, there were only eight Amiga owners that I knew of because we started a school computer club (I know, super dorky). In retrospect, that seems like a lot, but most of us also owned C64s prior to that, so it just was the natural progression. I will say that there were at least four Amiga/Commodore dealers in San Diego from the mid-80s up until the mid-90s, so it was definately a strong Commodore town.
I wasn't much older than you at the time of the crash, but I do remember being able to buy console games for near nothing (25 cent 2600 carts all over the place and such). But, that only seemed to be commonplace at the same time I remember seeing rows of computer software in stores.
One thing I always hold in my beliefs is that it's not the kids that are driving video game markets. Rather, it was the folks in their late teens and early 20's at that point in history and those that are even older now. Given the deep market penetration that the early computers enjoyed and the rate at which they were adopted, I think it's only natural that the market would have shifted away from what were traditionally considered to be toys to something more mature. Also, a lot of the people that are said to have been burned by the poor QC in console games would have likely moved to computers anyway as their interests matured.
No doubt that both console gaming and arcades took a major hit in the mid 80s (with arcades barely surviving and never reaching the same levels they enjoyed in the early 80s), but I really don't see how that can be entirely blamed on Atari or any other console manufacturer. I really feel that by then, computers had far outstripped what the consoles of the day were capable of and the market would have shifted anyway. Even with the NES, console games and computer games had started to drift apart in terms of capabilities and content. NES was sort of a rebirth of consoles, but mainly due to a fresh batch of kids coming into gaming while the previous batch were firmly embedded in the computers of the day.
To say there was a crash in consoles, sure. To say there was a general video game crash is just misinformed. It was a market shift that followed the progression of technology, nothing more. Consoles just happened to be the losers at that point in time as they were the older technology that had not kept up.
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Computer gaming didn't take off until the mid-nineties, from my memory. And even then, it's a handful. For every collector of PC games and systems, there are a dozen retro console gamers. But even back in the day... Crash of 83. NES in 85. 2 years of PC dominance. And I don't remember it that way. But I was a munchkin, so memory is subjective as hell. At any rate, All the games that the PC ever had that were amazing have been ported. Because more gamers rock consoles, and use their PC's as tools. Not saying the ports were worth a shit, mind you... Eh, all the thrifts want $3.00 a console cart, a buck a PC game. Not completely accurate, but a great barometer.
That's not accurate at all. A number of major retail stores had computer game sections in the mid-1980s and many even sold various computers like the Commodore 64, the Atari 800XL, etc...and there were computer software stores all over the place including Egghead, Babbage's, Software Etc...The Commodore 64 alone sold something like 8 million units in the United States in the 80s. The Apple II sold almost as many.
Not even close to every great PC game was ported. There are literally thousands of good and great PC and home computer games that never hit consoles. How does present sales price at a thrift have anything to do with popularity at the time? Beanie Babies are dirt cheap today, but I recall them being massively popular and commanding crazy prices on the secondary market for several years. You're right that fewer people probably collect PC games, possibly because services like GOG and others have made older games easier to download on newer PCs. The varying PC requirements for games from the late 80s until fairly recently for games makes collecting something of a challenge, even with DosBox.
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