For those who were around during the great crash [Archive]

diskoboy

07-27-2006, 09:21 PM

When did you come to the realization that something seriously wrong was about to go down?

I think it began to hit me when Electronic Games magazine changed over to Computer Entertainment magazine. There was even an article in the first CE mag about a plethora of arcade games that never made it past the proto/test phase (Actually I learned about Gottlieb's Screw Loose from this issue). Most games they wrote about sounded really interesting. I think thats about when I realized things were beginning to change.

It became painfully obvious when both the Inty III and Odyssey 3 were announced, then both got scrapped around the same time. A few months later, both companies fold and get out of the market. Everyone then thought Atari and Coleco were the only contenders left. When Atari announced losses - thats when I knew we were screwed.

Arguably - The ADAM was pretty much the straw that broke the camels back.

Sweater Fish Deluxe

07-27-2006, 10:39 PM

This is something I've been meaning to ask about, too. Mostly because I didn't notice shit. I was only six years old in 1984, so I guess I didn't notice much in the larger world, but neither I nor any of my friends ever stopped playing our Ataris (or dreaming of having a Colecovision).

We all played our 2600s religiously and occasionally someone would get a new game from Toys'R'Us (maybe they were cheaper than they had been before, but I wouldn't know since everything seemed pretty expensive to me back then) and I even remember one of my friends getting a cool newly redesigned and way smaller 2600 back when they must have been brand new. That lasted until about 1987 when my family moved to a larger town and I discovered that everyone there was playing Nintendo, though I had to keep playing my 2600 at home since I didn't get an NES until like 1990.

So for me there was really no crash at all. There was just Atari times and then Nintendo times with no real break inbetween. I've always wondered if I was really the only one who experienced the so called "Great Video Game Crash" that way. I can't believe that I am.

...word is bondage...

alexkidd2000

07-27-2006, 10:46 PM

I noticed when Coleco Vision games were all of a sudden $5. Cheap ass parents only bought me one too!

GrandAmChandler

07-27-2006, 10:52 PM

I noticed when Coleco Vision games were all of a sudden $5. Cheap ass parents only bought me one too!

Yeah, my dad and I picked up sealed copies of Pole Position and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back at Toys 'R Us, around somewhere between 1985-1987ish for around $5-$10 each. I was young but I still remember it. I remember not believing the price.

norkusa

07-27-2006, 11:05 PM

I was 8 in 1984 and played video games a lot back then and had a little over 100 Atari 2600 games at the time. One moment during that time still stands out vividly to me. I haven't gotten any new games for a while and my mom took me out shopping at Meijers for some because we remember seeing them being sold for very cheaply there a while back. We looked around the toy department for about 5 minutes and couldn't find a single one. My mom then found an employee and asked him where the vide ogames were. He laughed and said "we haven't carried any of those for a while".

We went to a few stores after that and it was the same story. Nobody carried any video games. It was then I knew something strange was going on.

Seems hard to believe now, but there was actually a short period when you couldn't buy games anywhere. Thankfuly the NES came out not long after that though and changed things.

kentuckyfried

07-28-2006, 12:08 AM

I was about the same age as most of the previous posters, 6 in 1984, and I remember that the friends that I had that had video games had lots and lots of them. I realize now it must have been due to clearouts, price drops etc.

When I finally got my first game system in 87, a brand-new Atari 2600jr system (60$) with Solaris ($?), you could get those Zeller's Atari games for about 5$ new from Zeller's (duh), and used games were Everywhere! For reeeallllllll cheap.

dbiersdorf

07-28-2006, 12:19 AM

Boy am I young.

Retsudo

07-28-2006, 12:23 AM

I was off to Bootcamp. So I didnt notice.

smork

07-28-2006, 12:23 AM

kentuckyfried

07-28-2006, 12:29 AM

dangevin

07-28-2006, 12:41 AM

I was a latecomer...I didn't get my 2600 until 1982 and my first NES until 1986 or maybe even 87. But I do remember being able to pick up 2600 games for $2 apiece in a big clearance bin at Ann & Hope (the local dept. store around Fall River, Mass.). Shortly thereafter, there were similarly priced games in and odd lot store, oddly called "Christmas Tree Shops". Although I was 6-7 at the time (was EVERYONE here born in 77/78???) I still remember stacks upon stacks of the "Pole Positn" (sic) misprint Atari 2600 cartridges, I guess they were considered "undesirable" then lol.

Anyways when the NES came out there was a whole new section to the Department store, with Rob and the Zapper and all the beautiful black boxes, stoic in their sharp contrast to the colorful yellow, orange and assrted M&m-colored disarray of old 2600 clearance boxes festering down the aisle.

So I have very clear images in my mind of the retail turning points in the games industry...if even at the time I had really no concept of anything larger at work such as the gears of capitalism grinding off in the distance...

98PaceCar

07-28-2006, 01:44 AM

I was lucky in that my mom worked in a shopping center that had a drug store with 2600 games in it. Towards the end, I was getting games for $.25 to $1 a piece. I remember my collection expanding quite a bit during that time. Looking back, there were very few good titles available at that store, but I did get a few Activisions and most of the silver label 2600 games.

WIsh I could have bought multiple copies of each, but I never would have guessed then that I would be collecting games and would care about having them now. I am just glad that I still have most of them now.

lordnikon

07-28-2006, 02:32 AM

I acquired a 2600 after having an NES. I had a few games for it that I liked playing. Mostly activision titles. Note that the 2600 was before my time. I started with the NES, and the prime of my video game youth was during the 16-bit era (I was born in 1980, currently 26 yrs/old).

Now, I am guessing around 1990-93 I was in a dollar store. There was a wall, from the front of the store to the back of the store completly stocked with Atari games for a dollar each. All 2600 and 7800 games.

Yes they were all $1.00 each, brand new sealed, and I didn't buy any. I was too into comic books.

I wish I could go back in time.

NeoZeedeater

07-30-2006, 03:07 PM

This kind of repeats what others have said.

I remember the discounted console games well and even though I was young I knew that products on the market were always temporary. As a gamer it never felt detrimental as there were still tons of popular new arcade games. New arcade games like Paperboy, Punch Out!! and Karate Champ were innovative and awesome.

There were also more quality computer games than I could keep track of. It made sense to me that people would flock to gaming computers like the C64 because they generally had better arcade ports than the consoles along with great new games like Bruce Lee.

There was never a point in 1984/1985 where you couldn't buy new games in the stores and there were always arcades around. The console crash was just that: game systems defined as consoles. Gaming wasn't at its peak popularity but it wasn't dead.

Honestly, I think the people that make the biggest deal out the crash are the ones who weren't there. They see the word "crash" and get the misconception that gaming was wiped off the earth or something.

Mayhem

07-30-2006, 03:15 PM

We never truly noticed until after we'd sold the 2600 and gotten a C64. Then some point after the games went right down in price and became harder to find. Video shops stopped doing rentals on them.

Of course being in the UK I never really knew what "the crash" was until a few years after talking to people who had experienced it in the US. Here in the UK people moved onto or into computers and it pretty much passed us by.

JerseyDevil65

07-30-2006, 04:38 PM

I don't remember the crash at all.

I remember playing my friends 2600 when I was 12 or 13. I really didn't play videogames when I was ages 16-20 which was right during the crash.

My girlfriend at the time bought me an NES in 1986 for my 21st birthday and have been playing ever since.

Griking

07-30-2006, 05:39 PM

When did you come to the realization that something seriously wrong was about to go down?

I think it began to hit me when Electronic Games magazine changed over to Computer Entertainment magazine. .

I was around but I didn't think that the name change had anything to do with a crash. I just thought it was because computer games were just a natural progression. Computer games at the time were just so much more advanced than the video games of the time. And some even still are.

mailman187666

07-31-2006, 10:06 AM

i was 2 in 84 but i remember my mother and I picking up atari games in bargain bins back then and also i went from atari to an Apple 2e playing games. Other than that I didn't really know anything about a crash till I read about it. I was too young but I was in fact still playing games at the age of 2. Tell me thats not a lifetime of gaming for ya....I'm 24 now.

Pantechnicon

07-31-2006, 11:30 AM

I was 14 at the time and not aware of a market crash, and I don't think that a great many other young'uns at the time were aware of a market crash either.

It is really important to remember this era in a pre-Web context. There was a far less permeable division of awareness for the average person between gaming as a hobby and gaming as an industry. There was no DP, IGN or any other sort of collective repository wherein thousands of people were able to pore over both the minutiae and business trends which drove their hobbies.

Game magazines, by and large, were propaganda tools of console manufacturers or (in the case of 3rd-party publishers) less concerned with the business-related intricacies of the industry than promoting the up-and-coming games. If there was any speculation on a market crash, it would more likely have been found in a publication like Business Weekly or the Wall Street Journal than Atari Age, and there weren't a lot of teenagers reading those first two publications back then...at least not in my part of the country.

So back in 1984, what the antacid-popping Money Men in three-piece suits referred to as a market crash, I called a bonanza. I distinctly remember walking into a Walgreen's one day over my 9th grade lunch hour and seeing three tables of boxed 2600 carts going for $2 to $4 each. Warlords, Star Raiders, Pac-Man ( I know...I know) and a few others that had long eluded me in the $25 to $40 range were finally coming home. That was a good day.

A year or so later that new-fangled NES popped up in the stores. I wasn't interested. It looked too complicated and besides, I had all these great "new" 2600 games so I really wasn't in the market for something different. The point, though, is that this industry-ignorant mindset was more the rule than the exception for persons my age.

Hep038

07-31-2006, 12:09 PM

I was at Lowes of all places with my mom. I cannot remember what we were there to get, but when you are a kid back then there was not much you ask your mom to buy you at Lowes. So I was just walking around goofing off when I saw a big table of games. I ran over and saw Atari games $4 a game. I grabbed Atlantis and took it over to my mom and did the " Can I have this PLEASE!!!". First she said no, the asked me where I found the game, knowing that Lowes did not sell vidoe games. Well I dragged her over to the table and showed her all the games priced at $4. When she said OK, I did the next thing any kid would do, I started picking up all the $4 games and asking how many I could get. Well I only got the 1 game, but I remeber after that everytime we went to Lowes I would tag along hoping to find a table of $4 games to increase my collection. Saddly I do not think they ever carried games again.

fergojisan

07-31-2006, 01:17 PM

Ah, sweet sweet memories... O_O

Like Pantechnicon, I was 14 in 1984, and I had stopped playing the Atari 2600 by then, at least for a year or so. I guess I had my own little crash of sorts. :) But I did not stop playing arcade games, for sure. Maybe I realized that the Atari was never going to look like the arcade games, I don't know.

I do remember going food shopping with mom to the PathMark, and they had loads of games there, all for $5 or less. I was working for my dad by this time, so I had lots of pocket money, but I was not moved to buy any games. The KayBee Toys at the local mall had a table out in front piled HIGH with 2600 games, but I don't remember the prices there, and didn't buy any there either. I have finally realized that I should stop kicking myself over this, since I definitely wouldn't have kept any boxes, and the Atari disappeared over the years anyway. I have more than enough games at this point.

I didn't get back into home gaming until I saw a friend playing The Legend Of Zelda, in 1988. All through high school my friends and I either played pool, went bowling, or went to White Castle. No time for games in that schedule. :P

vulcanjedi

07-31-2006, 01:40 PM

Geez

Am I really that old? I was 21 years old in 1982 when I was borrowing my younger sisters 2600. In 1983 when I had my first real job I plunked down $150 for a brand new Colecovision at Kiddie City. The local video store was unloading its rental coleco carts for $5 each as they were not renting as much as the atari ones. So I picked up 3 or 4 of them to go along with my pack in donkey kong. Then only 1 month after that the video store owner offered to sell me a used intellivision for $40. And a few months later my mother decided to give me the 2600 because my sister didn't play it anymore and my father was playing it too much :)
The first thing I remember was a slew of bad games. Really bad awful games. I was still renting atari and intellivision carts at the time and wasted so much money but you had to try them out first since you didn't want to get stuck with a $20 dud.

Then all the games started dropping in price. I loved it because I had already spent way too much money on coleco carts. At least 20 of the 40 coleco carts I had cost me $30 because they were bought brand new. I was working field service at the time so I was in every Kiddie City within 100 miles from Philadelphia and stopped in at least once a week looking for games. That lasted all the way to 1986 when I bought my first Atari 800xl.

To me this didn't seem like a crash it seemed like moving up to the Commodore and Atari computer world. The Coleco adam with its big noisy table shaking printer looked like such a failure. But other computers were the future.

It was many years after the event that I first heard it referred to as "the crash" and most of that was in the same sentence as Nintendo. But my first second gen system was a Sega Master System because it had Thunder Blade and Choplifter. Two arcade games I was addicted to.

That's my 2 cents.
vj

wufners

07-31-2006, 04:47 PM

Glad to see I'm not the only one who had no idea anything was going on. I was an Intellivion playing, Atari wanting, Colecovision coveting kid during that time. The only thing I noticed that was odd was that I was now having to buy my Intellivions games from a catalogue and they no longer came with boxes, controller overlays, and had boring white labels.

The NES came around soon enough afterwards that I never realized there was anything wrong.

NE146

08-01-2006, 02:38 AM

I remember it. Although I didn't think of it as a 'crash'.. i just thought of it as "Where the heck are all the new 5200 games that are supposed to be coming out?!?!?" LOL

o2william

08-01-2006, 03:07 AM

I was 9 in 1984 and extremely ignorant of videogames in general. I owned an Odyssey2 and an Atari 2600, had a vague notion there was something called an "Atari 5200," and that was it. I didn't even know there was anything called an "Intellivision" or a "ColecoVision" (that's what you get when you live in a low-population, high-unemployment area like I did).

Videogames were difficult to find in my area in any case. We got O2 games through a catalog, and 2600 games during infrequent trips to the Big City (which in our case was Cincinnati, Ohio). So my memory of the Crash was that the supply of games suddenly increased. We didn't have many large stores in our area and almost none of them carried games, but once prices began to fall, they started turning up in odd places like drug stores. I remember buying Reactor and Amidar at Revco for $5 each. But it was just a temporary thing. Once the supply of discounted games dried up, they were gone. The last game I purchased "new" was Space Attack from Big Lots (which was called Odd Lots back then) for 99 cents. I was SO excited by that, because I thought I might continue to find games at that price, but no dice. Didn't buy another 2600 game until I started collecting retro games in 1994.

I realized "something" was going on, but I knew nothing of the industry and just figured people wanted computers, not consoles. I wasn't entirely wrong.

Princess-Isabela

08-01-2006, 03:46 AM

I was born in 1984 so no gaming crash for me ^_~

dojosky

08-01-2006, 06:26 AM

Ahh I remember those days !!! LOL I was 12 years old myself .. i always went to Kay Bee Toys and buying a lot of ColecoVision games there !!! i remember some gems like flipper slipper for $12.99 ... B.C. Quest for Tires part 2 grog's revenge for like about $9.99 and burgertime and many many more !!! i think i still have those price tags on the colecovision front box (stupidly me when i was about 13 or 14 years old started riding skateboards a lot and went skateboarding so one day i decided my stash of Colecovision game boxes were too bulky and eating up a lot of space so I put all manuals and overlays in one box and cut up the sides of the boxes and glued front and back cover together :( STUPID MOVE LOL I copied Toys R US old display covers LOL ahh oh well that was my old days ... then remember finding a lot of games for 99 cents and $1.99 each etc etc ... then got addicted to NES in 1986-1987 ...

scorch56

08-01-2006, 07:02 AM

I have even you beat by a few years vulcanjedi ;) . My parents bought me the first Atari PONG unit when I was in college. Then later I got a 2600. I didn't even notice the crash because I think somewhere in college I remember taking a COBOL and a FORTRAN class and failing them miserabely. After that.. I was convinced that anything electronic was evil (besides.. my stereo system became very important). Somewhere along the way I remember selling my 2600 to my best friend dirt cheap along with a crapload of carts (complete too!). I had a lot of money invested in them.. but I just didn't care anymore. I'm thinking that's about where the crash was.

Fast forward to about 94 or somewhere thereabouts.. and the same friend (my best of 32 years) shows me Alien versus Predator on his Jaguar. I got hooked again and bought one. THEN.. I went out and bought backwards.. SNES and Genesis at first.. later 8-bit stuff. Then I went out and bought a PC so that I could play MechWarrior II (best game ever).. and it was all downhill (or up.. depends on your POV) from there.

In other words.. I didn't even know there was a crash.. or that there was such an entity as Sega or Nintendo.. until long after they were established. Late bloomer.. I guess.

Oh BTW.. my best friend (who's 5 years older than I am!) always took very good care of his stuff. He traded my (then his) 2600, and some 120+ games he'd amassed since I sold it to him (all complete.. some real rares now.. I'm sure) into a video game store for about $100 credit towards some used PC games. Yes.. we're BOTH sorry about that!

Sweater Fish Deluxe

08-01-2006, 07:43 PM

I was 12 in 1984. I'll say like i've been saying all along -- there was no crash in 1984. Most people had moved on to the C64, TRS-80, or an Apple machine. There wasn't a great feeling of "Oh, we have to do this because the videogame market collapsed", but "Hey, this is better, better graphics, bigger games, and can program the thing to make our own games!" Computers were a step up from consoles, but were a similar price (Mac and AT/XT excluded, of course).

So, I say nothing went wrong, things got better.
Yeah, even though I didn't notice anything at the time as I've come to read about the crash in game magazines (I recall VG&CE mentioning it a number of times when I used to read that) and online, this is pretty much the understanding I've come to. I mean, no one says the video game market crashed when Genesis games get cheap as 32-bit systems gain in popularity or Playstation games get cheap as its successors gain in popularity and it just looks to me like that's what happened in 1984. People whow wanted to play video games were just looking to systems like C64 and Atari 8-bit computers, which were as much like video game systems as they were like the computers we know today. Sure, some investors lost their shirts, but that's nothing new, stupid capitalists are always jumping out of buildings for some reason or another.

I expect that if video game history ever becomes an academic discipline we'll see a lot of theses and dissertations deconstructing or re-imagining the crash. I should write one now and stay ahead of the game.

...word is bondage...

mezrabad

08-01-2006, 10:50 PM

In the same vein as smork's comment . . .

I was 16 in 1984. I'd had an Atari 2600 since I'd been 12 and as much as I always enjoyed a game of Adventure, I didn't play it as often as I would've liked because I was in high school and being a very extra curricular activities kind of guy. For Christmas that year, my parents gave my brother and me a Commodore 64, now THAT was something special. I was very happy to have it and I remember, in the months that followed, playing the hell out of Gateway to Apshai.

The same friend I played Gateway to Apshai with, also mentioned one day at lunch, earlier that year, that he'd gotten a great deal on an Atari 5200 and some of the accessories for it. Wow, I wondered why it was so cheap?

I did notice a lot of Mom & Pop video rental stores shut down around that time of my life, I'm pretty sure that had something to do with the VG crash as well, or at least coicided with it.

Juganawt

08-04-2006, 08:22 PM

I was born in 1980, so I was merely 4 years old at the time of the crash. However, no matter how young I was, I was still aware of it, as our 2600 got thrown into the garage the year earlier. My brother had a shining spanky new ZX Spectrum 48k, which I acquired in early 1984 after nearly breaking it by hammering on the keyboard (my brother then gave it to me and bought a new ZX Spectrum 128k). So the industry crash was at the same time I was entered headlong into the videogame world.

The Great Crash was nothing but good times for me. One of my first ever memories was figuring out how to get games to load by typing LOAD "" and seeing the flash of colour and sound in the loading screen fade away into a black background with 2 white tanks on either side of a battlefield, hitting each other in turns.

Pantechnicon

08-04-2006, 08:36 PM

I did notice a lot of Mom & Pop video rental stores shut down around that time of my life, I'm pretty sure that had something to do with the VG crash as well, or at least coicided with it.

I don't think would have been related to the crash. Videogame rental really didn't come into its own until the NES era. Perhaps these stores may have been involved in sales, but I can't imagine that would have been a business killer.

Maybe those stores were invested too heavily in Betamax LOL .

gepeto

08-04-2006, 11:18 PM

I knew there were serious problems when I started seeing atari games being sold on intellivision. I couldn't believe it centipede,Pacman,defender.

They were fan boys back then. sorta like the neo geo scene. I would have never thought in a million years that atari would put them games on the competitions consoles. Good ports too.

Computers were there but I think they didn't cause or perticipate in the crash because computers were very expensive Most people played them at school or the one persons house that had it.

Here is my hypothesis. The Vhs was in its infancy. It was a real wonder to behold because now you can record live tv.
See movies that were in the theater uncut in your own home. That diverted alot of people from the console in my opinion. everybody was recording everything. Porn in the privacy of your own home, Movie rental stores were popping up in every neighborhood. It was crazy.

Alot of stores panicked started dumping stock. Stores were great for copying one another. Old foggys just considered it a fad and it wasn't suppose to last anyway. Alot of people were doing there own market analysis.

I believe the young generation cannot comprehend how the influx of new technology can really be mold a society. Most, even my daughter has had it all since birth. TV, vcr ,computers.

Stuff she takes for granted was very revolutionary.
Today it would take something revolutionary like if technology became availible to instantly transport people from point to another. Man there would be a social switch. I know i would be jammin somewhere tonight.

Aswald

08-08-2006, 03:09 PM

When I noticed that all of the "experts" were claiming that "computers were the wave of the future."

When an issue of an electronics gaming magazine mentioned the story of a repairman saying "anything vector can do raster can do- usually better" three times as "proof."

When I noticed that everything about the future of gaming was all about the opinions of Baby Boomers, and never about the ones playing the games- us.

I knew that a storm was approaching. Then, in mid-1984...

rolenta

08-09-2006, 08:46 AM

The crash was evident at CES.

At the June 1983 show there were approximately 50 companies offering 2600 games. That number dropped to three at the January 1984 show.

ManciGames

08-09-2006, 12:16 PM

I'm inclined to agree with the revisionists here.

There wasn't so much a "crash" as there was a movement to "next generation". In this case...computers.

Everyone I knew at the time who had an Atari either kept playing their Atari and enjoying their cheap new games, or were buying C64s.

I just don't think we understood at the time that we were just moving onto a new generation of games. Sure, I think we stumbled into it due to a number of factors (piss poor games, relatively higher price of the C64 compared to what you could buy a 2600 for at the time, etc.), but we made it through nonetheless.

Nobody understood "the 5 year cycle" yet. I remember my parents not wanting to buy me a C64 because "your Atari is only a few years old and besides, you can buy a new one for $75 and that computer is $250." Nowadays, we understand that last-gen hardware will sink in price as we move into the next generation. For some reason, that just didn't register the right way during the move from first to second generation.

ozyr

08-10-2006, 04:31 AM

Frankly, I didn't really notice it too much. Yeah, systems dissappeared, but games were they. Thus, I kept playing games - 7800 and such - until the NES appeared years later.
Only affect this period had on me was the quick death of the Timex/SInclair 2068.

ccc---

08-14-2006, 03:04 AM

Here in Europe I didn't note something like a big crash. I bought my Philips Videopac+ G7400 in the beginning of 1984 I think. I read the TeleMatch back then (German version of Electronic Games) and they wrote about the crash in 1984, but in fact I didn't care. Philips continued to release games and everything was ok, until the end of 1984, when the members of the Austrian G7000 club were informed that the club had reached its goals (to bring video games to the people) and will close down in the beginning of 1985. We were very disappointed of course, but as the home computers had entered the electronic shops then, I bought an Atari 130 XE in September 1985. That was it, the home computers were just the better video game consoles. But I didn't really notice something of a "crash". And I can't remember that they brought anything of a crash in the newspapers or TV back then.

SeGaFiEnD

08-14-2006, 10:57 PM

I remember it well. I was 10 and my brother 13. We had a nice Colecovision collection going. Nothing good came out and stores like Odd Lot had Atari and Colecovision games for $1.00 each in piles in bins. However we were saved when his best friend got a computer. His friend knew everything about computer gaming and so did my brother. So for about two years we basically lived at this kids house. Until good ol' NES won our trust back. :)

http://videogamecollectors.com/gallery/SeGaFiEnD

SeGaFiEnD

08-14-2006, 10:58 PM

SeGaFiEnD

08-14-2006, 10:58 PM