kingpong: I'm talking strictly dates here. "Crash" or no crash regardless, the TECHNOLOGY is what I am referring to. It makes no sense to call the Colecovision a classic when the NES technology upon worldwide release was less than a year later, and call that a "neo" classic.

I was fully aware of arcades/consoles since I was going to the arcade 7 days a week back in the mid 80s, and Zody's (a crappy department store), had a Family arcade next to it, and every single grocery store/casino/pizza parlor within a 2 miles radius of me (and there were numerous) had arcade machines.

This "crash" is just really referring to the ET Atari 2600 game, and a lot of companies were dumping "some" games, but it wasn't as crazy as you think. People still carried games normally (in my area) and not everything was dumped. The 2600 was reboxed later on for $49.99 in that red box in the mid to late 80s right around the time the NES was in full distribution, but those 2.5 years of supposed crash might have affected retail, but arcade still remained decent. Sure, it fell off slightly, but there was an even BIGGER crash for arcades in the 90s and for some reason video games as a whole are only referred to market crashes for console.

The point is, the NES technology was already in arcades. The system came out in Japan. I don't care if it came out in Antarctica, most of the VS arcade games came to the NES later, so to determine that the technology does not fit in to the same category because of ET failing to sell is ridiculous.

I was there through this whole thing, and I have to say not everyone thought video games were a "fad" still from retail. Arcades were still around, people were still releasing games, console stuff was just stagnant for a bit, but that does not denote that the technology was not classic by any means, and I was around through this whole mess....I know our department stores sure didn't have a blowout of all Atari games for $1 in 1984-85....