Its been a good long while since we first put this blog into effect, the idea was simple. We like video games so lets talk about them, be it new or old, bad or good, we just wanted to talk about video games. For most of us growing up video games were a big part of our lives, from the simple beginnings of the NES and Master Systems, right up to the Wii's and 360's of today. Now of course there was a time before us, when the Atari and its kin ruled the infant video game market way back before the North American Video Game Crash in 1983.
I myself personally never owned an Atari, however my brother owned an Atari 2600 and we had a fair amount of games to choose from (his personal favourite if I recall being Circus.) The games themselves were crazy simple, and fun for the most part. The problem during this time was the over-saturation of the growing market. You had roughly about 12 different consoles out, some of which being straight up clones of other consoles. Not to mention the large amount of hastily started companies which crafted wonderful “classics” like the unplayable ET the Extra-Terrestrial and the terrible port of arcade classic Pac-Man to home systems.
It was also at this point that personal computers were starting to get some spot light, in the early 80's companies were starting to release PC's that would connect to a colour TV which offered improved sound and graphics. Now most of us know, most early PC's in comparison to older consoles offered more memory, better graphics, better sound. PC's as well used various forms of memory storage, floppy disks, cassette tapes and so on which allowed players to save their progress seeing as most PC games were far more complex then their current console counterparts. This also allowed for games to be easily copied and exchanged thanks to this writable storage.
I am sure most of you know of Activision, this particular company was originally founded by former Atari programmers. Why is that? Well you see, these said programmers left Atari in 1979 due to the fact that Atari would not allow credits to appear on games and would not pay employees on a royalty biased on sales. Now when you put a lot of your own hard work and effort into creating a product obviously you'd want payment for your time, and seeing that Atari was owned by Warner Communications the developers felt that they should be paid and receive the same amount of recognition that musicians, directors, and actors get. Now remember these guys aren't making 8-bit NES titles, they are making very simple titles however many staples of platform and puzzle games would not exist if not for these simple titles. Now after Activision went into business, Atari moved quickly to try and block sales of their products, however they never won a restraining order and lost the case in 1982. Thanks to this case, more third party developers started coming out of the woodwork. Companies in an attempt to get some money out of this growing industry started rushing to create video game divisions. They even went as far as luring away programmers from each other, using reverse engineering to learn how to make games for proprietary systems, and hiring programmers from other studios.
Now because of all this stealing, poor mistreatment of programmers most of which working in obscurity, the creation of upstart competitors, this caused hardware manufactures to lose exclusive control of their platforms' supply of games. This caused them to lose the ability to make sure that toy stores were never overloaded with products. Now many of these companies created during this time had experienced programmers (Atari, Activision, and Mattel), but most of these new companies in an attempt to hastily join the market had little to no experience or talent to create games. As they paid into advertising and marketing the games themselves were of poor quality which further damaged the industry which already was slowly falling apart.
The actual crash itself was caused by two games, Pac-Man for the Atari 2600, and the infamous ET. In Pac-Man's case it was so rushed (they wanted the game out for the Christmas of 81) that it really didn't play anything like its arcade counterpart, and Atari thinking that it would be a top seller created more cartilages then it sold creating a huge loss. ET? Fuck what do I have to say about ET, it was an awful game. Rushed much in the same way as Pac-Man it was unplayable, and just overall not fun. As most of you know its considered to be one of the worst games in history and was so bad, Atari bought all of the unsold copies and buried them in a landfill in New Mexico (mind you this could be just a rumour, but I believe it.) These two factors became such huge loses for Atari that it was sold two years later.
By 1982 there were so many new games that most stores lacked the space to carry them, as stores moved to return the surplus games back to the publishers the publishers had no new products nor did they have the money to refund the retailers. Most publishers folded, and by June of 1983 the market was replaced by rushed to market budget games. Now as most companies fell apart, closed or abandoned games altogether, some companies like Activision survived by working on PC games.
At the end it came down to one thing, most toy companies saw video games as nothing more then a simple fad. Video games simply became ignored. This saw the movement of the home console market from the US to Japan, moving into 1985 when the NES is now at the top spot of a slowly recovering industry with Sega and Atari fighting for the number 2 spot.
Was anything learned from the video game crash? You bet your sweet ass! First thing was the placement of measures to control third-party game development which in the current video game market is key. Nintendo for example, would use methods such as a lock out chip and licensing restrictions. Not just anyone could come into the market and make a game for the NES, they need to have the appropriate key chip for the lock inside the console and they had to acknowledge its licence to Nintendo in the copyright notices. Without this key chip, the game simply did not work.
Nintendo set the standard for licensing third-party developers, and the NES itself is noted as being the best-selling console of all time!
Wait? Where are you going with all this information Kevin? Well I'll tell you, it was around this time when video games started becoming not only a large effect on my life, but the lives of many. Most of the people that were around during and after the crash are the very same who write and create games today! Video games, the systems, even the people that play them have evolved from being just people latching onto what was seen as a “fad” to being part of a worldwide phenomenon. Most game consoles today do far more then just play games, where the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) was simply a game console the very name it carried would soon carry more meaning then it did back in the day. Consoles now, are full on entertainment systems from playing music and movies some even carrying the ability to surf the web.
To get back to my point, myself personally have been able to see the evolution of games from a simple past-time to a powerful art form. The purpose of my next few articles, will explore my personal experiences and hopefully give you all an idea of what we hope to accomplish with Haruokay.
