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| Video Game crash of 1983 |
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| Thenasty:
Did not really notice. I just got myself the C64 (seen the a2600 graphics, ewww.) cause graphics was better. This is when I got addicted to COPYing >:D (any1 remember RENEGADE for C64 ?) |
| Arimack:
I never owned an Atari 2600 as a child because parents could not afford it back then. I did have friends who owned either it or an Atari 400 when they first came out. I played a ton of it because there was nothing else other than going to a real arcade. My main experience during the crash was that my family finally got a system to play video games on thanks to Texas Instruments. My folks bought a TI-99/4A for Christmas that year thanks to a $100 rebate that let us buy it for $99 on sale at Sears. It ended up being orphaned that next year during the crash, 1983. I think we had five games for it. Great choice Mom and Dad! But as for gaming, my friends who had the Ataris quickly moved on to the Commodore 64 around that time. For the next five years or so, we played exclusively on the Commodore. I went to college in 1987 and took my Commodore with me. I was not really too aware of Nintendo in college (I think most people my age thought of it as a kids system). Then I ended up buying a Sega Genesis in 1990 (the adult system as it was marketed then!) So I think the crash was not really that noticeable to most kids at the time. Atari 2600/Coleco/Intellivision just became old hat and went to the bargain bin. No one was playing them anymore. We did not really pay attention to the economics of the thing. Honestly, it just became the old system and there was better stuff out there. There were not a lot of dedicated video game stores out there so it disappeared from the catalog for Sears and JC Penny and new stuff replaced it. I mean who wanted to play a bad copy of PacMan on the 2600 when you could play UltimaIV/Beachhead/Impossible Mission/Archon/etc on a Commodore....with the same controls plus a keyboard! I think most of us did not notice that everything got so cheap because we were all looking at the next shiny thing on the screen and did not notice the crash. Plus we still had video arcades to go to! |
| RandyT:
--- Quote from: yotsuya on August 30, 2012, 02:56:11 pm ---I STILL have a boxed Star Raiders in my shed. I loved that game, although it all honesty, it really didn't need the keypad. --- End quote --- When I finally scraped together enough money for an Atari 400 (my first actual computer), Star Raiders and Pac-Man were the two games I ordered with it. When I first booted Star Raiders, I was in heaven, and Pac Man, compared to the 2600 version, was fantastic. It was that moment I knew what the future held and my quarters started flowing toward buying games, instead of into the arcades (well...some quarters still went to the arcades, just not as many ;D) --- Quote from: Ravenger on August 30, 2012, 03:07:28 pm ---Here in the UK we didn't really have a video game crash. What happened instead was the rise of low cost microcomputers like the Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum, (sold as the Timex/Sinclair 1000 and 2000 in the US), Commodore VIC 20 and C64, which rapidly took over from the VCS, Intellivision and other consoles. --- End quote --- I lived in Germany (stationed there by the US Army) from late '83 to '87. I have to say, it was the same there. Consoles just didn't have the same following as they did in the US, and arcades never took off to the same extent. But it was a great time to be there, as it seemed that folks weren't just playing games, but getting very involved in development of both hardware and software, at the smallest of scales. I still remember riding a train to a city hours away to buy an inexpensive MIDI interface kit from a guy who had designed his own and was selling them from his small apartment. There were a lot of items out there you had to know someone, who knew someone else, in order to find. Different days. |
| yotsuya:
--- Quote from: RandyT on August 30, 2012, 03:27:54 pm --- --- Quote from: yotsuya on August 30, 2012, 02:56:11 pm ---I STILL have a boxed Star Raiders in my shed. I loved that game, although it all honesty, it really didn't need the keypad. --- End quote --- When I finally scraped together enough money for an Atari 400 (my first actual computer), Star Raiders and Pac-Man were the two games I ordered with it. When I first booted Star Raiders, I was in heaven, and Pac Man, compared to the 2600 version, was fantastic. It was that moment I knew what the future held and my quarters started flowing toward buying games, instead of into the arcades (well...some quarters still went to the arcades, just not as many ;D) --- End quote --- So when can we expect the USB Groovy StarRaidersWiz??? I'd like to preorder. :laugh: |
| PL1:
--- Quote from: yotsuya on August 30, 2012, 03:47:21 pm ---So when can we expect the USB Groovy StarRaidersWiz??? I'd like to preorder. :laugh: --- End quote --- I don't know if Randy's got anything in the development pipeline, but Degenatron is talking seriously about adding keypad support to his KADE/AVR encoder. (Matrix encoder support) Atari 2600 keypad support is at the top of the layout list I compiled for him. Scott |
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