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Video Game crash of 1983
DrumAnBass:
The most vivid memory I have of the crash was seeing a clearance bin in the local supermarket, piled high with 3rd party 2600 game carts for $4 each, along with 2600 compatible joysticks for $5... In a SUPERMARKET! By that time, I had moved on to the C64 and knew that times, they were-a-changin'
fantoboy:
I moved to Japan in 83 (Air Force brat), when the Famicom (NES) was new and hadn't hit the US yet. So 83 was actually a great year for video games as far as I was concerned.
RandyT:
--- Quote from: Gatt on August 31, 2012, 11:17:41 pm ---Keep in mind that a video game back then was a 5 or 10 minute experience with little to no personal involvement, in contrast to later years where a game could last 40 hours or more, had narrative, and often the Player is involved in the game's direction as it plays out. The games were designed after arcade game design philosophies, and the result was a experience that failed to cause long-term engagement.
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I think you are looking at the past through a modern filter. In those days, that number at the top of the screen reigned supreme. The score meant something to players, and playing a game for 40 hours was nothing in the quest to get that number higher. After a friend and I got good at Yar's Revenge, we sat in a room for 24 hours straight and played it until we could roll the score, which we did a did at least twice in the same game.
While games with a narrative are appealing nowadays (they really weren't at first), the fact that they have an end does more to disengage players from the game. It does, however, keep GameStop in business ;).
SavannahLion:
Thanks Randy, what I came up with was a lot less civil.
To put it in perspective.
This ~~> :lol cannot fit into the Atari 2600 6507 RAM space yet every game had to run with 128 bytes of RAM.
This ~~> :dunno is too large to fit on an Adventure cartridge, yet Warren Robinett managed to pack an entire adventure game PLUS the first Easter Egg into 4K of ROM space.
Personally, I find Adventure more captivating than staring at :dunno.
DaveMMR:
--- Quote from: ark_ader on August 31, 2012, 11:21:38 am ---I wonder how much that ET 2600 cartridge is worth today?
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Next to nothing. ;D
--- Quote from: RandyT on September 01, 2012, 02:58:05 am ---I think you are looking at the past through a modern filter. In those days, that number at the top of the screen reigned supreme. The score meant something to players, and playing a game for 40 hours was nothing in the quest to get that number higher. After a friend and I got good at Yar's Revenge, we sat in a room for 24 hours straight and played it until we could roll the score, which we did a did at least twice in the same game.
While games with a narrative are appealing nowadays (they really weren't at first), the fact that they have an end does more to disengage players from the game. It does, however, keep GameStop in business ;).
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+1 A lot of people can't believe that people spent so much time playing these archaic games but it definitely wasn't 5-to-10 minute bursts. For me, getting the score to roll was the modern equivalent of "beating a game". And a lot of these old Atari and Coleco games had a large number of difficulty settings to master, so there was more replay value than people think.
As for the crash: I personally didn't realized it happened until years later, though I do remember now that my parents really stocked up on the Colecovision carts Christmas of 1983 and now I know why. And while a lot of people point all the blame at Pacman and E.T. for the 2600, it really was a combination of many factors - one of them being the rise of the affordable home computer. While carts were being tossed into bargain bins, we were booting up our Commodore 64's, etc. and really enjoying advanced games without knowing our favorite console game publishers were hemorrhaging money behind-the-scenes.
The North American Crash really did shape a lot of what gaming eventually became. You can thank that event for Nintendo's "VCR-like" design of the NES (it can't look like a videogame), the ROB (used to convince retailers it's more of a toy), and the lock-out chips and strict licensing agreements that have been put in place to stem the glut of poor quality, unauthorized games.