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The video game crash of 1983
1983 was a time of huge success for Nintendo with the success of their Donkey Kong arcade series including: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr and Donkey Kong 3 as well as their biggest arcade release of the year: Mario Bros. This firmly cemented Nintendo as the new force on the gaming market. This was also the year that Nintendo announced plans for the Famicom in Japan, their first console with interchangable cartridges. Nintendo were prospering, especially in Japan but overeseas in America Atari had thrown the video game market into chaos and almost destroyed the medium entirely. This came about from what should have been a monuumental deal for Atari: exclusive video game adaptation rights to the year's biggest block buster E.T..
Howard Scott Warshaw, famous for his successful games Indianna Jones and Yars Revenge (both on the Atari 2600) was tasked with creating the infamous E.T. game alone and in just six weeks. This game cannot be solely blamed for the market crash but did impact it significantly. Warshaw worked to the deadline of the christmas period to finish the game and finished just in time. The game was a commercial success but a critical failure, millions of copies sold but also millions were being returned to shops all over America. The game filled Atari warhouses in Texas and as shop owners sent the cartridges back Atari ran out of room to store them.
The game was a failure for many reasons but the goal of the game reflected the film, E.T. needs to collect phone pieces to "phone home". The concept was simple enough but the problems arose from the randomiser the game was built on so it looked different everytime, there were pits you could fall down that were invisible or imposible to avoid, you could run out of energy from moving too much and die and the list goes on and on (maybe a future post will be needed to express how bad this game really was). Also causing problems for Atari was the return of thousands of Pacman cartridges. Pacman was a huge success but the Atari 2600 was a very poor port of the game. As this game was a huge commercial success too Atari kept making the cartridges of both E.T. and Pacman.
This overinflated the video game market and resulted in the crash of the whole industry in America. People lost faith in the industry and, more specifically, Atari. Atari's poor management resulted in Nolan Bush, the founder of Atari to sell the entire company to Jack Tramiel in 1983 (he also plays the final part of one of Atari's greatest stories but that will be a future post). Other companies also felt the impact like Mattel with their Intellivision and the Connecticut Leather Company with their Colecovision. Atari also had warehouses filling up with unsold Atari 5200 consoles from the previous year and still more and more were being sent back to Atari. With all these games and consoles filling Atari's warehouses what could Atari do? They were losing millions by the day and had no room to store any new games or consoles. Their solution to this problem is a unique one. Next time we'll see what Atari did to save space in their warehouses!
