Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech style from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: welcome to check stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and
Speaker 1: I am an editor here at how stuff works dot Com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan
Speaker 1: Strickland on the other side of the screen. It all
Speaker 1: looks so easy. That's a quote. Never mind, I said,
Speaker 1: I wasn't gonna say where it was farm anymore, so
Speaker 1: people have to tell me where it's from. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: today we're gonna talk about the great video game crash,
Speaker 1: which really we should specify happened in North America. Yes,
Speaker 1: and we're not talking about the video game crash that
Speaker 1: we of arcade games. We're talking specifically of the home market. Yes.
Speaker 1: So in order to understand this, we really have to
Speaker 1: uh to think back to the origin of the video
Speaker 1: game market the home market. Um, because it doesn't really
Speaker 1: make sense to talk about the crash until you find
Speaker 1: out how you got to where you were in the
Speaker 1: first place. Right, True enough, and honestly, the the arcade
Speaker 1: game market and the home market started roughly the same
Speaker 1: time they were growing out of um you know some
Speaker 1: work that different computer programmers were doing in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: even a little bit earlier. But it's kind of hard
Speaker 1: to say that it was really becoming a video game
Speaker 1: of any kind of sort until it got to the
Speaker 1: late sixties and the early seventies is when you saw
Speaker 1: the first arcade games and first home video games, and
Speaker 1: I'm talking early seventies nine. Nineteen seventy two is when
Speaker 1: we saw the very first home video game console in
Speaker 1: the North American market, and it was a Magna Vox Odyssey. Man,
Speaker 1: what a machine that was. Yeah, the original Odyssey. Now
Speaker 1: there were lots and lots of future Odyssey consoles, which well,
Speaker 1: I'll chat about briefly. I've got a kind of timeline
Speaker 1: where i can talk about some of the consoles that
Speaker 1: came out and the big years in video game the
Speaker 1: home video game market. But nineteen seventy two is probably
Speaker 1: the biggest year because it's the first one. Um So
Speaker 1: you had the Odyssey, which was designed by an engineer
Speaker 1: named Ralph Bear, and he had been working on the
Speaker 1: prototype for this since the late sixties, like you had mentioned,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's interesting. It was um it was powered
Speaker 1: by batteries. It was not something that you plugged into
Speaker 1: a wall at that point, and it was analog not digital,
Speaker 1: so pretty lot. Also, no sound in the earliest console
Speaker 1: there was no You didn't get audio. You just had
Speaker 1: a video output. And the video output, of course, was
Speaker 1: your television. You had to hook it up to a TV.
Speaker 1: It didn't have its own screen or anything like that.
Speaker 1: You know what I have to say about that? What's that?
Speaker 1: Because there was no sounds really funny. So in nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: thank you for the pity there, You're welcome. In ninety three,
Speaker 1: the the Pong coin operated game was starting to make
Speaker 1: a splash. That's right. So Pong is like the first
Speaker 1: like major breakthrough arcade game, uh to hit the arcades,
Speaker 1: well not even arcades at that point, but bars and
Speaker 1: and things like that. Yeah. Computer Space was the very
Speaker 1: first coin operated game. Yeah but uh, and and that
Speaker 1: was done Nolan Bushnell. Those of you longtime listeners or
Speaker 1: computer game fans probably know who Nolan Bushnell was. But yeah,
Speaker 1: Pong was actually the second of those games. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: in nineteen Sears began to sell a Pong home console.
Speaker 1: I remember that now I should point out I should
Speaker 1: have said this for the Odyssey as well. These home
Speaker 1: consoles had games hard coded into them. Yeah, we're talking
Speaker 1: the chips actually very similar to arcade games. Yes, the
Speaker 1: chips inside them would tell you what they would do.
Speaker 1: So I mean you're not removing a cartridge, right, you know,
Speaker 1: a CD or DVD which hadn't been invented yet. You
Speaker 1: couldn't even switch a chip out like with with some
Speaker 1: arcade machines you can switch out rams, so a RAM
Speaker 1: would be what essentially has the game's programming on it,
Speaker 1: And some arcade consoles, you know, you can switch one
Speaker 1: ROM out for another and use the same cabinet to
Speaker 1: house different games. So if one game is not getting
Speaker 1: a lot of traffic in an arcade, you could swap
Speaker 1: out the ROM for and put in a new game. Uh,
Speaker 1: you couldn't do that with these home consoles. You're stuck
Speaker 1: with whatever games they were able to put on there.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of them were variations of pong um.
Speaker 1: You know, like you might have pong and then you
Speaker 1: might have handball, which is really just a slightly the
Speaker 1: paddles are slightly smaller and it moves faster. Um and basketball,
Speaker 1: in which case everything was was um horizontally oriented rather
Speaker 1: than vertically oriented, but it was still using the same
Speaker 1: sort of mechanics as pong. Uh. It was really just
Speaker 1: variations on that for a while. So se you get
Speaker 1: the Odyssey one and two hundred. Uh, this one was
Speaker 1: kind of funny and that um the the PALNK system
Speaker 1: that Sears put out in had an on screen scoring system.
Speaker 1: It would keep track of your score. The Magnavox Odyssey
Speaker 1: on two hundred did not have an on screen scoring system.
Speaker 1: It had little plastic markers on the console itself, and
Speaker 1: you would move your marker up a notch every time
Speaker 1: you scored a point until whoever reached the you know,
Speaker 1: whatever the limit was that you had decided, whether that
Speaker 1: was the top of the notches or all right, we'll
Speaker 1: play to whoever it gets to five points first. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of like playing a game of pool. You
Speaker 1: actually had to physically notate what your score was on
Speaker 1: the console system. Do I get to throw in a
Speaker 1: plug for my very first video game system? Go for it?
Speaker 1: Because it was a clone of all these There were
Speaker 1: lots and lots of Palm clones, but mine, which I
Speaker 1: still have is colicos tells to our system that came
Speaker 1: out in Yes, lots of them did. The fair Child
Speaker 1: Channel F was out about that same time, which actually
Speaker 1: that was one of the first ones to ever use cartridges. Yes,
Speaker 1: in seventy six, you've got the Odyssey three hundred, four hundred,
Speaker 1: five hundred, Super Pong, Wonder Wizard, and the Calico tell Star.
Speaker 1: And like you said, the tell Star was one that
Speaker 1: had hard coded games on it, right, the tell Star,
Speaker 1: yes did, and it had three So this this is
Speaker 1: before Kalika Vision. This is not that's not what we're
Speaker 1: talking about. We're talking about earlier system than that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the whole thing. When you were talking
Speaker 1: about the cartridges, Um, we're talking about the rams again,
Speaker 1: which are hard coded inside. But at least these newer
Speaker 1: machines gave you a slot from which you could remove
Speaker 1: a RAM and put a new cartridge in, so then
Speaker 1: you could play. It was extensible, You could play lots
Speaker 1: of different games on it. Yeah, So the fair Child
Speaker 1: Channel F never really took off, but it was the
Speaker 1: first one to actually start using a cartridge based system.
Speaker 1: So the next year and seventy seven, uh well started
Speaker 1: seeing things like the Atari Video Pinball Machine, the Atari
Speaker 1: Stunt cycle machine. But also there were a couple more
Speaker 1: to tell Star models that came out, and of course
Speaker 1: more Odyssey games. What about the r C A Studio series. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's that as well. But the but in seventy seven
Speaker 1: a big one hit, probably the big one for the
Speaker 1: earliest video game market story, which is the Atari VCS,
Speaker 1: the video computer system, which was actually my very first.
Speaker 1: The other one was technically my brothers, but you know,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to plug the tell Star Yeah I
Speaker 1: had as well. Now this was of course a cartridge
Speaker 1: based system again, so there were no games pre programmed
Speaker 1: on the console. Yeah, there was a game packaged with
Speaker 1: the system though for mine it was Combat, Yes it
Speaker 1: was mine. For Combat was mine as well. And I'll
Speaker 1: never forget playing jet versus airplane. Yeah, fun times anyway.
Speaker 1: So actually that that's going back to you, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I didn't mean going back to your scoring thing. For
Speaker 1: those of you who have never played an Atari. Um
Speaker 1: the games and about which we were talking, they came
Speaker 1: with an instruction book, and and most of the instruction
Speaker 1: books that at Chari published. There the last couple of
Speaker 1: pages or last page had a note field so that
Speaker 1: you could write down your high scores because of course
Speaker 1: at that point, well maybe not of course, but at
Speaker 1: that point they didn't have any kind of onboard storage,
Speaker 1: So so I didn't remember your high scores and you
Speaker 1: wanted to keep it, keep track of it, you needed
Speaker 1: to write it down. Yeah. This is also before like
Speaker 1: at this point, the the video games that you would
Speaker 1: get in the home market were a lot like the
Speaker 1: ones in the arcade and that they were usually you know,
Speaker 1: usually would only play them for short burst because uh,
Speaker 1: there's no way to save your progress. So there was
Speaker 1: no point in writing a longer game that would require
Speaker 1: multiple sessions of play because there was no way to
Speaker 1: to save and pick up where you left off. I mean,
Speaker 1: why would you come back and and and just basically
Speaker 1: leave the machine on for day is as you worked
Speaker 1: your way through a game because there wasn't any way
Speaker 1: to store that. There are a lot of people who
Speaker 1: did that with later systems in particular. Um, well we'll
Speaker 1: get to those. But so then let's go ahead to
Speaker 1: seventy eight. We get some more tell Stars because you know,
Speaker 1: every year has to pass with another tell Star getting Uh,
Speaker 1: that's when the Odyssey Squared came out or Odyssely to
Speaker 1: um that actually was a computer and it had basic programming. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then you also had Colico tell Star Gemini, which was
Speaker 1: an attenty sud clone that came out in Sight, and
Speaker 1: the one and only entrigue from uh Bally the Ballet
Speaker 1: Professional Arcade came out in that year. I remember that too,
Speaker 1: And do you guys if you listen to our Midway podcast,
Speaker 1: you know that Bally had purchased Midway. This was the
Speaker 1: result of Bally Midway working together to create a home
Speaker 1: arcade system use bitmap graphics. Did not succeed those that one.
Speaker 1: You know, you may not have ever heard of it
Speaker 1: because it never really well anywhere. Um, did you want
Speaker 1: to have anything else to add? For seventy eight before
Speaker 1: I go to see Okay? Seventy nine you had the
Speaker 1: Zircon Channel F system to Wow, which was like the
Speaker 1: fair Child is going back, and then um, the Atari
Speaker 1: four hundred, yes, which also was really kind of a computer. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It actually had its own keyboard built into that console
Speaker 1: and uh, yeah it was. It was meant to be
Speaker 1: like a kid's computer. Like my first computer was the
Speaker 1: Atari four hundred and it was also cartridge based. It
Speaker 1: did have an onboard program which was essentially a notepad program.
Speaker 1: It was kind of like a very very basic word processor.
Speaker 1: You should, uh, if you're an old if you're a
Speaker 1: fan of old computers, I didn't want to say old
Speaker 1: computer fan. If you're a fan of old computers, you
Speaker 1: should definitely check out the Atari four and, as Jonathan
Speaker 1: will mention shortly, the eight hundred, which looked very much
Speaker 1: like it because they were kind of cool. They had
Speaker 1: a big door and the top of them to remove
Speaker 1: and insert cartridges from, so you can actually you know,
Speaker 1: open it up and plug it in and then close
Speaker 1: the door back again. Very kind of old school computer style,
Speaker 1: and had a membrane keyboard, which is real pain and
Speaker 1: neck to type on. It's not entirely differed from the
Speaker 1: way the Nintendo had a door where she would flip
Speaker 1: open and take a cartridge out in a way, no,
Speaker 1: but it kind of reminds me of the old mainframe
Speaker 1: style things where we had to open it up to
Speaker 1: actually mess with it, rather than you know, like the
Speaker 1: hr vcs, which the slot was just on the top
Speaker 1: right where dust could get in it. Yes, where you
Speaker 1: got into the hole let's blow into the cartridge before
Speaker 1: we put it into the machine, because if dust got
Speaker 1: in there, if enough dust got in there, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: work anymore. Another big player hits the scene, which is
Speaker 1: Mattel's in television. I believe you had one of these.
Speaker 1: I did have an intelevision, and I had an intelevision
Speaker 1: long after the heyday of intelevision games had had passed. Well,
Speaker 1: people are still playing the games now, yeah, but there
Speaker 1: was no way there were no new games coming out
Speaker 1: by the time I had. I came into possession of one.
Speaker 1: I inherited it essentially from a cousin, And yeah, it
Speaker 1: was a It was a really neat game system. It
Speaker 1: was I would call it more advanced than the Atari
Speaker 1: twenty hundred. It still wasn't you know, it wouldn't blow
Speaker 1: you away or anything, but but the games were a
Speaker 1: little more sophisticated than the ones you would get on
Speaker 1: the twenty. Well, I think it directly resulted in Atari's
Speaker 1: next move, which we'll get into in a moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's when we start seeing some more some more
Speaker 1: interesting machines. We see the Clico vision, another big heavy
Speaker 1: hitter in television and click a vision kind of battled
Speaker 1: it out in the early eighties to see who would
Speaker 1: have video game supremacy, and Attari had a leg up
Speaker 1: just because it'd been around a little longer than the
Speaker 1: other two, even though the other two had slightly better
Speaker 1: graphics and and arguably a better controller, depending on whether
Speaker 1: or not you felt like you got a couple tunnel
Speaker 1: from it. Well, it's funny because at this point in
Speaker 1: home video gaming there was sort of this weird crossover
Speaker 1: between home computers and home video game systems. Um. Like
Speaker 1: today you see stuff like the WE and the PlayStation
Speaker 1: series and the the Xbox series, and they can do
Speaker 1: things that computers do. But uh, some of these systems,
Speaker 1: you know, um getting into the Colico Vision, and then
Speaker 1: Colico also started a system called the Atom, which was
Speaker 1: supposed to be a computer system, but they were sort
Speaker 1: of compatible with one another, and you know the R
Speaker 1: four eight hundred UM and uh, you know they're they're
Speaker 1: things like that, and having the opportunity to use a keypad,
Speaker 1: because the Colliquo Vision and the in Television both had
Speaker 1: a Numeriic keypad on their their controllers, as did the
Speaker 1: R and so for a while there, I think the
Speaker 1: manufacturers were all sort of flirting with this idea that
Speaker 1: you know, maybe creating a system that could do all
Speaker 1: of the stuff. Um. Unfortunately, uh, that didn't come out
Speaker 1: in the way I think that they really intended, or
Speaker 1: you know, none of them, none of these companies were
Speaker 1: able to capitalize on it. Yeah, a lot of the
Speaker 1: a lot of the consumers seem to think that these games,
Speaker 1: these systems were more game systems than computer systems. There
Speaker 1: was more of a division of the two products in
Speaker 1: the mind of the average consumer, and it was really
Speaker 1: hard to bridge that gap. I think because I think
Speaker 1: what they may have been trying to do, and this
Speaker 1: is just speculation on my part, is that perhaps they
Speaker 1: thought if they could embed some computer ability in it,
Speaker 1: that it might encourage more moms and dads to fork
Speaker 1: over the cash for a video game system that they
Speaker 1: could do their taxes on. Yeah, you know, later on
Speaker 1: it's like, well, you know, and like Kate video game
Speaker 1: system exactly. But um, but yeah, I mean also, Atari
Speaker 1: had a leg up on Colico because Atari was a,
Speaker 1: if you will, a pure play h video game company,
Speaker 1: whereas Colico stood for Kinnectic Get Leather company. They actually
Speaker 1: had their roots in a completely different business. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: games that you play with leather. I've made this joke.
Speaker 1: I made this exact same joke, so I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: several times I believe. Yeah, well, I mean on the
Speaker 1: podcast specifically, I make the joke all the time. In
Speaker 1: the office. Actually, HR will probably talk to me, no, no,
Speaker 1: but but yeah, I mean they were they were doing
Speaker 1: something else for a long time and then got into
Speaker 1: two Electronics and uh, Colico bet hard and the Callico Vision, right,
Speaker 1: and getting back to two. So Collico Vision comes out.
Speaker 1: Also the at comes out, which is essentially the Atari
Speaker 1: four hundred but without the keyboard. Right. You had the
Speaker 1: vet trex come out. Look like a little console. I
Speaker 1: had a little cabinet game. Yeah it actually it actually
Speaker 1: had its own dedicated screen, so it looked like a
Speaker 1: miniature arcade machine Kaid Cabinet Sorry, go ahead. And it's
Speaker 1: also vector based and monochromatic. It was vector based on
Speaker 1: the Grand Fields better but it was monochromatic. So what
Speaker 1: they they shipped the game system and the games with overlays. Nice.
Speaker 1: You put an overlay on the screen and that would
Speaker 1: simulate color. Very nice. Yeah, groovy. Also, the Emmerson Arcadia
Speaker 1: two thousand one came out in two as well as
Speaker 1: the in television two. And uh, we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: pause the timeline there in two because now we're getting
Speaker 1: up to the point where the actual crash began to
Speaker 1: take place. And uh, and there are a lot of
Speaker 1: different reasons for the crash. One of them we've already
Speaker 1: established just by doing the timeline. There were lots and
Speaker 1: lots of competing video game systems out there. Yeah, now
Speaker 1: we've we've basically been going from two up through the
Speaker 1: mid eighties, early eighties, about eight five, we're sort of
Speaker 1: getting this thing and um, that's the whole thing that
Speaker 1: we're in the third generation of consoles in you know, years,
Speaker 1: ten years really, I mean because because if you look
Speaker 1: at the crash, the crash is pretty much eighty three,
Speaker 1: so you think of as the eleventh year. So home
Speaker 1: video game market had ten amazing years. But as you
Speaker 1: were pointing out, three generations within ten years, gets, especially
Speaker 1: for a new kind of product, is hard for consumers
Speaker 1: to swallow. Ye, I mean it's at that time it
Speaker 1: was very difficult to think I need to I'm going
Speaker 1: to make a two or more investment two hundred dollars
Speaker 1: in those dollars those years, dollars which more than what
Speaker 1: you would spend today. So you know, you look at
Speaker 1: an arcade or a video game console as it comes
Speaker 1: out today and you're thinking, wow, five hundred dollars, it's
Speaker 1: a lot of money. Well, if you look at the
Speaker 1: consoles that first came out in the seventies, uh, they
Speaker 1: were priced around two hundred dollars, including the twenty hundred
Speaker 1: um when adjusted for inflation, they might be the same
Speaker 1: or more than what you will pay for a and
Speaker 1: like a brand new console in today's market. Yeah, as
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, I'm trying to look that up
Speaker 1: as we speak, but while the computer is percolating, since
Speaker 1: we have weird WiFi in this room. Um yeah, and
Speaker 1: something else too. I mean, at this point, the home
Speaker 1: video game industry was just huge, and other people were
Speaker 1: trying to get into it. A little company starting up
Speaker 1: you may have heard of, Activision, was fighting desperately to
Speaker 1: get on the Yeah, let's talk about this. This is
Speaker 1: where you can lay a lot of the blame for
Speaker 1: the video game crash on Atari's shoulders. Oh yeah, and
Speaker 1: here's here's what it boils down to. Ultimately is credit.
Speaker 1: Video game developers wanted to start getting credit for their work.
Speaker 1: They were designing these games, and they wanted to be
Speaker 1: able to have their names attached to the games that
Speaker 1: they were building. Atari meanwhile, wasn't too keen on that idea.
Speaker 1: They didn't see any need to do that. They wanted
Speaker 1: the games to look more like they all essentially were,
Speaker 1: you know, just from Atari. They didn't want to to
Speaker 1: differentiate that at all. Yeah, and uh, as a result
Speaker 1: that that did, I would say that ultimately four is
Speaker 1: the basis of what formed Activision. Yeah, it was game
Speaker 1: developers who wanted to be able to create games that
Speaker 1: they would get credit for, you know, they wouldn't remain anonymous. Um.
Speaker 1: By the way, according to Will from Alpha, at an
Speaker 1: average rate of inflation of two point nine one per year,
Speaker 1: two hundred dollars would be approximately four d four dollars
Speaker 1: and thirty four cents. So that's three. And remember that
Speaker 1: the came out in the late seventies, So yeah, we're
Speaker 1: talking about the early video game systems cost then in
Speaker 1: purchasing power essentially what they cost today. Yep, and uh,
Speaker 1: Woll from Alpha was working on that Toy seven debut
Speaker 1: at the tred two hundred dollars at an average rate
Speaker 1: of inflation of three point nine three percent per years,
Speaker 1: seven dollars seventy six cents, so actually more expensive than
Speaker 1: either the PlayStation three or the Xbox three sixty when
Speaker 1: they debuted. Yes, and in relative terms. But um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there was we talked about I think Warren
Speaker 1: Robinett in an earlier podcast. Probably he was one of
Speaker 1: the if I think he was the developer behind the
Speaker 1: game Adventure, and one of the big things to do
Speaker 1: back when that game was released was to find what
Speaker 1: was called a micro dot, which is not a micro
Speaker 1: dot in a classic sense, um in the spy terms,
Speaker 1: if you will, but a micro dot. There was a
Speaker 1: little glowing dot, a couple of pixels. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: exactly how big it was in terms of pickles pixels
Speaker 1: pickles pickles. It was about three gherkins wide. Anyway, I know,
Speaker 1: I know it's right before lunchtime. So anyway, if you
Speaker 1: could find this dot, you could take your character, which
Speaker 1: was a square through a wall that normally you wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to go through. It was just basically cordoning
Speaker 1: off part of the game. Yes, this was Easter Eggs podcast. Yes,
Speaker 1: and you could see the name of the designer, Warren Robinett,
Speaker 1: and uh, because otherwise you never would have seen it
Speaker 1: at all. Yeah, it wasn't It wasn't listed down. There
Speaker 1: weren't credits like like you see when you finish one
Speaker 1: of these, uh, one of the newer video games, you
Speaker 1: get a whole listing of all the animators and the
Speaker 1: story developers and the story boarders anybody else who's worked
Speaker 1: on the game. And it wasn't just a question of credit,
Speaker 1: although that was definitely important, big it was also royalties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean, without being credited for their work, these
Speaker 1: developers weren't going to be able to claim royalties on
Speaker 1: any sales. And uh, that's the that's probably the It's
Speaker 1: hard for me to say because I wasn't there, but
Speaker 1: I would guess that that was the main reason why
Speaker 1: Atari resisted this whole credit thing. They didn't want to
Speaker 1: pay out royalties to the developers, and um, so it
Speaker 1: boils down to money. So that ended up make having Uh,
Speaker 1: these these developers found activision, whether they're developing their own
Speaker 1: game company. Uh, there's a there was essentially a big
Speaker 1: restraining order that Atari put on on other game developers
Speaker 1: saying you can't develop games for our proprietary console. But
Speaker 1: it never panned out. So that kind of opened the
Speaker 1: doors for third party developers yep, and that allowed all
Speaker 1: sorts of games to flood on the market. Now, Activision
Speaker 1: had some of the uh I liked them a lot.
Speaker 1: I mean I played laser Blast for hours and hours,
Speaker 1: and Activision do Pitfall. Activision did do that is like
Speaker 1: and Mega Mania Pitfall. When I think of great home
Speaker 1: video games, especially for the Atari, Pitfall has got to
Speaker 1: be in the top ten. I mean it was a wonderful,
Speaker 1: amazing game and uh I loved it, and um yeah,
Speaker 1: so I mean the Activision put out some really good games. Now,
Speaker 1: the problem was not all third party developers put out
Speaker 1: games of the quality that Activision was creating. And because
Speaker 1: those floodgates had opened, where now any third party developer
Speaker 1: could build a an Atari game and sell it. You know,
Speaker 1: they didn't have to go through Atari to sell it.
Speaker 1: They just you know, they had to get their own
Speaker 1: distribut it or whatever, but they didn't have to ship
Speaker 1: stuff to Atari. Uh. It meant that anyone who had
Speaker 1: some programming skill could build um an Atari game, and
Speaker 1: that led to some pretty crappy games. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: there were some pretty good developers. Oh no, there were
Speaker 1: some great developers, but there were some really bad ones. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna let's talk about two games that helped
Speaker 1: perpetuate this crash. So we've already established that part of
Speaker 1: the problem is that there were a lot of game
Speaker 1: systems on the market, so consumers had way too much
Speaker 1: choice in that sense, it was really hard for any
Speaker 1: one console to to do well apart from like the
Speaker 1: three big ones Collego, Vision and Television and at UM.
Speaker 1: So that was one problem. Uh The other problems were
Speaker 1: things like the the fact that the systems were so expensive,
Speaker 1: so people didn't want to upgrade every few years because
Speaker 1: they put in such a huge investment already. And then
Speaker 1: we had the problem of the the the flood of
Speaker 1: games hitting the market all at once. Uh two games
Speaker 1: in particular, really heard Atari specifically, and then by extension,
Speaker 1: the rest of the video game market. Are you going
Speaker 1: to too? Are these uh Atari specific games? One of
Speaker 1: them is pac Man. The adaptation of pac Man, which
Speaker 1: was such a huge hit in the arcade, was an
Speaker 1: enormous disappointment when it was brought to the problem was
Speaker 1: that the timeline to develop the game was very very short.
Speaker 1: Atari was putting pressure on the developers to get it
Speaker 1: ready by the holiday season that year. I think this
Speaker 1: in fact, and uh so, uh the developers have to
Speaker 1: try and build this game in a fraction of the
Speaker 1: time they would have used to put it together. So
Speaker 1: when it launches, it looks hardly anything at all like
Speaker 1: the pac Man of the arcade games. I mean, the
Speaker 1: basic concept is the same, and that's it. The graphics
Speaker 1: were terrible, the sound effects, everything was was dreadful, and
Speaker 1: so people really got turned off by game. The next year,
Speaker 1: that's when the granddaddy of all terrible arc home video games,
Speaker 1: uh came out. And it's one that I've talked about
Speaker 1: multiple times on this podcast and I'm gonna do it again.
Speaker 1: It was ET. And you know, I have to say,
Speaker 1: not everyone agrees with you that ET was the worst
Speaker 1: game for the but not everyone is as smart as
Speaker 1: I am. No, that's the that's the whole problem. I mean,
Speaker 1: I remember, even when the A was very popular, going into,
Speaker 1: for example, drug stores and seeing huge you know how
Speaker 1: you go into the imagine most of our listeners probably
Speaker 1: play some kind of video game. And if you've ever
Speaker 1: been one of the used video store, video game stores,
Speaker 1: you see those big baskets and it's like these are
Speaker 1: five bucks, and they'll be games from five or six
Speaker 1: years ago. I mean consoles like the PlayStation two. They
Speaker 1: are still enjoying quite a bit of success, you know,
Speaker 1: still alling new consoles. Um you know, basically they're going out.
Speaker 1: You know what, we got thirty of these things here
Speaker 1: take you know, twenty five of them are gonna stick
Speaker 1: them in the bend, sell them for five bucks or
Speaker 1: seven bucks or something like that. Was having that same thing,
Speaker 1: only a lot of these were it was like straight
Speaker 1: to video, if you will. A lot of them were
Speaker 1: going straight into those bins of games that were just reprehensible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you've got you've got a flood of really bad games,
Speaker 1: You've got expensive hardware that keeps steaming to be upgraded.
Speaker 1: You've got too many choices on the market. Uh, it
Speaker 1: was just a recipe for disaster. And around in North America,
Speaker 1: that's when it all came crashing down. And so uh,
Speaker 1: you know what also helped was the rise of the
Speaker 1: personal computer. At personal computers were starting to to have
Speaker 1: their own set of games that were in a way
Speaker 1: more sophisticated than the home video games. They were different,
Speaker 1: you know, they didn't they weren't. They didn't have the
Speaker 1: same kind of twitch based gameplay that a lot of
Speaker 1: the home video games did. But they allowed you to
Speaker 1: do more with those games, and once you were able
Speaker 1: to do things like save games, that really started to
Speaker 1: change things. So the home video game market really started
Speaker 1: to crash in on itself. It imploded to the point
Speaker 1: where there are famous stories about companies having to dispose
Speaker 1: of enormous inventories of games, including ET, which if you've
Speaker 1: heard the tales, where did where did all of those
Speaker 1: ET cartridges end up? Those cartridges ended up in a
Speaker 1: public landfill? And I believe it's Arizona. I actually found
Speaker 1: the story on Snopes. I wanted to find out if
Speaker 1: it was actually true, if it was a miss myth.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry it's in New Mexico. Oh it was New Mexico.
Speaker 1: I thought was Arizona. So yeah, yeah, Alama Gordo, New Mexico.
Speaker 1: In late September. According to Snopes, um Atari took ET
Speaker 1: and pac Man and dumped them in a city landfill.
Speaker 1: Uh rolled over them with steamrollers, so you couldn't play
Speaker 1: them right than that playable before and covered them with cement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting to note that they treated that as
Speaker 1: if it were toxic waste kind of was considering the
Speaker 1: amount of lead in them. Yeah, I'm talking about a
Speaker 1: more like philosophical um but yes, but also that so yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: the this is all the stuff that kind of together
Speaker 1: led to that huge crash, and in America it lasted
Speaker 1: for about two years. It wouldn't be until the debut
Speaker 1: of the Nintendo Entertainment System in America, which was before
Speaker 1: the home video game market started to recover. So for
Speaker 1: two years, home video game market was pretty much dead.
Speaker 1: You could you could pick up titles for a fraction
Speaker 1: of what they once went for as people were trying
Speaker 1: to stores were trying to get rid of them because
Speaker 1: no one was making new ones. They just needed to
Speaker 1: get this stuff out of inventory. So uh, yeah, for
Speaker 1: about two years, there was no way of getting like
Speaker 1: a new system or new games. And we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to probably cut it off here, but I think it
Speaker 1: might be fun in the future. We'll we'll probably give
Speaker 1: it some time. But to revisit this and talk about
Speaker 1: how Nintendo helped usher in a new era of home
Speaker 1: video game systems and and what it took to bring
Speaker 1: home video game systems back from the dead because Nintendo
Speaker 1: had a very specific way of doing things that that
Speaker 1: really changed the whole paradigm of how video game consoles
Speaker 1: were marketed and how how third party development was handled.
Speaker 1: And we'll get into that in a future podcast. I
Speaker 1: do think it's ironic. I'd like to mention you know
Speaker 1: how I was talking about how Atari had an advantage
Speaker 1: over Colco because they actually were a video game company. Well,
Speaker 1: Nintendo wasn't exactly a video game company when it started
Speaker 1: either Playing Card Company. Yes, still still game weighted, yes, indeed.
Speaker 1: Whereas Leather, I have to leave it off there, all right,
Speaker 1: So I guess it's time for us to wrap this
Speaker 1: up in leather and we will talk to you guys
Speaker 1: again soon. Remember you can email us. Our entrance is
Speaker 1: your tex stuff at how stuff Works dot com. Chris
Speaker 1: and I will chat with you again once Chris is
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