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There's already plenty of articles and shit about this but this is one of those cases where the buzzing is in my head because of a recent thing. This time it's a message that should resonate broadly: fuck Americans, man.
Today's post is collating a whole bunch of shit about the state of the videogame industry in the 1980s, with particular focus on the much acclaimed 1983 US Videogame Market Crash, a name I prefer to use in favour of, say, the Wikipedia article's "Videogame crash of 1983" for reasons I hope are screamingly obvious. The long and short of it is that the tweet above is completely correct, and within the deeper culture of videogames and 'gamers' (by which I mean the Youtube sort, you know, the ones who call themselves shit like TheFootlongSubGamer or watch such creatures), the mythologised version of these events is a noxious mix of nationalism and corporate hagiography. If you don't believe me I invite you to find that tweet, if it's still up, and look through the replies for all of the furiously pissing Americans.
This also helpfully dovetails with my interests in games this while back, which is to say, broadening horizons and getting a fuller view of how things are, were and will be; I think most people's notions of what the videogame industry in the 1980s was like basically starts and ends at the NES coming into existence and selling fuckloads.
What was the 1983 US Videogame Market Crash?
You've probably osmosed some form of this story somewhere along the way if you're even halfway into learning about videogames as a medium.
The broad-strokes version is this: Atari was an idiotically managed company that believed its market was functionally endless - this 1983 article from the New York Times quotes Raymond Kassar (chairman of Atari at the time) as saying that the market saturation point was when half of all American households had an Atari 2600, before noting he resigned just months later due to its immense financial failure because of market saturation. The 1970s were a time of money-making trends and hit products, especially aimed at kids, and videogames were acquitting themselves well in the arcades. In 1980, Atari put out a home release of Taito's Space Invaders, which was absorbing people the nation over in arcades, and sold some several million consoles.
To give you a sense of the actual scale here, in the modern market if you're one of the three console platform holders (Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft) , and your system is not over 65-70 million hardware units sold by the 4-5 year mark, you fucked up somewhere, as that's the sort of numbers expected of the industry now. At the time of their crash and their functional demise 6 years into their console run, Atari had sold 15 million 2600s. That was the best any home console manufacturer at the time had managed.
The mythologised version of events goes that Atari's bad movie licence game E.T. The Extra Terrestrial was the harbinger of the great dying, the one that laid low the whole market and broke the American spirit for videogames with its awfulness. Some will remember to mention that the market was flooded with other bad games but usually will stress or just imply, intentionally or not, that E.T. was the death blow. In truth E.T. was just part of the trend; once Activision won the right to produce their own games for Atari's consoles without Atari's say-so (but they did have to pay royalties, an early version of the platform holder licence fee you hear much about these days), the floodgates opened and every chancer with access to manufacturers of compatible cartridges and a small pack of gits who knew about the concept of programming could start running up orders of cartridges to sell to retailers, who had no real way of knowing what was good or bad or what could sell or not.
This meant that very swiftly, there were far more cartridges of games being produced than could be sold, and retailers made do by selling shit at discount prices to clear stock as usually the game producers had no money to refund them with, having spent it all on the game and cartridges. Consumers bought the cheaper shit because it was cheap, and most of that was bad, so they stopped buying and often sought refunds, so retailers began refusing to stock home console games, and so the feedback loop formed.
This feedback loop applied to all home consoles, not just Atari's, incidentally. In 1983 basically everyone got fucking hit and sales of videogames began to die off, in part because no-one wanted to sell the things any more if they could help it. Sales for the whole industry sank into the toilet and Atari's competitors basically all universally died, bringing the cash totals down with them. It did legitimately fall a shocking amount, with some reporting a fall from $3.2 billion in 1982 to $100 million in 1985 (you'll have to pan around, it's the bit about NEC). Most of the home console companies died off - Atari was sold off in 1984 to a former Commodore executive who focused in on home computers with the Atari ST, being the first of many sales, shifts and reuses of the Atari name over the industry's history.
In late 1985, Nintendo arrived with an initial limited run of the NES, before opening to general sales in 1986. You know the rest from here, more or less.
So, where's the myths?
The myth is not that there was a market crash - there was, visibly, obviously - it's usually in the causes and the effects and particularly the aftermath. I already mentioned the special attention given to E.T., for example, and while it was a prominent failure its importance in these events is vastly overstated because of the jokes and focus given to it by early youtubers and online writers. So mythologised is E.T. that there's the entire debate and story around the New Mexico landfill where Atari offloaded a pile of hundreds of thousands of cartridges. People raged and debated about it being unused manufacturing stock, unsold copies of E.T. and Pac-Man, that there were millions upon millions of carts out there. The last word on it was a mid-2010s dig that got writers of an earlier book about the same topic huffy and upset, with both sides using different sources from Atari of the time to assert what the contents were. As it turned out there were E.T. and Pac-Man carts in there, but there also weren't untold millions of them.
People get stupid about this topic, a lot. I bet someone out there has or is planning to find the landfill and abscond with carts from it to sell as special "graded" carts unique for being from it. If you do that I want royalties from money you do glean from suckers. I can't do it myself because I'm continent-ily disadvantaged.
The real myth is the "what if" stuff about the aftermath and how serious its effects were, such as "what if Nintendo didn't try to sell in America or failed to catch on?". The answer, as you can glean from the boiling piss beneath that tweet from the top of the post, is usually "videogames wouldn't exist and no-one would be playing them because Americans would not be playing them". Oh, no-one will actually phrase it so directly except when being huffy about someone suggesting other countries exist, but that is what is being asserted: that without the American home console market, there would be no game industry. The American market crash was so profound and devastating that if not stopped by fair and noble Nintendo, it would radiate outward like a force of evil and kill all videogames elsewhere.
I intrinsically can't phrase it in a way that isn't sarcastic because that's how stupid it is.
But alright, that's the proposed version: if the US market crash wasn't reversed by Nintendo in 1986, it would have led videogames as a medium to their end, as without the US home market there isn't a sufficient audience anywhere else to buy videogames/everything that happens in America is replicated everywhere else or follows suit. The US market crash needed to be stopped as it was threatening the core of the videogame industry.
We're going to start poking the holes in this with the obvious one.
Hole #1: hey where did them nintendo lads come from anyway
JAPAN
JAPAN IS RIGHT THERE
IT'S RIGHT FUCKING THERE
ALL THE REALLY SUCCESSFUL ARCADE HITS AND EVEN THE GAME THAT ACTUALLY "MADE" THE ATARI 2600 WERE JAPANESE GAMES
At the time Nintendo entered the US market in 1986, they had already sold several million Famicoms in Japan. They would sell many more by the time the Famicom/NES 'bowed out' and the SNES began to go on sale, and kept selling even as the system's successor was around. In other words, they were not far off of Atari's American install base back in Japan by the point they entered the US, and per Nintendo's own numbers from 2018, the Famicom would shift 19.35 million in Japan alone, outstripping or matching the height of the American Atari userbase of reportedly 15-20 million.
They had a market a decent bit bigger than what Atari had back at home; yes there's big bucks in America and getting more money is important for companies, but if that initial market of 15-20 million viable Americans that Atari had is so critical, why is the similarly sized one back in Japan not so?
The logical conclusion from people huffing about it seems to just be "they aren't American", which is part of why I got annoyed enough to vomit this up.
To be clear here, the 'shape' of the industry, the contours of it if American interest in games re-emerged even a bit later would be quite different: the fortunes of myriad players depend on having the NES audience to get their names out to, and if anything the industry might be far more Japan-heavy than it ended up being. There is a distinct possibility that if you push American interest in games out just another two years or so, you could butterfly effect a scenario where the Xbox doesn't emerge at all, or if it does, in a very different form, not carved out of the Dreamcast's husk but probably in some distinctly more original, perhaps more PC-aligned form. God knows, but it's fun to think about.
But of course, videogames and the industry wouldn't just wrap up shop and fuck off forever because America never got back into it, Japan's home market could have easily persisted and continued on its way, albeit with its chief players not being as disgustingly rich as they became. And also, you know, there's the other part.
Hole #2: Literally everyone else
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| Map source: Geology.com |
Like, fucking come on.
The corners of Youtube that talk excitedly about these areas of the industry are more niche, usually not favoured by the algorithm and more to the interest of the people who lived in or after their time, but it's still baffling that some will just seem to assume no-one else had videogames of any shape or form until Nintendo showed up. I'm European, so I must admit that biases my focus here, but it's a good instructive example all the same.
The videogame industry across Europe was quite a different time - the Atari 2600 made little headway, only breaching a million sales across the continent and not in any one country, and the real stage for European videogames was actually the suite of computers at the time.
The nations of Western Europe each had their preference for one or another of the home computers of the 1980s, with the big names being the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC - while the likes of the Commodore 64 would sell more on the whole globally, due to being rooted in America, these computers still ruled the roost in Western Europe, and developed their whole own game scenes, and not without merit; the ZX Spectrum is so old and venerable that it plays host to the first game to ever use an isometric viewpoint, Ant Attack, to give you an idea of what we're looking at here. There were myriad others, many of them selling over a million and usually several million units each across Western Europe, and with a commonality of the same processors being used everywhere and being remarkably compatible (and accordingly, programming languages like BASIC being dominant across machines of all stripes in the time before centralised, complex operating systems), games could spread all over surprisingly quickly.
How quickly? Well, let's put it like this: World of Spectrum, a loving archive of all the material and software and games of the ZX Spectrum they can find, catalogues the existence of some 11,000~ ZX Spectrum games, albeit that does include things that never released but known to have existed, and games not yet retrieved and archived but known to exist, and also basically any little thing anyone had ever made and distributed for it. Wikipedia's list, self-described as incomplete, lists 1977 games; Mobygames claims 3582, though I'm unsure of their criteria. And per the musings and calculations of users at Spectrum Computing, a fan forum of all Sinclair computers, there's as many as 15,200 in the game packs passed around in their circles. The lists and collections and archives and sets of ZX Spectrum games are numerous, and their bounties unfathomable.
But videogames would've died without America's home console market, don't you know. And I'm just focusing in on one in particular!
And that number keeps growing, as people never stopped making games for the ZX Spectrum, or indeed really any of the old computers. Itch.io is a fun place to stroll through sometime; the 'ZX Spectrum' tag comes up with over 1100 results of games made for the computers now, as enthusiast and hobbyist scenes never truly die (they even make actual usable casettes for the real hardware for some of these!). The same goes for others like the Amstrad and the Commodore 64, mind you.
I think now would be a good moment for a more relevant example of the merit to be found in the Western European PC scene, for both our core subjects (namely, Nintendo) and for you the reader (most likely). In 1982, a pair of brothers who developed arcade games and arcade conversion kits in the UK formed the company Ashby Computers and Graphics Limited, and would do slightly later trade under the name/label Ultimate Play the Game. These two, Tim and Chris Stamper, made a series of very successful games for home computers such as the ZX Spectrum, with multiple selling hundreds of thousands of copies - titles such as Sabre Wulf, and Jetpac. Their seminal work was a game called Knight Lore, a game renowned for developing a technique that allowed on-screen objects pass over and behind each-other without graphical collisions (such was the limitations of the time!), a genuine massive technological advancement.
Within a few years, the company dropped the Ultimate Play the Game label and renamed itself, as it grew and moved to developing for the NES, to a much simpler name: Rare.
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| A ZX Spectrum 48K, image source: Wikipedia |
I specified Western Europe so often not just to be inclusive and a pedant, but because it mattered; the 1980s were the last legs of the Cold War, with the Berlin Wall falling in 1989 to herald the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany. The 'Iron Curtain', the functional giant border and 'buffer zone' the Soviet Union seized and demanded in the wake of World War II to protect it from the West, was fenced off economically from the rest of the world and thus access to technology and cultural products was strictly controlled and very difficult to manage.
But not impossible! More knowledgeable people than I have spoken of it, so it sadly won't be getting that lengthy a section from me: some years ago, journalist and youtuber Super Bunnyhop covered the topic of access to videogames in East Germany, and it's a well done and fascinating video. Also quite interesting are the comments, many of which speak to the video's accuracy and chime in with their own experiences and viewpoints, or those they learned from their family members for those too young to remember themselves. Local clones of Western computers and machines, using third-party illicit radios to catch onto certain channels that were broadcasting audio frequencies that, when recorded to casette, could be deciphered by the ZX Spectrum (or local analogue) and other such computers and translated to code to compile and play games with, the whole thing is extremely interesting, and for our subject, extremely relevant. Not to put too fine a point on it, but of course there was interest in computer games even in the USSR, despite the limited access to computers and software from other regions; how else would we get to Tetris in 1985?
Mark how difficult and strange that sounds, to be using pirate radio to record frequencies to casette tape that your computer would then translate into code, and you had to hope your signal was clear enough and that you latched onto the start of the frequency, all to get a game that was probably an alright clone of Pac-Man. Even in a time and situation where many simply had no notion or concept of videogames, videogames still existed, still persisted, and in some cases still spread and grew.
The notion that there would be no industry without the American home console market isn't just silly, it's patently absurd. It's demonstrably wrong, and obviously stupid. Videogames had much deeper hurdles than that to clear, and yet, clear them they did. Eastern Europe is a powerhouse of videogame development today and has been so for decades, in spite of all the hurdles it had with even accessing this medium to begin with. One key example: Poland's CDProjekt Red isn't just one of the biggest names in videogames, it's also the owner-operator of Good Old Games, a store dedicated to retrieving PC games of all ages and prominence, both massive and none, from all corners of the world, and making them playable and available on modern machines with no DRM fuckery. How can anyone but sound like an ad when talking about that?
What I want to note after all of this are the time-frames here, to bring us back to our core topic. The ZX Spectrum released in 1982, the Amstrad CPC in 1984, and these often had local clones and variants and counterparts in each country and region to suit the needs of their laws and markets. This entire industry was ticking away happily while the American home console market had its meltdown, and continued entirely unabated. Sure, European home console markets didn't really exist until some years later, but the European videogame industry was good and healthy (for what it was) the whole time.
These are just the ones I know myself and can thus speak on with even a little bit of authority. The story I know for, for instance, Latin America, is steeped in the Neo Geo, which wouldn't come around til 1990 and thus is out of our early-to-mid 80s window for the US market crash splash radius (but keep it in mind, for later).
I sometimes wonder if people realise that PC gaming has been around basically as long if not longer than proper home consoles. It's a fun thing to think about. Speaking of which:
Hole #3: Because the Commodore is keeping up with you!
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| Image source: Interface-Experience.org |
So yeah, talking about the European home computer market naturally brings us to the American home computer market, and after beating on Americans for being ignorant of other people I'm now going to beat on them for being ignorant of themselves.
The headliners here are the Commodore 64, of course, but also IBM personal computers. The Commodore 64 is in a similar position to the ZX Spectrum, albeit with bigger sales numbers as it was focused and entrenched in the US, though didn't take off that much elsewhere (it reportedly only lasted 6 months on the Japanese market, unable to compete with their own suite of home computers - that would be the likes of the PC-8801 and the MSX). It's a similar story; taken up pretty widely, very popular, and has an unfathomable number of games. Lemon64, a C64 game-and-material database and fansite, puts its number at 7273 C64 games, and there are also over 1100 results on itch.io for its Commodore 64 tag which yes does mean vast swathes of recently made games for the actual hardware and emulators thereof, with some making actual physical copies for use with it.
Sales data for the Commodore 64 is tricky to come by, in terms of software anyway. For hardware, here's a particularly interesting article that cross-references multiple sources to come out to about 12.5 million C64s, contradicting the "2 million per year for several years" and "half a million a month every month" claims made about the C64 all over the place, which still puts it at around twice or so the ZX Spectrum, for example. This site claims to be drawing from magazine charts of the time for software but the other numbers given are across all formats (so C64, ZX Spectrum and others), with no word as to the spread.
One of the best sources I could find was this archive.org scan of "The Computer Industry Almanac" from 1990, a book of lists of data and information about various facets of the computer industry (if you weren't sure what almanacs were). I might try to acquire it myself one day as I see places selling it for £40, allegedly; it'd be fun to have. At any rate, its own sources aren't the clearest, but hell, there it is; a list of software titles that sold over 100,000 copies, and 80,000, and on. It's worth making an account to look at it.
I don't have much to dwell on with the Commodore 64 itself beyond that, as there's bigger fish to fry.
So, 1981, IBM releases the IBM Model 5150, more commonly called the IBM Personal Computer. They announced, at the outset, the intent to have a selection of three operating systems, but in practice, only one was actually available at launch and when the other two did show up, no-one wanted them, cementing the initial OS' dominance. IBM referred to it as "PC-DOS", with DOS being Disk Operating System, because it used disks. IBM didn't make PC-DOS, it was just their branding for an operating system they got from a little company called Microsoft, who called that system MS-DOS. Microsoft themselves just bought it off of a guy who cloned it from another operating system because 1980s computing was a fucking funny time.
MS-DOS, often simply called DOS, likely needs no introduction, not least because starting a few versions in, it earned another name: "Windows". The DOS moniker was formally retired as of version 8, also called Windows ME ("Millennium Edition"), whose successor was Windows XP. How we got from there to "Windows 7" is an exercise I leave for you.
And yes, like the other home computers, there is an endeavour to collect and archive and provide every single DOS game that has ever existed. This collection is known as eXoDOS, whose games are playable to some extent or another (most seem to be fine but of course some are dodgy, perhaps because they always were), and the sheer size of it speaks for itself. The eXoDOS collection spans from the early 80s when DOS first entered the scene all the way through the 90s, to FMV games and later more complex multi-disc monstrosities, of every language and origin, of the names you know and the multitudes you don't.
So, with that said, what was PC gaming like in America at the time? Well, besides the release lists being packed with ports to different systems of games released initially on one, things trucked along just fine; fine enough for there to apparently be regular 100k+ sales for games. But, there are some specific examples I want to single out because if there was no appetite for games, they wouldn't matter in the ways that they did.
In 1983, Ultima III: Exodus released. Sales figures weigh in at around 100-120k within a year or two, which is pretty excellent for a game largely made by one lunatic with a lot of ideas. Ultima III is particularly important, because it's the game that is cited by Yuji Horii as one of the inspirations and key influences on the creation of Dragon Quest (the other usually cited is one of the Wizardry games) - the Famicom would only just release in Japan this same year, funnily enough. Ultima as a series would go on to be a prominent RPG franchise until EA bought out the studio in the 90s and crushed it as it did to all studios it bought; they got as far as IX, and there were actually two games released as VII, and a whole array of spinoffs. Suffice to say, Ultima acquitted itself well despite the industry apparently crashing to complete and total death around it.
One day I'll scream about Ultima on here, it's a special series.
In 1984, prominent PC publisher and occasional developer for some years, Sierra On-Line, released a little game called King's Quest on a variety of home computers. King's Quest was initially released for the IBM PCjr, an unpopular platform, but IBM paid for the development cost and Sierra got to publish the thing wherever they wanted after that. With its remarkable animations and graphics for its time, King's Quest advanced adventure games quite significantly and sold pretty well. How well? By 1988 it had 3 sequels and Sierra was churning out "__ Quest" series at a decent clip by a whole pack of in-house developers, and were basically the name in adventure games at the time. Six years later, Sierra would release King's Quest V, which is said to be the first game to sport a development budget of $1 million (not surprising, with its tons of genuinely gorgeous art stills and backgrounds and significant amount of digitized voice recordings). In just six years, from the middle of the nadir of the home console crash, entirely on PCs!
Seriously though, look at Sierra's list of titles and note how much porting and publishing they were doing in 1983-1985 (the Ultimas pop up in there, even!). Business was good and they had some good shit going on, and this was before their best and most prosperous years. In fact, looking through the lists of publishers of the time is pretty telling, especially for certain key players. Activision's list of games from 1980 to 1999 is particularly interesting in this regard, being one of the Atari 2600's biggest players and its first formal third party. You can see them up through 1983 focusing almost entirely on the Atari 2600 and rarely the Intellivision or Colecovision (the 2600's chief competitors), and then in early 1984 you start seeing more releases for Atari's 8-bit home computers and the MSX. In June and July, Activision ports some of their own games, including their biggest 2600 hit Pitfall, and then August is a bunch of Atari 8-bit PC ports. Presumably the numbers came in fast and thick, as from September to the end of the year, PC games completely dominate their output, with Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Atari 8-bit releases outnumbering their home console efforts in the same timeframe.
In 1985, Activision only made one single non-PC release. Everything else is pure PC; Atari 8-bit and ST, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Apple II and Mac OS, DOS, the works. They would not start making a return to home consoles until 1987, where they put out a single game each for the Sega Master System and the NES. They found their market and they claimed it, and I don't need to tell you where Activision ended up. It's pretty clear that PC had a hungry videogame market, and there was a fair bit of money to be had there - we wouldn't have seen the 90s PC market and the rise of boomer shooters and adventure games and FMV games et al if there wasn't some kind of firm foundation there. Remember, this shit has to be of noticeable size by 1993, when Doom shows up on DOS and starts making everyone panic about Satans again.
It all makes me a little curious about one aspect of our story of the crash from earlier.
Hole #4: Hey, who said that?
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| See if you can spot the issue before I get to it. |
I don't know about you but in school, at GCSE and A-Level, the thing firmly drilled into me and my classmates time and again for History class was to identify who your source was, not just what they said. The core questions "Who were they?" and "Were they actually there, or are they just repeating what they heard?" in turn lead to a third, more critical question: "Why are they saying this?". There's always a reason, a motive, a viewpoint to consider. Critically thinking about sources in this manner is vital to figuring out the truth of an event, if we even can - if nothing else, we can reasonably deduce if something is a fabrication or not the whole picture.
The thing about those figures from earlier, the drop from $3.2 billion to $100 million is, well, what's our source for that? There was an obvious drop, there was an obvious death in the market because basically everyone but Atari (and Activision) fucking went bankrupt and Atari themselves dropped so hard they got bought out and struggled to exist for a few years more. The market conditions that prompted Nintendo's shenanigans and draconian control over their platform were real, we can observe them in the behaviours of retailers and the devastation of companies involved and from reporting on these events from the time - but was the market ever that fucking big? Our source from earlier, the newspaper, it conveys that drop through data on a graph, but where did they get those numbers? Under the graph, as you can see above, it says their source is...Nintendo of America. Nintendo had a vested interest, even at that stage, of "writing the history" as it were.
Incidentally, Wikipedia uses that newspaper as one source, and its other source is this fansite...which must obviously be referencing the same paper as it declares the $3.2 billion figure comes from Nintendo of America. This is how the number spreads around as raw iron fact, despite the fact that we don't know if it just means home consoles or if it includes arcades, waning but still prominent ahead of their mid-to-late 80s resurgence and early 90s boom, and/or PC games, growing in popularity all throughout the period and growing all the more prominent past 1983/1984.
Okay, let's look around and see what we can see about Nintendo at the time. Check, for instance, this newspaper from June 1986 (if you have to pan about, you're looking for "Video games gain in Japan, are due for assault on US"), which cites quotes from Sega of America president Bruce Lowry, and Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. I'll put them here, even:
We're also going to attract a lot of interest from the 19- to 27-year-olds. Those are the people who were into Atari or Coleco games for a while, but tired of the systems, let them get dusty on the shelf because the technology didn't live up to the manufacturer's promises. Our system is the first one where the graphics on the box are actually matched by the game.
- Bruce Lowry, president of Sega of America
Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games.
- Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo
Note that Bruce chooses to frame the prior market crash in a way that provides an angle to do product promotion even here. Meanwhile, Yamauchi curtly justifies his company's strict business practice - the newspaper article actually says Nintendo restrict third-parties to 3 games a year, a stricter number than the generally quoted 5 a year (I guess they eased up a little when they got power). For our purposes I think we can take Yamauchi basically at his word, as he's hilariously blunt about it; either way, it still serves as justification for how Nintendo would run their end of the market like a racketeer.
But if you then pair that with Nintendo of America-provided figures saying the industry was super huge and then became instantly super small (including a projection for 1989 that says it will become bigger than it ever used to be), well, you can see the narrative being built before your eyes. Nintendo justifies itself in public, to the press and thus the consumers, and provides the numbers that reinforces their justification for their death-grip on releases. They can use this sentiment and their golden throne in the market to keep their practices reinforced and pressure third-parties to tow the line. The industry used to be great, then everyone fucked up and did the stupid thing; we have brought it back, and we're doing so good with our way of doing things that it will shortly be better than it has ever been.
I mean, shit, in the last section I linked this post that set about figuring out the actual sales numbers of the Commodore 64, citing company financials and official records of serial numbers used in production to come to a number many millions under what the company's founder Jack Tramiel boasted about having. You lie to look better to potential investors and business partners and, let's be frank, to bolster your own image as a successful businessman for your ego, it's why we have decades of extensive regulations and controls around finances and businesses. With the NES turning numbers that Atari (who, incidentally, were bought by Jack Tramiel during the crash and repurposed toward making more home computers) could only dream of, it's no wonder; it was a genuine cultural phenomenon and feeding that fire any way they could was in Nintendo's explicit interest. Anything to ingrain themselves in the minds of the young even more, anything to make Nintendo the name in videogames.
Our sources for the sales figures of games are basically self-reports at best, and even those are few in number and hard to track down. Jack Tramiel got away with tacking an extra ten million or more Commodores onto his scoreboard for some time there, and if ever that was challenged outside of that post from earlier, it's hard to trace it; in fact, we can assume it basically wasn't, as Tramiel's figures are cited on Wikipedia and in turn everywhere else that cares to mention it, it's only down in the enthusiast pits that you find people running the numbers otherwise.
I mentioned that the games of the Stamper Bros sold several hundred thousand copies, but in truth the oldest source I can find for that is this article from The Times around a decade after the fact, mentioned as their origin story as part of a small report on Rare entering partnership with Nintendo after Donkey Kong Country's explosive success. It does hilariously mention that Jetpac's 330,000 copies were sold at a price of £4.95 (around £16 today). Humble origins, eh? At any rate, we seem to only have the Stampers' word for it, but at least we can put some amount of stock in it - their company did tangibly and observably grow across the years to be able to produce the likes of Battletoads a few years later, and then be producing Donkey Kong Country (itself a work at the cutting edge of technology at the time) just a few years further than that.
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| God those 90s models. Image source: Nintendo |
In my search for sources, I came across this article on Gaming Alexandria, which gets into this very topic and tackles the same questions I'm pondering now. The author doesn't link sources, but does name them (although the generic nature of "The Electronic Market" as a name makes it difficult to track down), and has page citations for newspapers and so on. By their reckoning, the American home console market's revenue was probably closer to $2 billion prior to the crash instead of the $3.2 billion reported by Nintendo, and it's debatable if it ever fell to $100 million as there are hints of $240-250 or even $500 million reported elsewhere. The author leans toward a spot in the range of $100-$240 million, and for home consoles specifically; I think that might be true enough, and it ties into my prior section.
Namely, that the figures cited don't account for arcades or PC games at all, and if you read through that article, arcade game revenue was its whole own beast that, by that author's view, went through its own crash in 1982 before home consoles did, but never fell as viciously and persisted in a better but stagnant state for a few years longer, still reaping billions in revenue where consoles did not. PC game revenue and profit likely just got lumped into broader computer software sales data, if it was tracked at all in this time outside of the developers themselves, whose words we intrinsically have to doubt without some form of evidence to back it up.
But even all this is still estimates and guesswork, albeit it is better informed than blindly following Nintendo's numbers. We don't have the reporting that exists today, the interest and avenues and regulations just weren't there to force a lot of these out into the open. We might have a better view of how arcades were doing, for instance, if we could see the Japanese financial reports from the likes of Namco and Taito and Sega, but good luck finding those from here.
Regardless, we must come to my point: if we actually look at America itself, if we look at the numbers we can find and pit them against each other and actually consider the full scope and breadth of videogames as a medium and industry at the time...even in America itself, the 1983 crash didn't extend beyond home consoles. Oh, there were a lot of issues in the mid 80s and it was devastating for the home consoles that did exist at the time...but was it really an existential moment for videogames as a medium and industry? America's own numbers and data don't seem to say so - if it did manifest into a deeper malaise for home consoles, it's good odds that actually America would be one of the markets that's just super-heavy into PC gaming, like continental Europe or China are today. That'd have significant effects on what became popular and influential, and history would change, of course, but videogames wouldn't die, far from it.
Thus we must realise that the American games market proper was probably actually worth more than $3.2 billion at the time of the 1983 crash, and was likely still worth billions in the intervening years, just not as many and that was mostly from arcades. But videogames as a whole soldiered on and were far from dying, even in America.
Oh and I've referenced it a bit in this section and hither and thither but let's just round this off:
Hole #5: Welcome to the Fantasy Zone!
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| Photo source |
We touched on the potential numbers for this one a bit in the last section, with that Gaming Alexandria post's efforts to dig up numbers suggesting at a still significant industry despite stagnation and a gradual popularity dropoff: arcades! Arcades and arcade gaming persisted throughout the crash, unsurprisingly, and while they had their own issues in America due to wavering interest and a lack of new hits for a while, it didn't just suddenly die during the crash and take all its art with it either.
I made the crack that of course PC gaming had to be in a decent enough state to provide foundations for Doom to scare people in 1993, and actually the exact same joke can be made for arcades: of course they had to have survived the 1983 crash and be in a state where they could be culturally relevant, because 1992 would see the debut of Mortal Kombat, a game so devastatingly popular that its arcade takings in 1993 beat the US box office gross of fucking Jurassic Park, if our sources are to be believed. And to be frank, I think they reasonably can: Mortal Kombat was a fucking cultural paradigm shift event unto itself.
It's the same sort of story we've discussed at length already, though; arcades waned a bit from their immense strength in Japan and the US both in the early 80s,but they never went away in the 80s, continuing on quite decently as a good long string of arcade hits and beloved classics rolled out year after year. This was the era of arcade beat 'em ups and Sega's long line of classics that would also eventually coat the Mega Drive's early years.
Shmuplations, beautiful site that they are, translated an interview with former Sega director Akira Nagai, who oversaw Sega's arcade business in the 80s in Japan. He mentions that there was a slump there too in sales and revenue around 1983-1984, but cites the games of Yu Suzuki and particularly the release of Outrun as turning things around, alongside a significant effort to 'clean up' arcades and make them pleasant, bright and cheery places to be. The events he mentions as significant are Nintendo's 1981 release of Donkey Kong, and Capcom's formation in 1983, outside of Sega's own successes - business abroad simply doesn't register on his scale, it seems. You can see this sort of effect elsewhere as well - the likes of Space Harrier, Hang-On, Outrun and Afterburner, combined with the efforts of other companies like Konami with their string of brawlers, the works of SNK and Data East and Capcom creating exciting and also, often, multiplayer experiences that kept people coming in. Here, too, the 1983 crash's effects were tangibly limited and nowhere near as devastating as often imagined and claimed.
Again, the problem is reporting is slim on the ground and difficult to come by. The Gaming Alexandria post laments this about arcade revenue figures after a point, as finance reporters and rags lost interest in arcades and just stopped reporting on them as they weren't the dominant force any more. But we know from the vitality of Sega and Capcom and Konami and SNK et al, and there being a foundation for the rise of fighting games in the early 90s and the existence of the Neo Geo at all, that arcades must have been doing alright for themselves, and actually probably quite well from the scant numbers we can get. They wouldn't persist and continue this effort in America if there wasn't anything in it, and they moved their shit to wherever they could sell it.
Why does it matter so much?
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| If you actually watch this guy I'm afraid I think less of you as a person |
Doubtless somewhere you've osmosed the fact that the fighting games developed by SNK, in particular King of Fighters, are massively, massively popular in Latin and South America. And as it turns out, there's quite a story behind that: this Kotaku article features a good series of quotes and explanations from people in the FGC from Latin American countries about their childhoods playing NeoGeo games. It's a good and interesting read, and it explains the 'why' quite readily: the NeoGeo, despite being associated with being ungodly expensive to the average person (it was a hot-swappable arcade cabinet whose cartridges were just whole-ass arcade boards you could pop in and out, so it was quite a bit pricier than, say, a SNES...in most other places!), by the quirk of tax and tariffs on videogame consoles, ended up being the (relatively) affordable and useful alternative in places like Mexico and Brazil.
I'm just paraphrasing the article now, but fuck it, you need to see this bit if you didn't actually read that article: because you weren't buying separate full arcade cabinets for each individual game, but instead one unit and the cheaper individual boards/carts to swap in and out, the Neo Geo fostered a significant and vital arcade scene in Latin American countries. And because the machine and its games were thus cheaper than standard arcade hardware (despite otherwise being identical!), shops and arcades and other places could make them cheaper to play to help get their money back and profit, which let more people (predominantly kids and teenagers, of course) actually play them. I've heard, for example, people in Australia push back on the notion that the old arcade setup 'made you learn better' in fighting games - because arcade games were massively more expensive to take turns at there, in Australia's completely different economic situation. It made more sense, over time, to just get a SNES and a copy of Street Fighter II or whatever else rather than spend a SNES' worth in individual goes over a few months. But, with the particular combination of heavily tariffed home consoles and cheaper Neo Geo hardware (plus easy piracy of it, always a factor), you get the exact opposite in Mexico, Brazil, Peru and so on.
Which brings us to the smug gibbering ape in the image above, and how he perfectly encapsulates the core attitude behind the misconceptions, mythology and ardent nationalism of the importance of the 1983 US market crash. The Neo Geo is a very important part of gaming history, especially in its native Japan (where arcades have had a long and active history) and, as expressed, across Latin and South America; SNK is a storied company whose library contains many influential and important titles, especially for fighting games in particular.
But those aren't the United States so it doesn't matter as much. They're weird, and foreign, and he didn't grow up with them so shut up and stop talking about them. Oh, it's in a """joking""" manner, but that's what's being said and make no mistake, he believes that despite defensively couching it as a joke. The NeoGeo didn't dominate in America so it's "not as important" and can be dismissed. Stop taking time away from Nintendo. No-one knows what a SNK is.
It's the same shit as the mythology of the 1983 market crash, and that's why it matters: it pervades fucking everything and twists how everything is seen and valued. It centres America as the only place that matters, Americans as the only people who matter, American culture as the only thing that matters. It shears away the full breadth of the industry, casting off untold numbers of artworks, dismissed because they weren't big in America, weren't in America, aren't on a home console or more specifically aren't on a Nintendo system or aren't a Nintendo game. It reduces the complexities and nuances of events down to a digestible "good story" with a protagonist, and throws away everything that doesn't fit into that framing. It excuses the deranged aspects of Nintendo's racket over the market in the 80s, of their enforced censorship reinforcing the morality of 1980s white Christian America and shoving it onto all and sundry, of their rigid control over what was even permitted to be released and thus to a significant extent, what even got made. And it colours the perception of everything that comes after, one way or another.
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| It really is fucking wild how many people will blindly believe "games haven't increased in price" |
In a really fortunately timed occurrence, there was fresh debate about the pricing of games, particularly AAA Western games, instigated on Twitter while I was writing this. Some Larian employee insisted games would have to get more expensive to be viable, which is obviously a fucking stupid and patently false statement - as it turns out, you can just not spend hundreds of millions of pounds/dollars on your project chasing the dragon of photorealistic visuals and world simulation and still get people to buy your game. Whenever this discourse pops up, people who think themselves really smart start talking about inflation, and how "the cost of game development has risen with inflation but the price has not". This, too, is an obviously stupid point - the answer is "developers and publishers should be taking measures and approaches to cut costs" because hey guess what, no-one's asking you to spend $500 million and 9 years making an extremely mid walk-and-talk, you just decided that - but more importantly, the cost has increased!
But not in America!
When I was growing up, the standard retail price (the RRP, "Recommended Retail Price", that's MSRP or 'list price' depending on where you are) for console games was £40. Very, very occasionally, it might sneak a little higher but it was almost solely £40. And then, particularly when entering the 7th gen of videogames, this began to increase. Every now and then you'd see a £50 price tag, but by and large you were still between £40 and £50...until Activision bumped Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 up to £55. The dam broke, and the price of games slid up more. By the PS4, RRPs of £60 from chancier and more bastardly publishers were common, though there was, at least, variability between retailers and plenty would still aim lower.
This generation, Sony sparked controversy in America by trying to sell "next-gen" games at $70, opening the floodgates for many stupid publishers to try the same - even Nintendo of America, inexplicably, gave Tears of the Kingdom a $70 price tag. What isn't addressed ever by the people justifying this increase as somehow being fair, necessary and worth it is that Sony translated this increase 1:1 here in the UK, insisting that the pound is just 1:1 to the dollar and therefore games must be £70 now. It's how it has to be, $60 isn't a tenable price any more, and £60 is $60, right?
£70 is $92.
In today's money, $60 is about £45, which you will see a decent amount of games aim for - including, funnily enough, Nintendo of Europe, as I got Tears of the Kingdom for £47 with no fancy discounts or trade-ins or anything. Many games are £50, and AAA Western games now solidly aim at and over £60, as does any game published by Sony.
It's the same story, if not worse, for Europe, and it only gets worse the further out you go. Games are already often unfeasibly expensive in Canada and Australia. And this, of course, isn't even getting into the nightmare scenarios for places like the nations of Latin America and South America - as discussed in the article above about SNK, the likes of Brazil have a large piracy culture because local tariffs and vicious regional pricing exploiting exchange rates on stores like Steam make games simply too expensive for basically anyone, if the publisher/developer doesn't adjust it themselves to a saner equivalent. Some won't, because they fear an apparent avalanche of people changing store regions or using another regional account to buy games for cheaper prices than their local one.
The cost of games has gone up already, often multiple times, all over the place...just not America, where the $60 line stayed rigid until this generation, though the fact that basically every $70 game that isn't Spiderman or Zelda has bombed should be pretty revealing of what the price debate's true answer is. Spoiler: people are already spending as much as they ever will on games and increasing the price will drive them away, not make them acquiesce. They will wait for price drops, or pirate it, or simply go elsewhere for their entertainment, there's no shortage of competition for people's eyeballs. Publishers have no power or say in this and must adjust accordingly or die. Many, it seems, are choosing to die.
But, none of these price increases happened to Americans, ergo the cost of games has never, ever increased and it has to increase now or the industry will crash and die! Obviously it can safely increase because Americans haven't paid more for games in ages! In fact we have old pages from Christmas mail order catalogues that inflated prices as proof that $60 is a reduction! America is the global frame of reference and we are very sane and normal for using it as such! Do not think critically ever!
American Cultural Hegemony and the outsized influence of the American perspective didn't start with this, indeed it is because of them that the 1983 crash is given the mythological reverence that it has. But it is a further propagator of that influence and hegemony, and it is a pernicious and vile thing. It pervades a lot more than you'd think - you ever notice that games journalists, youtubers, pundits of all stripes and even regular people will say "this game is getting a Western release!", only to check and see that it's actually only releasing in America? That doesn't happen too often these days, but it does come up, every once in a while - and back in the 6th and 7th generation of games, it was all over the place and ever so frustrating to see. Or a game will, rarely, release in Europe first but not be considered as real until it gets its American release, which sees outlets that do have European staff and branches do things like dismiss Bravely Default from GOTY considerations until it released in America the following year.
It's not just about the crash itself, it's about the attitudes it fosters and all that come out from them. This and stories like it need to be challenged and corrected because if left to their own devices, they start to tinge everything else with the underlying view that it only matters if it's America, and to a lesser extent it only matters if it's Nintendo. And, if you want to treat games as art and this whole medium as an art form, then getting the true history and centring that is incredibly important. Refusing to let the full scope be winnowed away for convenience is critical, and if you like to fancy yourself as in any way 'academic' about games, then you simply must champion the reality of matters. And, to be frank, there's way too much dismissal of people outside the Western hemisphere, especially from people who otherwise claim to be great progressives who care about diversity and seeing other viewpoints.
And to be even more frank: fuck Americans, man.
Once More, With Feeling
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The Game Industry Layoffs Tracker. It's, uh, bleak times. |
There has, for years and years now, perhaps since the internet first came about but with growing intensity from the 7th generation of games consoles onward, been frequent calls for or belief in an impending "Second Videogame Crash". It's the sort of thing you would see called for or wished for by people deep enough into gaming discourse to be angry about microtransactions and horrible business practices and the overt decline in Western AAA game quality. It's sort of an addendum to the myth: that soon, the industry will crash again, in the same way, and it will be a great reset that washes away all of the evil bastards and silences the medium for years, pushing it to the fringes, to be rebuilt later by those who hopefully learned the lessons of wanton greed and excessive gouging. The general belief is that all major corporations will be wiped out or greatly diminished, there were will be a great loss or at least dispersal of the talents behind games, and things will start over.
In a darkly amusing turn, if I may call it that, we seem to see history repeating itself, kind of. Across this year, and throughout most of last, the videogame industry has been hit with wave after wave of devastating studio closures, whole corporation die-offs and tens if not hundreds of thousands of layoffs (as you can see from the tracker, linked above and also here). It's mostly, though not exclusively, concentrated in the Western games industry; Microsoft is waking up to having spent $70 billion on Activision and is aggressively cutting costs in ways that exclusively mean venting anyone not making Call of Duty games or equivalent sellers, Embracer bought up the forest floor of the continental European industry and promptly died after a single deal it bet everything on didn't go through, wiping out untold numbers of studios, major publishers across the board are shedding staff as their hyper-expensive products that aren't actually any good keep failing to sell, the live-service craze is a repeat of the MMO craze a decade or so prior and is producing as many corpses.
Just today, Chinese company NetEase has killed Ouka, the studio contracted by Square Enix to develop Visions of Mana, which released just today, reducing it to a skeleton crew to finish its support obligations ahead of closing the studio entirely. There was no time or way of telling if Visions of Mana has yet succeeded or failed: it explicitly matters not. NetEase have killed them regardless and reportedly they, and other Chinese megacorp Tencent, are suddenly skittish about all the studios they poached staff for and built up and spent millions on. Success no longer matters, the closures will come no matter what.
We are, really, witnessing that Second Videogame Crash now.
And like the first, it isn't happening in the way people imagined or for the reasons they believe it would, but, comically, it's not too different from the reasons the first one happened.
The Western AAA industry has worked itself into a horrid, horrid rut: the pursuit of ultra HD photorealistic visuals with accompanying realism simulation systems and mechanics, like vast open worlds with realistic environmental physics and hordes of NPCs with special animations or even schedules, are taking their extremely obvious toll. When that's not the target, chasing the mythical infinite money machine that is a successful "live service" game - a game that can sell cosmetic microtransactions and expansions forever - sees countless studios killed in the pursuit of trying to unseat the established victors. Like World of WarCraft before it, Fortnite kills all who try for its crown because it won the first fight and became firmly entrenched. The same goes for the likes of Mihoyo's gacha games, Final Fantasy XIV et al; the victors are in, and convincing their players to leave for something else is the most difficult fight imaginable.
The result is a constant stream of insufferable and unwanted games. Just this week past, Sony's Concord released to basically no sales and a lot of well-deserved gravedancing, because it's as soulless and derivative a husk as you can imagine: pound store Overwatch with knockoff bargain bin rips of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies' cast, and a frankly absurd level of visual fidelity put into making everyone look as realistic and human as possible...for a 5v5 hero shooter where you'll see them for like three seconds before you kill them or vice versa. It is completely emblematic of the causes of this "second crash": a game that was obviously not wanted by anyone with nothing interesting about it, with an 8 year dev time and untold hundreds of millions spent on it and its pointlessly super high fidelity graphics. Priorities and ideas completely and utterly out of touch with what the consumer audience wants, with no real basis in material reality.
Last year, Insomniac Games were hit by a cyber-attack that resulted in the theft and release of tons of internal documentation and game work and assets, and among the interesting details about Sony's business were the details that Spiderman 2 had a budget of $300 million and a dev time of several years. It looked basically identical to the first game, but they spent all that time completely redoing their assets and a lot of animations and a lot of their world simulation technology to make the in-game city seem "more real", and the end result was nobody fucking noticed or cared because it didn't ultimately look any different from the assets and tech they had. Internally, a dev even questioned if anybody would notice and if this was really a sensible use of resources, and, tragically, we could also see that another $350 million budget was allotted for Spiderman 3, suggesting possibly similar intent being queued up.
Like the first crash, many of the games produced by the Western AAA industry are just dogshit, mid at best and they aren't what the audiences anywhere want. They're years out of sync with current interests and tastes, often chasing the MCU writing style wagon that went out of style half a decade or more ago, they keep pushing the highest fidelity graphics and technology like it's a mandate despite vastly less graphically complex games selling millions casually all around them, and there's almost no regard for how the game actually plays.
Also like the first crash, the rest of the industry chugs along just fine. The independent game market and games with lower budgets roll out and make their money fine, and even go from strength to strength. Nintendo reap untold levels of profits by riding years behind the graphics and technology curve while producing things that people like to look at and want to play, aiming at audiences outside teenage boys and young men (though still securing them at the same time, too). The Japanese industry is getting along just fine, with the odd exception (Square Enix haven't gotten the memos yet), PC gaming is doing fantastically in spite of the inflated costs of hardware at the moment, and the general quality of games on average is at an all-time high. China and Korea have had their local industries surge and build up off of major successes in mobile gaming, Sony is carrying out a series of initiatives to invest in development teams in India, North Africa and the Middle East after the first one in China succeeded immensely.
The immense job losses are tragic and executives should be put to the axe, frankly. Just hunted in the streets, their wealth redistributed and their names stained forever. On the other hand, the art medium continues, and it will survive this easily too.
I wonder what myths people will make of this period, in time?
The buzzing has subsided, and I think I've said more than enough. If you got this far, download a NeoGeo emulator and go enjoy Neo Turf Masters, it's like the best golf game ever made (I do not have a comprehensive knowledge of golf games). Or, perhaps, look into those old PC game collections, culture yourself a bit. Take a stroll around GOG or itch.io, buy something weird or old and/or pornographic (like, say, Ultima VII, which can hit all three of these at points), put it in your system and see if it does anything for you. It just might!
The point, at the end of the day, as always, is to indicate just how much shit is out there, and to hope you'll give something a gander if only to experience it. To broaden your horizons, cleanse your pallete and put more colours in it, and see what you figure out about games and yourself. And to try and induce the same sicknesses I have in others, but that goes without saying.
