The North American videogame crash of 83.

[SuperMappy]

What better place to ask this then here:

How was Europe effected by this?

To my under standing the answer is hardly at all because most games in Europe were played on computers and not consoles. Did Atari 2600 cartridges suddenly get cheaper in the shops or was the prices relatively steady?

I never knew about the crash until years later because I had moved on to the Vic-20 and I mainly got games for it instead. I still had the Atari 2600 and I kinda of remember the price of the games were suddenly reduced quite a bit at the local Heck's Department store where I also got my Vic-20 games. I then later went on to the C64 and pretty much left the 2600 in the dust, but the Atarisoft cartridge line for the 20 and 64 were great fun.

[NorthWay]

Someone should match it up with the story of Imagine and see if there is any overlap.

[Dio]

Your experience is largely the point. The general European reaction to hearing there was a videogame crash in 1983 is "eh?".

Most of us were ramping up our gaming time in 1983, not down. The VCS was already a rapidly declining system - it was very rapidly replaced by the Spectrum, once that became available, with the major factor being the much higher visual quality of the average game and that they were £5 instead of £20+. (The latter price being well over £50 in today's money).

Indeed, the UK's outsized position in the game industry through the 90s and early 2000s is a direct consequence of the number of people that got into writing games in the home computer era.

For some odd reason, home computers were just a much smaller market in the US (per head of population, at least). Although it's worth noting home computers were a far smaller market than consoles, even then. Indeed the total sales of all home computers only just beat the 30m of the VCS: 13m C64s, 5m each for the Spectrum and MSX, about 4m Amigas, 3m STs and Amstrads, and the rump of about 8m or so across BBC, Atari, VIC-20, ZX81 etc. - and then the NES ships 50m (mostly in Japan, mind) and conclusively demolishes the entire home computer market on its own.

(In the spreadsheet I've got two prices for the system, £95 in early 1982 and £49 in 1988 (both from PCW - game prices "from £15" though).)

[MattyP]

Indeed echo the above. Didn't happen here in the UK at least.

1983 was a boom time for computer tech. Generally I think the Atari 2600 as a value proposition here didn't really cut it. I mean it only played games. Carts were £25 a pop. Cassettes and computers all the way here. And we were better for it TBH. Made a whole generation computer literate and got to play a whole diverse selection of games far exceeding the depth of consoles at the time. Consoles never really caught on in the UK until the NES I'd say and even then they were a hard sell with the price of carts and the single use thing.

I do miss the variety of the era at times. The C64, Spectrum then the Amiga and ST. Great times.

[Dio]

The NES was barely officially sold in the UK, it was a tiny market because it really wasn't that good compared to a C64, let alone the ST. The first console to properly take off here was the Megadrive.

Before that the grey import PC Engine was probably the biggest system - we sold that at the games shop a bit along with lots of ST games (and a very few Amiga - it really was a small market) but we only ever once had a NES (we bought it in second hand - us shop lads gave it a try but the games were absolute rubbish).

Once we started to get grey import MDs it rapidly blew all the rest of the business away. It was massive long before the official UK launch.

[Jonesey]

My two older brothers and I managed to talk our dad in to buying a ZX81 (as the song goes - to "help with the homework"). The Speccy quickly followed in '82. For me that was it - the beginning of my obsession with video games. Before that it was arcade games and to be honest I couldn't see the point in them - putting a 10p in a machine for no returns - better off putting it towards an ice cream!

But yeah the 48k Speccy was our videogame world for many happy years. The "crash" we didn't even notice. Like Matty said it boomed - it was Crash magazine every month, dodgy tapes, POKES..even Your Sinclair and programming in BASIC..

[F-ZeroOne]

As far as my own experiences go, I don't think it ever registered. Looking back at various arcade games I used to play, some of them were released rather later than I thought they were and my own local mix of games was a real grab bag of vintage and latest releases, so as far as I was concerned at the time they were all just "arcade games" without any real idea of "period"; some were obviously more advanced than others but thats as far as my perception meant.

As has been pointed out, home computers were the home gaming platform of choice in Europe compared to the US and stuck around longer. I remember seeing a NES in a local toy shop with no real idea what it was and Master System games in WH Smiths, but although a friend had a Master System it wasn't until the Mega Drive and then - again, from my perception - later SNES arrived that they seemed to take over.

I used to be into tabletop RPGs - circumstances meant I rarely got to play them, but I loved buying and reading them - and I used to buy "Dragon" magazine which would review US released computer games [1] like "Ultima" and the like (released in the UK as well but again, rarely encountered by me personally) and they seemed like alien exotica that I badly wanted to experience. Reality did not always match the longing though...

[1] As well as, eventually, console games; I first learned of "Phantasy Star" from ads in the magazine.

[Foozwah]

For whatever it's worth, the experience in Australia was much the same as the UK/Europe, with a slight shuffling of which computers were most popular.

The Atari 2600/VCS was huge here too (far more than Intellivision, Colecovision and Vectrex) , but we were unaware of any video game crash because by the time that occurred the machine has been well and truly replaced by computers as the primary gaming machine.

The C64 absolutely dominated gaming here, with Apple II a very distant second, and the remainder made up of Amstrad, Atari 8-bit, BBC and Spectrum, all of which were regarded more as a curiosity. (I was one of the few to have a Speccy first, before getting a C64. Here it was totally a niche machine - but cheap, hence why I got one, haha....)

Then the 16-bits came along, and I suspect my friends' group was fairly typical, in that almost everyone got an Amiga. Here the Amiga to Atari ST ratio was probably something like 50 to 1, maybe more. The ST was in a few shops, instrument stores, etc. but the Amiga was everywhere: computer shops, department stores, white goods stores, etc. Very much the default gaming machine, and the one which united the previously warring 8-bit micro tribes.

NES was similar to UK, maybe a bit more popular, but the Master System was much more visible and widespread. When I started at Beam/Melbourne House it was full-on NES dev there, post 8-bit micros, but 90% of titles were for the US and Japan market - many games I worked on never got a PAL version because it just wasn't worth it for a relatively tiny market. It was quite weird developing for something that wasn't really a thing own ones' own country - it was still the Amiga period then locally, which was slowly moving into the PC DOS era.

(Echoing Dio re: the UK, the Megadrive was really the first mass-market popular console in Oz since the Atari 2600. The SNES did eventually catch up, though.)

So yeah, the earlier videogame crash was very much a US-centric thing. At the time we were too busy living through what was pretty much a golden age of relatively cheap and diverse computer games, via 8- and 16- bit micros. Of course we heard about things like the "ET cartridges buried in desert" thing, but it was seen as an isolated incident, not part of some broader momentous happening.

[Dio]

Australia's Amiga popularity is something I've been trying to drill down on, but not got far with any reliable figures. The echo chamber often reports 1 million Amigas sold in AU, which A. seems rather high, since basically half the households in the country would have one and B. is probably a quarter of all the Amigas sold. It seems unlikely, but it keeps coming up.

And it would help explain why the ST continued to dominate the Amiga in publishers' mindsets even after it likely overtook ST sales in 89-90 or so, since it means the installed base everywhere but Australia remained smaller than the ST.

[Foozwah]

Yeah, as much as I'd like to fly the flag for Aussie Amiga-dom, 1 million DOES sound like an awful lot... especially if world sales were in the vicinity of 4.91 million.

I mean... maybe? Just from the POV that everyone I knew who had an 8-bit micro (C64s, Apple IIs, Beebs, Ataris, one or two Speccys) they ALL bought Amigas in the end, but even with that anecdotal take, it seems way high.

Years later I knew one person whose dad had an ST, but honestly, you were more likely to come across someone with an early Apple Mac than an Atari 16-bit here. (And yet all the newsagents still stocked ST Format alongside five or six different Amiga mags - always wondered who bought it!)