History of video games and Crashes

[starlight777]

The origin of video games lies in early cathode ray tube-based missile defense systems in the late 1940s. These programs were later adapted into other simple games during the 1950s. By the late 1950s and through the 1960s, more computer games were developed (mostly on mainframe computers), gradually increasing in sophistication and complexity.[n 1] Following this period, video games diverged into different platforms: arcade, mainframe, console, personal computer and later handheld games.[1]
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/History_of_video_games.html


The first commercially viable video game was Computer Space in 1971, which laid the foundation for a new entertainment industry in the late 1970s within the United States, Japan, and Europe. The first major crash in 1977 occurred when companies were forced to sell their older obsolete systems flooding the market.


Six years later a second, greater crash occurred. This crash—brought on largely by a flood of poor quality video games coming to the market—resulted in a total collapse of the console gaming industry in the United States, ultimately shifting dominance of the market from North America to Japan. While the crash killed the console gaming market, the computer gaming market was largely unaffected. Subsequent generations of console video games would continue to be dominated by Japanese corporations. Though several attempts would be made by North American and European companies, fourth generation of consoles, their ventures would ultimately fail.




Though several attempts would be made by North American and European companies, fourth generation of consoles, their ventures would ultimately fail. Not until the sixth generation of video game consoles would a non-Japanese company release a commercially successful console system

 

[starlight777]

Video game crash of 1977



In 1977, manufacturers of older, obsolete consoles and Pong clones sold their systems at a loss to clear stock, creating a glut in the market. Atari and Magnavox remained in the home console market, despite suffering losses in 1977 and 1978.

The crash was largely caused by the significant number of Pong clones that flooded both the arcade and home markets. The crash eventually came to an end with the success of Taito's Space Invaders, released in 1978, sparking a renaissance for the video game industry and paving the way for the golden age of arcade video games. Soon after, Space Invaders was licensed for the Atari VCS (later known as Atari 2600), becoming the first big hit and quadrupling the console's sales. This helped Atari recover from their earlier losses. The success of the Atari 2600 in turn revived the home video game market, up until the North American video game crash of 1983.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games

 

[starlight777]

http://www.neiu.edu/~cjhudso2/timetable.htm


1961

Steve Russell and his fellow peers at MIT create "Spacewar!", the earliest full-fledged computer game in history.[1]


1971

Based on Spacewar!, the Galaxy Game, the very first coin-operated video game, is created. Also, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created a coin-operated arcade version of Spacewar!, calling it Computer Space. They later went on to start Atari, Inc. and created another historical game: Pong. [1]


1972-1977

The era of first generation video game consoles, which were mainly to experiment in the relationship of console video games and television (back when each video game was exclusive to each console). This was also the time when the revered company Nintendo made its first major voyage into the gaming world.




1977

The Video Game Crash of 1977: A dark period of gaming when the markets were plagued by constant "Pong clones," causing manufacturers of older, obsolete console systems to abandon their products, leaving only Atari and Magnavox in the home console business. [1]


1979

Certain employees become outraged that the heads of Atari did not allow for credits in their games and did not pay royalties. Therefore, they split off and formed their own business, Activision. Afterwards, Atari tried to sue Activision in an attempt to boycott their games, but eventually lost the case in 1982





The era of second generation video game consoles,also known as the early 8-bit era, which was started by the Fairchild VES (later named Fairchild Channel F), the world's first CPU based video game console, introducing the cartridge-based game code storage format. This trend was followed by other companies (Atari, Activision, Magnavox, etc) to produce their games,most of which were ports of arcade originals. [3]


1978-1986

The Golden Age of Video Arcade Games: The Taito Corporation's creation of and massive success due to the game Space Invaders brought about the end of the video game crash and jump started an era of innovation. In the 1980's this era marked the rise of different gaming genres (action, adventure, platform, fighting, shooter...), as well as the rise to fame for many gaming companies (Nintendo, Sega, Capcom, Namco, Konami, and SNK


1983-1984

The North American Video Game Crash of 1983: A time of even greater loss than the last crash, which mainly affected the U.S., allowing Japan to dominate the gaming industry. This event had many causes; from too many consoles on sale in markets, to competition with home computers that could plug into televisions and offered colored graphics and improved sound. However, the greatest disaster came from Atari. In 1981, Atari tried to cash in on the massive popularity of Namco's Pacman by creating a port for it on their current system at the time, Atari 2600, but its production was rushed, and Atari was left with a low-selling game that was hardly as lively or colorful as the original, ending in enormous loss for the company. In 1982, Atari tried to bounce back by heavily advertising a game based on "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," and hastily made millions of copies in time for the holiday season. This ended with the game being declared one of the worst in history, and Atari actually wound up dumping all of the unsold copies into a New Mexico landfill. The horrific outcome of this crash resulted in companies like Magnavox to leave the gaming industry entirely (although Activision roughly survived), as well as toy retailers that controlled consumer access to write off video games as a fad that had apparently passed.




1983-1995

The era of third generation game consoles, in which Japanese gaming companies came to drive the U.S. out of the game crash with their new systems. One major example is the Nintendo Company's release of the "Family Computer" (Famicom) into American territories under the title "Nintendo Entertainment System" (NES), which largely dominated sales in Japan and North America with the first entries of some of the most revered game series ever, such as Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda. Meanwhile, the Sega Master system made it big in Brazil, Oceana, and Europe. One of the keys to their success was the switch from flip-screen graphics to scrolling graphics. This era also marks the birth of the role-playing game (RPG) genre. RPG's where around before, but began to be truly defined with the release of Enix's Dragon Quest, which pretty much set the standard for RPG's at the time. Another great example is when Hironobu Sakaguchi, president of Square, a Japanese gaming company that was struggling at the time, decided to place all of his bets on creating his "final" fantasy-style RPG based on Dragon Quest, the outcome being the first entry in the immensely successful Final Fantasy franchise. [6]


1986

Nintendo releases "Game Boy," the first successful handheld gaming system




1987-1999

The era of fouth generation game consoles, also known as the 16-bit era. A very lively era in gaming, introducing systems whose games are still popular today, like Nintendo's Super Famicom (Super NES in America). Another noteworthy system is the Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis in America), which introduced Sega's popular mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog. This era saw great improvements in graphics, sound, and color, making it no surprised that it lasted over a decade. [7]


1993-2006

The era of fifth generation consoles, also known as the 32/64-bit era. This era saw the rise of the first systems to experiment in the third dimension, most notably the Nintendo 64 and the Sony Playstation. The N64 brought revolutionary games like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the latter of which introduced a targeting system that would be utilized in many future games. The Playstation dominated the market in this era, due to its own ingenuity, such as with bringing the Final Fantasy series into 3D with Final Fantasy VII, which was originally meant for the N64, but moved on to the PS due to storage capacity issues. Because of many delays to the release of the Nintendo 64, in 1995 Nintendo released the Virtual Boy, a supposedly portable system capable of displaying true 3D graphics, albeit in monochromatic red and black. Because of its graphical capabilities, the system could cause headaches and eye strain, and was not functionally portable, though it was marketed as such. It was discontinued within a year, with less than 25 games ever released for it. This era also saw the rise of new handheld systems, such as the Game Boy Color

 

[starlight777]

North American video game crash of 1983

The North American video game crash of 1983 (sometimes known as the Atari Debacle or the video game crash of 1983 and 1984 because it was in that year that the full effects of the crash became apparent to consumers) brought an abrupt end to what is considered the second generation of console video gaming in North America.

It almost destroyed the then-fledgling industry and led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing home computers and video game consoles in North America.

It lasted about two years, and many business analysts of the time expressed doubts about the long-term viability of video game consoles. The video-game industry was revitalized a few years later, mostly due to the widespread success of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which was released in North America in 1985 and became extremely popular by 1987.

There were several reasons for the crash, but the main cause was supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games which resulted in the loss of consumer confidence.


At the time of the US crash, there were numerous consoles on the market, including the Atari 2600, the Atari 5200, the Bally Astrocade, the ColecoVision, the Coleco Gemini (a 2600 clone), the Emerson Arcadia 2001, the Fairchild Channel F System II, the Magnavox Odyssey2, the Mattel Intellivision (and its just-released update with several peripherals, the Intellivision II), the Sears Tele-Games systems (which included both 2600 and Intellivision clones), the TandyvisioN (an Intellivision clone for Radio Shack), and the Vectrex.

 

[starlight777]

Competition from home computers

The first microcomputers such as the Altair 8800 and Apple I were primarily for electronics hobbyists and usually required assembly from a kit.
Starting in 1977 however, a new breed of pre-assembled machines with the BASIC programming language in ROM became available, of which the most famous were the "Trio of '77", the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 Model I.
The latter two retailed for under $1000 and the TRS-80 benefited from Radio Shack's chain of electronics stores, thus it could be seen on display by anyone shopping there while many personal computers at the time had to be mail-ordered from their manufacturer. In 1979, Atari unveiled the Atari 400 and 800 computers, built around a chipset originally meant for use in a game console, and which retailed for the same price as their names.
By 1982, personal computer sales were booming and the TI 99/4A and the Atari 400 were both at $349, Radio Shack's Color Computer sold at $379, and Commodore had just reduced the price of the Commodore VIC-20 to $199 and the Commodore 64 to $499

Because these and other home computers generally had more memory available, and better graphic and sound capabilities than a console, they permitted more sophisticated games and could also be used for tasks such as word processing and home accounting. Also, their games were often much easier to make copies of, since they came on floppy disks or cassette tapes instead of ROM modules (though many of them continued to use ROM modules extensively). The use of a writable storage medium also allowed players to save games in progress, a feature useful for the increased complexity of computer games, and one not available on the consoles of the era.

In a strategy that directly affected its home computer arch-rival Atari,[citation needed] Commodore explicitly targeted video game players in its advertising by offering trade-ins toward the purchase of a Commodore 64 and suggesting that college-bound children would need to own computers, not video games.


However, Commodore had a huge competitive advantage in their ownership of a chip fab, MOS Technologies. Because they could manufacture ICs in-house, the VIC-20 and C64 sold for much lower prices than competing home computers.


Despite advertisements extolling the virtues of personal computers over consoles, the home computer market was additionally dragged down by the video game crash. Gaming had always been a major catalyst in computer sales, but after the crash, gaming was widely seen as passe. Much like the console market, the computer industry suffered from oversaturation and an excess of competing platforms. During the first half of the 1980s, sales of computers steadily rose each year and set a new record in 1984, effectively saturating the market until newer computer technologies spurred a demand for upgrades




The market for home computers was not the only one affected; the swift rise of the IBM PC into the corporate world (aided by the IBM-exclusive spreadsheet program Lotus 123) spelled the end of Kaypro, Morrow, and other computer manufacturers who targeted the business market. IBM's stranglehold on that market ended when Compaq developed the first legal IBM clone BIOS using reverse engineering and clean room design. The arrival by 1987 of low-cost Taiwanese IBM PC compatibles from companies such as Acer and Leading Edge ensured the final triumph of the IBM-compatible architecture

 

[starlight777]

The North American video game crash had two long-lasting results. The first result was that dominance in the home console market shifted from the United States to Japan. When the video game market recovered in the late 1980s, Nintendo's NES was by far the dominant console, leaving only a fraction of the market to a resurgent Atari battling Sega's Master System for the number-two spot soon after. By 1989, home video game sales in the United States had reached $5 billion, surpassing the 1982 peak of $3 billion during the previous generation.

A large majority of the market was controlled by Nintendo, whose NES ultimately sold over 30 million units in the United States, exceeding the sales of other consoles and personal computers by a considerable margin.[26] Other Japanese companies also rivalled Nintendo's success in the United States, with Sega's Mega Drive/Genesis in 1989, and then the Sony PlayStation in 1995.
Atari never truly recovered and could not match the success of its competitors or its own 2600 console; it finally stopped producing game systems in 1996 after the failure of the Atari Jaguar.

It was not until 2001, when Microsoft released the Xbox, that a U.S. manufacturer became competitive in the home console market again, albeit with heavy losses in the market throughout the first few years




A second, highly visible result of the crash was the institution of measures to control third-party development of software. Using secrecy to combat industrial espionage had failed to stop rival companies from reverse engineering the Mattel and Atari systems and hiring away their trained game programmers.

While Mattel and Coleco implemented lockout measures to control third-party development (the Colecovision BIOS checked for a copyright string on power-up), the Atari 2600 was completely unprotected and once information on its hardware became available, little prevented anyone from making games for it. Nintendo thus instituted a strict licensing policy for the NES that included equipping the cartridge and console with lockout chips, which were region-specific and had to match in order for a game to work.

In addition to preventing the use of unlicensed games, it also was designed to combat piracy, rarely a problem in the US or Europe, but rampant in East Asia



On the computer side of things, the crash meant the end of the 8-bit computer era in North America and the beginning of the 16-bit era, which was marked by the virtual disappearance of any architecture except IBM PC clones and Apples. Computer gaming also shifted to an emphasis on primarily RPGs, sports sims, strategy, and adventures, and away from arcade games.



Effects on world gaming markets

In Europe, the early years of personal computing (1981–1985) were spearheaded by the very aggressive marketing of inexpensive home computers with the theme "Why buy your child a video game and distract them from school when you can buy them a home computer that will prepare them for university?"

Marketing research for both the gaming and the home-computer industries tracked the change as millions of consumers shifted their intention to buy choices from game consoles to low-end computers that retailed for similar prices but still allowed access to comparable games, while at the same time being useful for other tasks such as word processing, calculations and programming. That is why video game consoles had already been largely marginalised in Europe by 1984, thus, leaving the North American video game crash with little effect for the European market.

 

[Mua'dib]

Let's hope f***ing MS doesn't crash... The signs and omens are certainly there...

 

[Z A C K]

Let's hope f***ing MS doesn't crash... The signs and omens are certainly there...

It'd be the Xbox One, not Microsoft. But yeah, I don't think we have anything to worry about.