History MediaNotes / TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983

Third, Nintendo had its KillerApp -- the original ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1''. It was solid, it was extensive, it was fun, and it was unlike anything anybody had played before. It combined the ease of the home console with the computing power and disk space of a PC game.

First, it had to solve the MediaNotes/{{Shovelware}} problem. It did so with its own [[CopyProtection proprietary cartridge design]]. Unlike the Atari 2600, Nintendo kept it totally secret; ''nobody'' knew how to make a Nintendo cartridge but Nintendo. Part of the secret was the "10NES" lockout chip -- if a cartridge didn't include it, the game refused to run it.[[note]]This made UsefulNotes/ImportGaming difficult, because the Japanese Famicom didn't have the chip. But it did the job of preventing Shovelware admirably, at least at first. It's also the main cause of the "blinking screen of death", in other words it also prevents ''legal'' NES games from running. Most people that still play NES games on the original hardware disable the 10NES chip in their consoles[[/note]] Nintendo also enforced actual quality control, both in terms of playability and of content. This meant no more buggy games, and no more pornographic games[[note]]Three pornographic games did make it to the NES: ''Bubble Bath Babes'', ''Hot Slots'', and ''Peek-a-Boo Poker''. These were not licensed or approved by Nintendo, in fact it's likely Nintendo wasn't even aware of their existence, and if they were they kept quiet about it rather than invoke the Main/StreisandEffect[[/note]]. It tied all this together with the "Nintendo Seal of Quality", which was a mark on the cartridge that proved that Nintendo had reviewed and approved the game to ensure that it was almost entirely bug free and wouldn't brick the console playing it. Anything else was considered pirated and "play at your own risk", and retailers would now know which games were the real deal and which were Shovelware[[note]]Well, not exactly. Nintendo checked for functionality and content, but didn't care if the game was actually ''good'', just that it worked. There was/is TONS of shovelware and terrible games for the NES even if you exclude all the unlicensed garbage and Taiwanese bootlegs[[/note]].

In those early days, Atari owned the rights to build physical cartridges for the Atari 2600. This meant that ''only'' Atari could make games for the 2600 - there were no third-party developers. But Atari was stingy with its in-house designers, refusing to give them royalties or authorial credit for their work. This led to a culture of dissent which led a lot of talent to [[BrainDrain quit the company]], many wandering to competing video game manufacturers. Since Atari dominated the home console market back then, most competitors were making UsefulNotes/{{Arcade Game}}s; many companies like Creator/WilliamsElectronics poached a lot of talent from Atari. But others went on to [[StartMyOwn start their own companies]], of which the most successful was a nascent Creator/{{Activision}}.

November 1982 also saw the release of the 2600's successor, the Platform/Atari5200, but it failed to live up to expectations. Not only were the joysticks notoriously finicky and fragile, Atari found out the hard way that successor systems need UsefulNotes/BackwardsCompatibility. The 5200 was ''not'' backwards-compatible with the 2600[[note]](at least the launch versions weren't; they did release a later version of the 5200 which was compatible with a separate 2600 adapter, but the early 5200 adopters were out of luck)[[/note]], whereas competitors like the Platform/ColecoVision ''could'' play 2600 games. Atari also tried its hand in the PC market with the [[Platform/Atari8BitComputers 1200XL computer]], which was an even ''bigger'' flop than the 5200, mostly because it was [[ChristmasRushed rushed to market]] and had serious compatibility issues of its own with the earlier 400 and 800 library (and also Atari was sucked into a price war with Commodore).

But the bigger problem is that with the games, there was basically no quality control. Nobody was testing whether their games were even ''playable'', not even the giant Atari. And once Activision blew the doors open, anybody could make a cartridge and sell it for cheap. This led to a glut of UsefulNotes/{{Shovelware}}, much of it coming from non-video game companies seeing an opportunity to cash in, thinking that video games would sell regardless of quality. They tended to make mail-in exclusive tie-in games to their corporate properties like ''The Kool-Aid Man''. [[SturgeonsLaw At least 90% of it was unplayable crap.]]

Although Atari took the country by storm in the early 1980s, there was an equally vocal contingent of people who were convinced video games were a FlashInThePanFad. Some of them were {{Moral Guardian}}s who [[NewMediaAreEvil didn't understand them]] and thought they were bad for that reason. Others thought they were a waste of time. And they may have had a point, what with all the UsefulNotes/{{Shovelware}} on the consoles. Many games at the time were over in five minutes, or had only a single screen of content, and even the best games of the era rarely broke more than an hour of playtime to see everything they had to offer. The media at the time thought of video games as a novelty, and an expensive one at that (since you had to buy a console ''and'' the games and hook everything up). 1983 essentially "proved" to the naysayers that they were right.

This is why, even as the home game market suffered a huge blow from the death of the home console, the few surviving game companies could write games for the growing PC base, especially the Commodore 64. The rest of the market survived on UsefulNotes/{{Arcade Game}}s, which were declining much more slowly because there was still a social aspect to these games -- instead of playing at home, you went to a public place and played alongside others, and those arcade houses were willing to make the investment in the hardware. Minor arcade classics like ''VideoGame/{{Paperboy}}'', ''VideoGame/PunchOut'', ''VideoGame/SpaceAce'', ''VideoGame/KarateChamp'', and ''VideoGame/{{Gauntlet}}'' saw release during this period, and many of them would end up ported to [=PCs=] and home consoles (with [[PortingDisaster varying degrees]] of success) after that market's revival.

First, it had to solve the UsefulNotes/{{Shovelware}} problem. It did so with its own [[CopyProtection proprietary cartridge design]]. Unlike the Atari 2600, Nintendo kept it totally secret; ''nobody'' knew how to make a Nintendo cartridge but Nintendo. Part of the secret was the "10NES" lockout chip -- if a cartridge didn't include it, the game refused to run it.[[note]]This made UsefulNotes/ImportGaming difficult, because the Japanese Famicom didn't have the chip. But it did the job of preventing Shovelware admirably, at least at first. It's also the main cause of the "blinking screen of death", in other words it also prevents ''legal'' NES games from running. Most people that still play NES games on the original hardware disable the 10NES chip in their consoles[[/note]] Nintendo also enforced actual quality control, both in terms of playability and of content. This meant no more buggy games, and no more pornographic games[[note]]Three pornographic games did make it to the NES: ''Bubble Bath Babes'', ''Hot Slots'', and ''Peek-a-Boo Poker''. These were not licensed or approved by Nintendo, in fact it's likely Nintendo wasn't even aware of their existence, and if they were they kept quiet about it rather than invoke the Main/StreisandEffect[[/note]]. It tied all this together with the "Nintendo Seal of Quality", which was a mark on the cartridge that proved that Nintendo had reviewed and approved the game to ensure that it was almost entirely bug free and wouldn't brick the console playing it. Anything else was considered pirated and "play at your own risk", and retailers would now know which games were the real deal and which were Shovelware[[note]]Well, not exactly. Nintendo checked for functionality and content, but didn't care if the game was actually ''good'', just that it worked. There was/is TONS of shovelware and terrible games for the NES even if you exclude all the unlicensed garbage and Taiwanese bootlegs[[/note]].

Third, Nintendo had its KillerApp -- the original ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1''. It was solid, it was extensive, it was fun, and it was unlike anything anybody had played before. It combined the ease of the home console with the computing power and disk space of a PC game. It wasn't even bundled with the console originally (in either Japan or North America[[note]]All "official" Nintendo sources insist the game was released in October 1985, at the time of the NES's release. But some sources claim it wasn't available in North America until 1986. The debate would be put to bed in the late 2010's, when a sealed test market copy of Super Mario Bros., which were ''only'' available during the initial trial run (and are distinguished by being sealed by Nintendo branded stickers, not shrink wrapped) was discovered, proving that Super Mario Bros. ''was'' in fact available at the launch of the NES.[[/note]]), but word of mouth soon came out, and it was this game that drove sales of the NES to the stratosphere.

The effects of the Crash and Nintendo managing to revitalize the North American market on the global video game market are still felt to this day; although there were still some American-made consoles in the last years of the 20th century, none of them made much headway for various reasons, and Japan enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the global console market for ''16 years'', with Nintendo only being knocked off the top of the market by Creator/{{Sony}}'s Platform/PlayStation in 1995. Even after Creator/{{Microsoft}}'s Platform/{{Xbox}} broke that monopoly in 2001, that just meant that two out of the three major players were Japanese. 22 years later, the "Big Three" are still Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.

In [[TheEighties the early 1980s]], the American video game industry entered [[UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfVideoGames its second generation]] and was making money hand over fist. Arcades popped up across the country, the Platform/{{Atari 2600}} dominated competitors in the home market, and ''VideoGame/PacMan'' Fever (no relation to [[PacManFever the same-named trope]]) held America in its iron grip.

Nintendo's crazy idea to revive a moribund console market with a game involving [[ItMakesSenseInContext a fat Italian plumber venturing across a land overrun by turtles and walking mushrooms to save a princess from a fire-breathing dragon-turtle]] proved to be CrazyEnoughToWork. And in so doing, it ushered in [[UsefulNotes/The8BitEraOfConsoleVideoGames a new era of gaming]].

Japan had a massive arcade base thanks to its longstanding Pachinko parlors and TabletopGame/{{Mahjong}} dens. Home consoles were seen mostly as American curiosities. Although the Crash provided Japan the perfect storm for domestic development of computer technology (because the parts were so cheap now all of a sudden), much of that investment went into gaming computers like the Platform/{{MSX}}, which was released in late 1983. Although Japan couldn't hang with the PC competition in Europe and North America for very long, it also parlayed some success into the domestic home console, Creator/{{Nintendo}}'s [[Platform/NintendoEntertainmentSystem Famicom]]. That one came out right as the Crash was beginning in North America, so it looked a lot like Japan was a latecomer who was about to lose their bet that home consoles would ever be a "thing". We'll see how that bet worked out in a little bit.

-->--''WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation'' on ''VideoGame/ETTheExtraTerrestrial'' for Atari 2600

Atari shoved out as many games as it could in late 1982, most notably the home port of ''VideoGame/PacMan'' and the [[VideoGame/ETTheExtraTerrestrial video game adaptation]] of ''Film/ETTheExtraTerrestrial''. Both games were [[ChristmasRushed rushed to market as quickly as possible]] (''E.T.'' was programmed in less than six weeks), and they quickly earned a reputation as [[Horrible/VideoGames two of the worst games ever made]]. Atari was banking on these games being [[KillerApp system sellers]] and produced insane numbers of cartridges - after all, how can you lose money making ''Pac-Man''? Indeed, although initial sales were brisk (and record-breaking in ''Pac-Man''[='s=] case), once word spread of their poor quality, the sales dried up. A desperate Atari kept churning out games, eventually making more copies of ''Pac-Man'' than there were consoles to play them on.[[note]](They knew this and didn't particularly care, hoping that the copies would drive demand to make more consoles.)[[/note]] But there were no takers. Atari famously had to deal with this by [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial burying the excess cartridges in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico]].[[note]](This was long thought an {{Urban Legend|s}} - nobody could ''find'' the landfill, and they just heard rumors that somewhere in New Mexico was a pile of old ''E.T.'' and ''Pac-Man'' cartridges. But the rumors were confirmed in 2014 when the landfill was excavated. There were indeed a ton of old cartridges there, but from a variety of games, as well as defective consoles and accessories - not that it made any difference.)[[/note]] That's ''millions'' of dollars' worth of hardware just thrown away.