If the video game crash of 83 hadn't happened, what would gaming be like today?

[thejboy88]

The crash of the North American video game industry in 1983 was perhaps one of the biggest things to happen in the medium. It wiped out a huge number of previously popular companies, like Coleco, as well as greatly impacting the success of old-school giants like Atari.

This crash paved the way for companies like Nintendo to arrive on the scene years later, completely changing the face of gaming with consoles like the NES.

But, what if it hadn't happened? What if the games industry never experienced that massive punch-to-the-gut? What would gaming look like today if things had remained stable through that entire period?

 

[MysticSlayer]

The only thing I can be certain of is this: We wouldn't have so many people looking at the 1983 crash and saying, "I want that to happen again...I think it will happen again...It will happen again." Instead, they'd be saying, "I wish I knew how to fix this...I think I can figure out how to fix this...Let's go figure out how to fix this."

 

[LaoJim]

Very tricky to make any kind of prediction given the number of companies, games and systems involved.

Lets suppose that there were enough sales of video games for Atari to make a new games console of similar power and quality to the NES. Does this mean that Nintendo wouldn't succeed as a games company？ - If it did succeed， does 2 successful console makers mean that there would be no more room for Sega to become a competitor. If there were no Mario and no Sonic does that mean that 2D platformers would not become a major genre, and if so what genre would replace it during this time? How would a lack of dominant platforms affect the Japanese game industry - Given that the Japanese had already produced classics such as Pac-Man well before the crash, my guess is that it would have done okay anyway. But given that Japanese people tend to buy Japanese products and Americans already had a popular home grown console, maybe two separate industries in each country develop - JRPGs and Fighting games never become popular in the West...

Anyway, so much for a sensible answer, let's try a ludicrous one.

The 1983 crash didn't happen? This can only be because E.T. turned out to be one of the greatest games ever made - Given only four weeks to develop the game in time for Christmas, somehow Howard Warshall does the impossible and makes a video game featuring the little brown alien that genuinely touches the hearts of gamers around the world - most being in tears as they raise E.T. back to life and send him on his way back to his home planet.

The success of E.T. leads to a new generation of what are know as 'sensibility' games - titles, often based on popular movies, that skillfully evoke complex emotional responses (love, regret, hope) in their fan base - chiefly young soppy girls who are famed for living in entirely pink bedrooms and eating chocolate after chocolate as they stare weeping at the scenes unfolding on the video screen. Top tiles of the period include Ghost: The Videogame of the Movie, Sleepless in Seattle: Awakenings and Jerry Maguire: Origins. The proposed adaptation for Interview with a Vampire falls through however as there is no proven market for violence in modern video games (Space Invaders being seen as the last of a 'barbaric' period).

The butterfly effect leads to Mr and Mrs Sarkeesian giving birth to Anthony, a MRA activist who goes on to bemoan the Estrogen-filled misandry of the current industry and asking why all the men appearing in games are sensitive hunks with British accents and when, (oh, when) will we see normal blue-collars workers - say an Italian-American plumber - represented in video games - instead of talking about our feelings, perhaps we could show the strength of our love for the princess, by perhaps killing wave after wave of invading space monsters - thus risking not merely our fragile flower-like emotional stability - but also the prospect of getting ripped limb for limb". Responding to this, the girl gamers send Anthony lots and lots of Valentine's Cards with big extra-fluffy pink hearts and in the spirit of respecting others' feelings agree that from now on the hero of a game can punch one moderately ugly alien once a game, in somewhere other than the face or genitals. Everyone lives happily ever after.

Meanwhile in Japan, which has no longer had to cater to a Western market, off-the-wall director Suda 51 bravely attempts to make the first game which doesn't involve tentacle-raping school girls with cat ears. He fails.

 

[Godhead]

There would be a hell of a lot more landfills with cartridges in them.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Very tricky to make any kind of prediction given the number of companies, games and systems involved.

Lets suppose that there were enough sales of video games for Atari to make a new games console of similar power and quality to the NES. Does this mean that Nintendo wouldn't succeed as a games company - If it did succeed does 2 successful console makes that mean there would be no more room for Sega to become a competitor. If there were no Mario and no Sonic does that mean that 2D platformers would not become a major genre, and if so what genre would replace it during this time. How would a lack of dominant platforms affect the Japanese game industry - Given that the Japanese had already produced classics such as Pac-Man well before the crash, my guess is that it would have done okay anyway. But given that Japanese people tend to buy Japanese products and Americans already had a popular home grown console, maybe two separate industries in each country develop - JRPGs and Fighting games never become popular in the West...

Interesting... Although some of those aren't truly hypothetical. Atari made 2 consoles after the 2600, which are comparable to the NES in performance (slightly better/worse perhaps. Hard to tell.)
They also survived long enough to make the Lynx and Jaguar. The lynx was monstrously huge, but that aside it had a degree of appeal to it. The jaguar was just a disaster.

So we can see what atari made in the present circumstances, but we don't know what it would have done to their market share if the crash hadn't happened.

There's a few likely points though. The Famicom would've existed either way, because of the Japanese market which has little to do with a crash in America.
Without the crash though, it's more likely the NES would bear a more direct resemblance to the Famicom than the redesigned box the west got. (The design of which was specifically about not making it look like a traditional games console)

Mario would likely have been around regardless, both because of the Japanese market, and because, in fact, early on Nintendo released Arcade machines, AND games for Atari systems (and others)...

If Atari had enough of a stranglehold on the western market though, there is a moderate chance we would have seen Nintendo titles continue to show up on Atari consoles...

Which feels really weird from a modern perspective, but it's definitely an interesting thought...

Sega is much harder to judge, though it is of course worth remembering they were once a Giant in terms of Arcade machines...
If the home console market proved too challenging, they may have stuck to just arcade stuff perhaps...
Sonic might not have happened in that case, since Sonic is a game which was originally tied quite closely to the Mega Drive/Genesis, and was somewhat trying to prove a point of technical superiority.

In all of that though, it assumes Sega wouldn't be able to survive on the Japanese market alone. Which would again change the outcome somewhat...

Still, a world where Mario was seen on Atari platforms, and Sonic didn't exist would be a strange one...

Hypothetical stuff gets weird quickly... XD

 

[Lilani]

The only thing I can be certain of is this: We wouldn't have so many people looking at the 1983 crash and saying, "I want that to happen again...I think it will happen again...It will happen again." Instead, they'd be saying, "I wish I knew how to fix this...I think I can figure out how to fix this...Let's go figure out how to fix this."

Yeah, whenever I see somebody hoping a crash will happen again or thinking it will, I immediately know that they do not know what causes a crash or what it does.

I mean, the Atari crash basically cleared the North American playing field and Nintendo eventually filled the gap--a Japanese company. And now Xbox is the only American console, and it's probably the one most likely to fail the soonest. Not that there's a problem with non-American game companies, but from a business standpoint America is a huge player in what we consume now, not only in AAA games but indie games. And other countries and studios are coming to prominence as well. The only reason the Atari crash "worked out" was because Nintendo was so independent from the American games market, and was able to fill the gap Atari left while not feeling the effects of the crash. In fact, they were booming at the time.

But now, everything is very integrated, and all countries, studios, and console makers rely on the sheer size of the games market to have the kinds of opportunities they have now. A crash would just serve to limit the market for all, displace a lot of talent, and crush opportunities.

 

[Smooth Operator]

We would have a couple more old crotchety companies taking up the Nintendo space... and that is about it.
Everything else still grew out on it's own from humble beginnings.

 

[LaoJim]

Interesting... Although some of those aren't truly hypothetical. Atari made 2 consoles after the 2600, which are comparable to the NES in performance (slightly better/worse perhaps. Hard to tell.)
They also survived long enough to make the Lynx and Jaguar. The lynx was monstrously huge, but that aside it had a degree of appeal to it. The jaguar was just a disaster.

I'd forgotten about the Lynx and Jaguar, I think I was only ever vaguely aware of their existence - growing up in Britain in the 80s/90s I don't think I ever saw one in the wild - I've just spent a informative 15 minutes on Wikipedia.

 

[stroopwafel]

Don't think it would have made a shred of difference. People overvalue the 1983 'crash' way too much. The 'games industry' back then consisted solely as a geek hobby and resembled nowhere near the multi-billion dollar industry it is today.

I guess the only tangible difference would have been that Nintendo might not have used their 'seal of quality' standard to prevent junk titles from flooding the NES like they did the Atari 2600. Though if you consider all the garbage LJN titles on the system you can even wonder how effective that was.

 

[Wakey87]

You know those early access and greenlight games on Steam? pretty much that except you'd be able get a boxed retail version in a store near you lol. But i guess it depends on the theoretical scenario that allowed the crash not to happen.

 

[RJ 17]

I think the much more important question is what will gaming be like when the next crash which is surely coming soon occurs.

 

[Aetrion]

I think the much more important question is what will gaming be like when the next crash which is surely coming soon occurs.

It's really not possible for it to crash. It could undergo a contraction at some point, but gaming isn't like it was in 83. Back then all games in existence were much more similar. Nobody had even conceived of gaming genres yet, and there was really no such thing a large audience of gamers who considered video games to be their primary hobby yet. Games back then were what we today would consider casual games, but priced more equivalently to a AAA title from today. It was simply an entirely different climate for games. Having a home console was more akin to buying a foosball table than it was to owning gaming consoles or PCs today. People stopped buying games because the new ones just weren't better than the old ones.

Today casual games are widely available for next to nothing on devices you already own for completely different reasons than gaming, so that can't really crash anymore, only maybe make less money when people get sick of microtransactions maybe. The games that "gamers" play are more like movies than games now. Even if you love a certain movie, you're going to watch new movies. A mediocre new story is better than nothing new at all. Simply the fact that today most games are meant to be finished and then you pick up a different game makes the industry infinitely more resistant to a complete crash. Nobody has pong and says "Well, the first game we got is still kind of the best one, all the others we bought aren't an improvement, so we won't buy any more of them", but that's what was happening back then.

 

[CaitSeith]

It's possible that neither Sony or Microsoft would be in the console business. Instead, it would be Matel, Atari and/or Coleco.

And the controllers would have numeric key pads

 

[snekadid]

It would look like Steam Green light. Seriously, go look up the reasons the crash happened in the first place and then go look at greenlight.

 

[Shiftygiant]

'83 doesn't happen. But it's gonna happen eventually, and if we delay it, the crash is just going to be worse.

 

[MetalDooley]

I guess the only tangible difference would have been that Nintendo might not have used their 'seal of quality' standard to prevent junk titles from flooding the NES like they did the Atari 2600. Though if you consider all the garbage LJN titles on the system you can even wonder how effective that was.

To be honest I don't know where people got the idea that the seal of quality meant a game was good.You only have to look at LJN's output as you mentioned to have that notion quashed.All the seal meant was that the game was licensed by Nintendo(one of the big problems with Atari was that anyone could release a game on the 2600)and that it wasn't utterly broken

 

[Redd the Sock]

Interesting thought exercise. I've gone on about how I see the 83 crash as enabled by the perception that video games were a fad that was on the way out because of numerous factors like generic similarities in games, crappy home ports, and crappier unlicensed games. ET just shifted it into high speed. Nintendo showed that technology can grow and improve, giving us the gaming medium we know today, however the crash gave it a virtual monopoly.

No crash means that Nintendo has stronger competitors at launch, which can be good or bad. It would put developers in a better place to negotiate pay and standards. On the other hand, while Nintendo could be an ogre, it had at least some quality standards and those unlicensed NES games we see on AVGN could be some of the worst. Not even just quirky or flawed, but total crap. Worst of all, console wars of that gen were based on exclusives with systems having almost zero overlap, so the barrier to a lot of games would be higher with more systems based on an exclusive lineup.

On the other hand competition is good, and the hardware level could be vastly improved if Nintendo hadn't nailed 80% of the market down before Sega came in. With lineups a bit more spread out, consoles would have to do better than the other guys and produce better games instead of the setup we got with Mario and Zelda carrying a lot of sub par stuff. It could have prevented some of Sega and other's missteps into better tech that was too costly and of questionable quality as they don't need to drastically out innovate and overpower themselves to compete with Nintendo and don't need to push unfinished tech out the door. Nintendo on the other side would have to be more open to market changes, including moving to CDs sooner, accepting more mature level entertainment sooner, and would have to be on better terms with developers lest they go elsewhere to an equal market instead of a smaller one.

A lot of possibilites.

 

[Bad Jim]

One thing to consider is what kind of '83 would not experience a crash. That would probably be an '83 without the "we can shit in a box and sell it" mentality that ultimately proved to be incorrect. The unlicensed games would probably have happened sooner or later with or without Activision, but if Atari had stuck to quality they may have retained customers.

Another issue is that the 2600 was weak and only allowed very simple games. A timely new console would have opened up possibilities and renewed interest in games. Atari did actually release such a console in 1982, the 5200, but they did not release many games for it and it was not backwards compatible with the 2600.

Generally, Atari would need to be a better company to not have a crash in '83, so it's just possible they would still be around and making consoles.

Also, the Amiga was originally developed by Atari while the Atari ST was originally developed by Commodore, but due to project difficulties and legal wrangling they basically swapped machines. So you would probably see an Atari Amiga and a Commodore ST.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I guess Atari would be this day's Nintendo, but Sony and Microsoft would've jumped in sooner or later either way.