It is a well-known story—There was a videogame crash in 1983 due to a flood of horrible games like E.T and Pac-man for the Atari that almost ended the videogame fad and if Nintendo didn’t come out in 1985 and saved the market there wouldn’t be any videogames today. Sounds simple, but is it true?
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In the late 70’s and early 80’s Atari was the 800-pound gorilla in the videogame industry. While they didn’t invent the console market—it was Atari who made it marketable and successful. Games like Asteriods, Missle Command. Jungle Hunt and Space Invaders were the killer apps of the time and made Atari the fastest growing company ever at that time. So, what happened-- how did Atari go from being the King of the Hill to barely existing today?
The NES we know and love started as the Famicom (Family Computer) in Japan in 1983. The videogame crash was purely an American event; around the world video and computer games were still thriving. After a massively successful 1983 and 1984 seasons, Nintendo began to eye the U.S market. Companies like Nintendo and Sega were weary of the American market, but they knew it was potentially prosperous as Atari had done very well in the past. Nintendo decided to partner with Atari to bring the Nintendo to the US, however after much back and forth the deal fell through and Nintendo had to decide if they were going to bring their Famicom system stateside. Of course, we know what decision they made.
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If videogames were going to be successful again in America changes would need to be made to get customers trust and interests back. The first of those changes was to develop the “Seal of Quality” which ensure the consumer that Nintendo themselves checked the game out and certified its quality (even though there were many crappy games). The big N also limited the amount of games that a publisher can release each year to reduce the glut of games in the market. Lastly quality of games was paramount. There was also a change in focus, no longer were games mostly arcade ports like Atari had been doing, console games would now be unique games that can only be played on the NES. I remember when my cousin first got the NES and he was trying to describe the new game “Super Mario Bros.” to me. “You run around and jump on top of monsters” he exclaimed, “then you can eat a mushroom get big and eat a flower and shoot fire”. After wondered if he was eating mushrooms, I got super excited and couldn’t wait to play this game. I daydreamed and tried to envision the world that my cousin described to me. When I finally played it, I was hooked. It was a whole world and adventure with a start and a finale. This was something new that the Atari did not offer on their system.
The D-pad was another invention that was integral. You now had a digital, ultra precise way to control your onscreen avatar. With the new control mechanism, the player can now move the player with their thumb versus having to use a whole hand to control a joystick. This opened the door to hours and hours of play at a time with less fatigue, as well as the epidemic known as Nintendo thumb.
The next innovation was how the NES would look. The hot entertainment item at the time was the VHS VCR and Nintendo borrowed from that design. They also packaged the system with R.O.B the robot and lastly never called it a videogame system. All of this lead to massive success.
What are the after effects of Nintendo joining the videogame market? The big N is still a major player with the Switch. Then there is the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. PlayStation is a player today directly because of Nintendo. There was a deal that went sour between Sony and Nintendo that angered Sony and resulted in them making the original PlayStation (a story which I can write a blog about because it is interesting). Microsoft created the Xbox because they feared that Sony would take over the living room. The NES also resulted in the videogame world being Japanese centric versus the Atari dominated American centric previous perspective. The NES dominance can still be felt today with NES classic selling like hotcakes. Thanks NES for keeping the industry afloat during the lean years.
