Thande
Donor
Anyone who wants detailed explanation behind this - suffice to say that you get weird ideas when you're trying to get to sleep in order to wave cuvettes in a German's face in the morning.
Part 1: Before the POD
1983:
Videogames are all the rage in the United States, with many different consoles competing for the market, including the Atari 2600 and 5200, the ColecoVision and Coleco Gemini, the Mattel Intellivision, and the Magnavox Odyssey Squared to name just a few. Arcades also proliferate rapidly across the nation.
Too rapidly. So many people and companies have jumped on the bandwagon that its wheels are about to fall off. The vast number of consoles and games has supersaturated the overestimated market share. Personal computers are starting to muscle in on the same area. Loss of creative control and the urgency of competition has resulted in many games being rushed in production, resulting in poor quality. Atari gambles that its undertested, imperfect port of Pac-Man and its licensed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial will sell wildly on name alone. They don't, with millions of unsold cartridges famously being buried in a landfill in El Paso.
The Atari Landfill
The result of all this is that the swelling video game bubble finally bursts and the bottom drops out of the market in the Great Videogame Crash of 1983. Countless American console manufacturers go bust or at least withdraw from the market with heavy losses. Atari hangs on by the skin of its teeth. For the American mainstream consumer, videogames have become a toxic, risky area in which to invest.
Such an economic bubble, more than two centuries earlier, had inadvertently created the British Westminster parliamentary political system that had, by 1983, spread across much of the world. The Videogame Crash would not be quite so important to world history, but its aftershocks would nonetheless be felt for a long time...
Meanwhile, in Japan, unnoticed and uncommented on by the rest of the world, two established arcade games companies are releasing their own consoles, apparently with horrible timing. Nintendo, a company dating back to 1889 when it had made card games, unveils the Family Computer, abbreviated to Famicom. The Famicom is deliberately designed to look toy-like, appealing more to children than previous U.S. console releases whose marketing had been aimed mainly at teens and young adults. Meanwhile, Sega, a company founded mostly by Americans in the 1950s whose original role had been to make mechanical arcade games for American servicemen in Japan, releases the Sega SG-1000.
The Nintendo Famicom
The Sega SG-1000
Part 1: Before the POD
1983:
Videogames are all the rage in the United States, with many different consoles competing for the market, including the Atari 2600 and 5200, the ColecoVision and Coleco Gemini, the Mattel Intellivision, and the Magnavox Odyssey Squared to name just a few. Arcades also proliferate rapidly across the nation.
Too rapidly. So many people and companies have jumped on the bandwagon that its wheels are about to fall off. The vast number of consoles and games has supersaturated the overestimated market share. Personal computers are starting to muscle in on the same area. Loss of creative control and the urgency of competition has resulted in many games being rushed in production, resulting in poor quality. Atari gambles that its undertested, imperfect port of Pac-Man and its licensed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial will sell wildly on name alone. They don't, with millions of unsold cartridges famously being buried in a landfill in El Paso.
The Atari Landfill
The result of all this is that the swelling video game bubble finally bursts and the bottom drops out of the market in the Great Videogame Crash of 1983. Countless American console manufacturers go bust or at least withdraw from the market with heavy losses. Atari hangs on by the skin of its teeth. For the American mainstream consumer, videogames have become a toxic, risky area in which to invest.
Such an economic bubble, more than two centuries earlier, had inadvertently created the British Westminster parliamentary political system that had, by 1983, spread across much of the world. The Videogame Crash would not be quite so important to world history, but its aftershocks would nonetheless be felt for a long time...
Meanwhile, in Japan, unnoticed and uncommented on by the rest of the world, two established arcade games companies are releasing their own consoles, apparently with horrible timing. Nintendo, a company dating back to 1889 when it had made card games, unveils the Family Computer, abbreviated to Famicom. The Famicom is deliberately designed to look toy-like, appealing more to children than previous U.S. console releases whose marketing had been aimed mainly at teens and young adults. Meanwhile, Sega, a company founded mostly by Americans in the 1950s whose original role had been to make mechanical arcade games for American servicemen in Japan, releases the Sega SG-1000.
The Nintendo Famicom
The Sega SG-1000
