Game News The death of video games?
Published on 07/17/2022 at 12:00
In 2022, the video game industry is doing very well and generating a lot of money! Metaverse, social platform, eSport, free to play, smartphone games, service games: gaming is evolving ever faster. But all that almost disappeared in a few weeks, exactly 40 years ago. Today we tell you how Atari almost destroyed the video game industry.
The video game is an electronic game having a user interface which allows playful human interaction with visual feedback on a video screen. When we talk regarding the origins of video games, the first name that often comes to mind is Pong, the famous tennis game released in 1972. Two white bars on each side of the screen represent the players. A white square acts as a ball. However, it is not really the first video game in history. This place goes to OXO, a game of crabs created in 1952, on a primitive electronic tube computer EDSAC. It was not until 1958 that another tennis game was created: Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope and 1962 for the release of Spacewar! on a minicomputer. Its creation will mark a turning point in video game history by starting the golden age of the arcade with its adaptation, Galaxy Game in 1971.
The Crash of 1983
From that moment on, the video game enjoyed great success with Donkey Kong,
Space Invaders or Pac-Man. It will even settle in homes with the first consumer console, the Atari 2600, from Atari, released in 1977. Despite the emerging success of this new medium, the video game will quickly face a financial crisis. This is what will be called the Video Game Crash of 1983. It is due to competition with personal computers, but also to the lack of originality and quality of the games offered on the platforms. Arcade games are so successful that all game producers copy and recopy their principles, to the point that supply outstrips demand. These reproductions are often sloppy and full of bugs. The public begins to lose interest and abandons the video game. The Crash was such that Atari, not knowing what to do with all these games, had to bury thousands of cartridges in the Mexican desert.
Nintendo, the savior
However, Nintendo would reshuffle the cards in 1985 with the release of Super Mario Bros.. on NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). The Japanese firm will offer a new vision of the media with other ways of approaching it thanks to licenses such as The Legend of Zelda,
Metroid or Dragon Quest. With this revitalization of the market, competitors appear like Sega proposing, in turn, new ideas, thus creating a stable and sustainable market.
