The Atari Crash, an event that can definitely be ranked first in the history of the video game industry.
Atari was a game company in the original world, a company that initially prospered in the arcade field.
A few young people created a game called "Pong" on a whim at that time. The gameplay was to continuously catch a small ball with a platform and then hit the blocks at the top of the screen until all the blocks were destroyed.
After these young people created this game, they made it into a simple arcade machine and placed it in nearby bars.
As a result, this game became extremely popular, and the coin boxes were eventually filled to the point of causing bugs in the game, but it still couldn't stop the players' enthusiasm.
From then on, the electronic game industry began to flourish.
Before that, it could only be called the barbaric era of games. After these young people developed Pong, it could be called the Bronze Age of game history.
Then, this company naturally began to establish itself, followed by rapid development, and eventually became a giant in the field of electronic games.
At that time, Nintendo was just a younger brother compared to Atari.
However, after Atari expanded, it made many wrong decisions.
The most fatal of these was not restricting the creation of game content, which led to its game consoles being filled with countless garbage games.
At the same time, these garbage games were also very cheap, with an average price of only about five dollars, and the developers were often one or two people, and it only took a week or two to finish them, quick and easy.
At that time, consumers were not very familiar with electronic games. They really didn't know what was good or bad about games, and in this state, the only thing they could use to measure was the price.
A high-quality game at that time often sold for around thirty dollars.
But a low-quality game only needed five dollars, or even less.
As a result, if consumers didn't know enough, they subconsciously chose the cheaper option.
They were all electronic games, and I could buy five or six with the same price. Isn't that great?
That was the unanimous thought of consumers at the time.
At that time, no one actively guided them on what was fun and what was junk games.
They only saw the cheap price for purchase.
Then, they bought them home, played the games, found them to be a pile of junk, and naturally thought that all electronic games were garbage, with no fun at all. Playing these things was just a waste of time.
This was the law of bad money driving out good.
A large quantity of content suffocated these consumers, leaving them no chance to experience better games.
Then came Atari's final fatal blow, the release of "E.T.", which almost halved Atari.
Consumers voted with their feet. When there were only a bunch of junk games on the market, they couldn't even look at those games that might be better.
As a result, the gaming industry in the United States fell into a two-year winter until Nintendo, a strong player, appeared and saved the entire industry.
Without Nintendo, the U.S. electronic game market would have been in a slump for at least another ten years. This wasn't just a casual statement.
Takayuki hadn't expected his development to be so rapid. He had already tried to control the trend of these things as much as possible, but it seemed that this industry was inevitably heading down this path.
It seemed to be some kind of trend, an irresistible force.
However, fortunately, the electronic game market now wasn't without resistance.
Now, the brand of Gamestar Electronic Entertainment represented high-quality games.
Plus, with Takayuki's restrictions on the content of their own game consoles, junk games would not appear on their own game consoles. As long as you bought our game console, you would absolutely not think it was junk. At most, you just didn't like that genre, but you couldn't deny the game itself.
Looking at the newly received data, Takayuki's heart sank more as he read on.
The price of a game console generally ranged from under $150, and a game usually sold for under $10, including the cost of the game cartridge itself.
Takayuki almost didn't need to play games like this.
This was bad, really bad!
...
United States, New York, a newly established small game company, several young people excitedly high-fived each other.
"Ah ha, our game just sold thirty thousand copies! Our profit is two hundred thousand dollars, it's simply a windfall."
Another young person on the side was chugging a bottle of just opened beer, then wiped his mouth excitedly and said, "We only spent half a month making this game. Doesn't that mean each of us has a value of two hundred thousand in half a month? Is there a cooler job than this?"
"No!"
Several young people shouted in unison.
They were surging with excitement, filled with infinite passion in their hearts, feeling that they had found the career they would dedicate their lives to in the future.
The money was earned so quickly!
"Let's go, I'll treat you guys to a trip to the strip club today!"
"Long live the boss!"
"Long live electronic games!"
"Let's go crazy!"
In many places in the United States, small game studios like mushrooms after rain emerged.
They were usually just two or three young people who dropped out of college or high school, exuding a rebellious aura, and plunged into game development with the little programming knowledge they had.
Game development wasn't actually that difficult, it was just a bit difficult to get started at first. But as long as you understood programming knowledge and had some basic drawing skills, you could make a simple game.
Especially with various popular games already in front of them, they only needed to peel off the program, then make some modifications themselves, and they could release their own game.
These games were generally very inferior and hadn't undergone any testing.
Some even froze the game console as soon as they were bought because of the cartridge, and in the end, the game console couldn't be used.
Of course, consumers were unhappy. They would go to the department store to ask for repairs or refunds.
And department stores would naturally go to the game console developers for an explanation, but the game console developers didn't care much.
Because the number of people who actually returned the product because of this was small, and most Americans were too lazy to do such things. They only treated it as if they had eaten a dead fly and swore never to buy electronic games again.
Most of these game console developers were immersed in the state of rapid sales performance in the short term and didn't care about the future of the game industry.