Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [20]
The same wasn’t true of fledgling video games, barely a decade old as a business. Arcades had grown like overnight mushrooms in the quarter-rich atmosphere, and seen a generation of grass-smoking hippies and disco cats grow up and leave, turning into Walkman-wearing yuppies. The arcade culture had existed for a hundred years before video games, but video games made them ever-present places where you could bum a smoke off an older kid, watch Yars’ Revenge masters ply their trade, listen to Kiss, and feel cool. But as with any game, the fun only lasted so long.
Distributors were now placing cabinets anywhere they could: supermarkets, restaurants, barber shops, drugstores, gas stations. They overloaded the market with too many games, games that weren’t worth a quarter, games too hard for John Q-Bert Public. Distributors started going broke, since the machines they bought on credit weren’t bringing in the cash to pay back the bank. The writing had been on the wall for a year already, when in 1982 Atari’s projected earnings were reset to be less Daedalian. After that, it was a matter of time before game companies too close to the sun started to fall out of the sky.
Where the pinch was really being felt, though, was in the home console market, which was five years newer than even arcade video games. The market began with its own minibubble, when Atari released Home Pong. Literally more than a hundred competitors followed, all with their own Pong-style games. It was grossly expensive and impractical to require consumers to purchase an entire console to play one game.
Atari’s 2600, released in 1977 as the VCS, had become the dominant gaming machine. But by 1983, its colorful graphics and varied gaming styles had become old hat. Too many companies—including Atari—were releasing too many games. Disgruntled Atari workers left to form their own companies, and sell their own 2600 games—Accolade, Activision, Acclaim (all named to come before Atari in the phone book). Simply buying “a” video game was now as inconceivable as buying “a” book or “a” sneaker: you had to know what type of experience you wanted, and which titles offered the best and most challenging game play and graphics.
Even knowing the game from the arcade didn’t guarantee your port of the game would be the pick of the variorum of possible conversions. Donkey Kong was a prime example. ColecoVision players received three solid levels, while Atari 2600 players only got two so-so levels. Since the arcade version had four levels, both were abridgements. Donkey Kong Jr. was even more bisected: the Atari 2600 game was atrocious, but the Intellivision edition was like setting up the arcade in your living room. And the Mario Bros. Atari 2600 version was phenomenal. (The ad for it was not. It featured an actor dressed as Mario in a boiler room frantically fighting giant crabs coming out of green pipes. Then he operatically sings “Mario, where are you?” Apparently the ad makers never understood that the plumber in red was Mario.)
Conventional wisdom says the sheer number of these bad games was the primary cause for the video game crash of 1983. Certainly two bad games stand out. Atari’s wretched Pac-Man, for instance, was manufactured to the quantity of 12 million cartridges. Atari had only sold 10 million 2600s, though, a decision as catastrophic as drying wet dynamite over a campfire. Add to that the other much-maligned 2600 game, the rushed E.T., whose box-office ubiquity was tarnished by a hard, unfun game. These games’ final fate is that rarest of things: an urban legend that’s actually true. With millions of unsellable titles, Atari had to eat the loss and dispose of them. But it feared that if the games were merely