Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [21]
But the way to avoid a bad game, as with a bad album or bad magazine, is simply not to buy it. Consumers might get burned from a shoddy product, but they’d learn not to touch that particular hot stove again. It’s the most basic role of capitalism: weak products don’t sell.
The real problem came from the retail side. Department stores, toy stores, and electronics stores needed to stock the latest games and consoles. Nowadays, and more or less ever since 1983, that has meant three or four home consoles, and maybe one or two portable consoles, plus a selection of games for each system.
Imagine what it was like in 1983. The Atari 2600 was still dominant. Its replacement, the Atari 5200, has recently hit stores. It was competing for shelf space with the ColecoVision and Coleco’s new Gemini, Mattel’s Intellivision and Intellivision II, the Bally Astrocade, the Fairchild Channel F System II, the Magnavox Odyssey2, the Vectrex, the Emerson Arcadia 2001, and the VTech CreatiVision. Individual stores such as Sears and Radio Shack had proprietary systems as well—Tele-Games and the Tandyvision.
And these were just the consoles! Atari had branched out into computers with the Atari 400 and 800 personal computers. Add to that the Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64, the Timex Sinclair, the Apple II and Lisa, the Mattel Aquarius, and the Coleco Adam. Each one had its own software library. Each had a half dozen accessories. All were sold as game machines that could also run a spreadsheet or type a letter. None were compatible with the others. Just about every company had announced plans to ship a brand-new console or computer in 1984. And, in a bout of desperation, they had all begun to slash prices to draw in a customer base. When Time magazine had said the person of the year for 1982 was the computer, it didn’t imagine the very next year there’d be an overpopulation problem.
The poor electronics retailer had seen this before, with VHS and Betamax, and before that tape versus videodisc. Eight-track versus cassette, record versus reel-to-reel, FM versus AM. Laserdisc, in 1983, was trying (and failing) to supplant videotape. But these format battles were usually two-party affairs. Retailers would stock both modestly, and allocate more and more shelf space to whoever was winning. But this rhododendron hell of a dozen different video game companies all trying to put the others out of business would bring everyone down—as well as any retailer foolish enough to try to stock a little bit of everything.
All through 1982 retailers had seen their groaning partitioned shelves grow dusty. Even for the Christmas season, consumers didn’t want to commit to any one console, any one computer. Now, in 1983, store owners drew a line. They started pushing back unsold products. They demanded refunds, and refused to stock any new games or consoles. Time to get out of this cloud-cuckoo land, this nine-person game of Joust.
But the game manufacturers had no cash on hand to return to the stores, since neither their new games nor the existing inventory were being sold. One company, US Games, went bankrupt. Another, Games By Apollo, followed. Private companies that had entered gaming to rack up a quick IPO shuttered their doors. Public companies like Atari’s Warner Brothers saw their stock prices plummet. System after system ended up being marked for clearance prices. What used to cost $300 was ratcheted down in $50 installments until it was being given away for less than it cost to manufacture. Forty-dollar games went for $10, then for $5—anything to get them out of the store. Like maggots on a corpse, a new crop of game manufacturers appeared, selling cheapo games already priced at $5.
The gaming retailers adopted the motto of the video-game-playing