The Early 80s Video Game Slump
Between the early to mid 1980s, the video game business was believed to be a dead industry. The arcades were dead or dying and the home console business had become practically extinct. Stores were avoiding anything involving the words “video game” like the plague and major investors were even less interested in pumping their money into something that was considered, at the time, to be an extinct business model. There were three causes to the video game crash of the 1980s, they were: A flooded market, lack of originality, and consumer burnout.
The market became flooded with a host of companies that had been created by former employees from other companies that had made millions from the video game boom of the late 70s and early 80s. With this influx of new companies came new machines. The majority of these consoles offered little in the way of quality innovation. Instead of striving to make the next risky leap, they reverse-engineered the competition’s machines and made their own versions without bothering to try and make them feel unique or special.
This lack of originality led to a market filled with clones. More detrimentally, this lead to a market filled with clones of clones. People were getting into the video game business to turn a quick profit, not help revolutionize an industry. The public saw a burgeoning market filled with the same old thing. The people had played these games before and weren’t interested in being told to pay more money for another system that they basically already had. They lost interest. The new had worn off.
Video games weren’t the shiny toy they once had been. The games were interesting because they were something that hadn’t been done before. These were things that hadn’t existed five years ago. Going five years forward, the public was staring at rehashes of games they’d been playing since the first couple of years after the birth of the video game industry. The industry had stopped giving them a reason to view video games as a shiny new toy and, as such, they stopped treating it as one.
The video game crash of the 1980s was not the fault of one person or one action. Many differing factors lead up to the moment; people getting involved with video games for profit instead of enjoyment, releasing reworks of the old standards without also pioneering new frontiers, and a fickle nation craving the next big thing.
