Let's talk about the 1983 videogame crash!

Hey everyone, I'm writing a piece on how videogames adapt to industry changes and I have two questions I'd be curious to hear people's opinions about.

How do you think games recovered from the crash of '83(beyond the NES was rad) and what do you think have been the biggest changes in how we consume gaming media in the last three decades(HD TVs increasing development time, things being expected to have online connections, moving from cartridges to discs)?

Yup, not only that, but some countries, especially Spain, experienced what's considered a golden age of game development starting around 1983. Wikipedia has this article on The Golden Age of Spanish Software, but home computers and game development for them was starting to reach a wider audience in both Europe and Japan at the time, laying the foundations for a lot of the tech industry throughout the 90s and up until today, as tens of millions of people were getting access to affordable home computers through Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad, Acorn, Tandy among many others.

I'm generally leery of topics that sound like we're doing someone's homework assignment for them, but the most obvious change in how we consume video games would be the move away from physical game formats and a near-exclusivity in digital-download purchases.

@dasakamov: Cheers, for the response. Hadn't though of 'I litteraly just downoad half m games now, and they could be gone any second'.

BTW def not HW, I'm going to post it here when I'm done it. A retro retrospective on gaming ability to adapt, cause I'm willing to bet Google is going to announce a 'revolutionary' streaming service tomorrow, and xbox and playstation are going to have headline about how dead they are written about them, and then they'll continue to not die.

...is this homework or is this something you're writing for a blog or newspaper or something?

Video games recovered from the crash of '83 because the NES came out. That's... kinda the biggest thing, honestly. Video games were never going to disappear - they were still very popular, and the crash just opened up a spot for someone else to move in and make better business decisions. My understanding has always been that PC games weren't really affected by that crash, either. We would still have had Lucasarts adventure games and Wasteland and Ultima sequels and Doom and so on. America is where that game crash was the worst and, well, there was Nintendo with a reasonably-priced console with several good games available (and one very good game included). The crash happened in the first place because too many people were releasing too many low-quality games and nobody wanted to sift through them all, so Nintendo just came along and did some quality control.

As far as what has changed most since then... you could get very granular with this topic, but the biggest thing is the internet. Patches were made feasible for PC's in the 90's, multiplayer games and user-made content/mods became widespread in a way that they never could without the internet, and forums/websites opened up for people to connect to each other and talk about games. There were some analogs to these things in the 80's - I imagine there were just as many fan-arguments on BBS's in the 80's as there are on various game websites these days - but the 90's is where it really came together and changed PC games from "single player timewaster" to "massive, fully-featured 3D games that you get absorbed in for hours at a time and then discuss over the internet".

What happened to console games with the original Xbox and later the 360/PS3 kinda echoed this, only in increasingly shitty ways. Games got released broken and sometimes fixed later (which also happened in the 90's), games got released without all the content (Asura's Wrath is one of the worst offenders here), and things that used to be unlockables or hidden behind cheat codes or something became pay-for DLC (Horse armor was $2.50, now go look up the top prices for CSGO gun skins).

...and now I feel like I've kinda written your paper for you. Eh, that's all right, the worst part is finding sources and expanding this into something that fits your page or word count requirements. Have fun with that.

One thing that is important to know is that the crash was pretty much just a North American crash. Gaming went along fine in Japan and Europe.