6 ms·

I've always felt like this as well. The "great video game crash of 1984" was very much an American phenomenon. It affected many of the consoles of the era in Am

I've always felt like this as well. The "great video game crash of 1984" was very much an American phenomenon. It affected many of the consoles of the era in America, which were getting long in the tooth and were quite underpowered, especially (but not only) the Atari 2600. I get rather fed up of hearing people refer to it as a universal, industry destroying event. The crash occurred because the market was flooded with cheaply made, poor quality, simplistic games, which were about all many of these consoles were capable of running. People became bored of them. There's basically no comparison between these consoles and the NES. The NES was vastly superior and hence allowed the creation of much more involving games. By contrast the early to mid 80s in the UK and Europe looked quite different: here it was the 8-bit computers that ruled the roost. These had more memory, and often better graphics and sound capabilities. Again, this allowed for the creation of more involving games. As a result many of the machines - and perhaps the C64 the most - had great libraries of games. And of course they were programmable and affordable, which made them vastly more interesting to homebrew hackers on a budget. (Apple and IBM machines were considerably more expensive.)

greggman 8y ago
I am curious if we are ever headed there again. Unity, Unreal, GameMaker and all the others are super amazing in that they let almost anyone make a game. Unfortunately they also allow cheap clones and shoveware to the point there are apparently 20000-40000 new games shipped per month, mostly on iOS and Android but even Steam is at or around 1000 a month. Not that there is anything to be done about it it's just when the barrier was higher it forced at least a small increase in "average" quality
- s3krit 8y ago
  I predicted the same around 10 or so years ago with the massive deluge of free mobile games flooding the market, making it hard to find genuine quality. Turns out I was wrong.
- ionised 8y ago
  Every Unity game I've played seems to suffer performance problems of some description, or completely shits the bed when you try to add mods. I've basically just learned to stay away from Unity games at this point.
  - Fifer82 8y ago
    Unity is fascinating. I remember upgrading from a old gaming PC to a brand new one. I sat down and fired up Kerbal, and it was almost as bad. I don't play Unity games any more. I really hate that Unity games are mashed with traditional games as well and that I can't filter that shit out on any popular stores such as steam. Drives me wild.
  - crysin 8y ago
    It's not Unity, it's the developers. Unity can perform very well if enough care and effort is taken to understand it. The problem is a lot of Unity developers don't take the time to learn it's mechanics or just don't understand programming all that well. If you were to attach Unity's profiler to a majority of the Unity games out there, which I'm sure with some you could because they're probably built with the autoconnect profiler set to true, you'd probably see a monstrous amount of garbage collecting occurring. Not understanding update cycles or the performance implications of newing each update is what I've seen be the true source of performance loss in Unity, in general. Unity also has a GetComponent<T> because they need to access a class attached to a Unity GameObject, but instead of caching that reference to the gameObject they just do the GetComponent each frame or each method call, which has a performance impact because Unity needs to filter through all the active GameObjects to find either the first one or all of the ones that have said component. Stuff like that is why Unity games run so poorly, the engine is almost to accessible.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Now, as then, the key is good journalism. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com https://www.rockpapershotgun.com
  - ferongr 8y ago
    Link unrelated?
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      There's a deluge of crap games on Steam, but there are also journalists sifting through all that crap to find the hidden gems. RockPaperShotgun are (IMO) the best of the bunch.
    - izacus 8y ago
      Not really, RPS is (I feel) one of the best journals out there when it comes to gaming. Too bad they only review PC games though :(
jdietrich 8y ago
I think Nintendo's quality control gets too much credit. The European market was flooded with C64 and Spectrum games of wildly varying quality, but a) they were cheap and b) there were credible, independent games magazines. The European computer games market in the mid-80s wasn't too dissimilar from the PC games market of the mid-90s. A full-price Spectrum or Commodore title cost £8-£10 ($30-$40 in today's money), but a budget title cost as little as £2 ($7.50). The low cost of cassette media drove down the price of games, so young gamers could build a collection with their pocket money. Crash, Your Sinclair and Zzap!64 weren't afraid to slate a bad game, so you could have a reasonable degree of trust in their reviews. Your Sinclair had a regular feature called Crap Games Corner, dedicated to taking the mickey out of genuinely awful games. By the late 80s, all the major magazines had cover tapes with demos or free games. Nintendo's strict quality control was a particular response to the severe asymmetry of information in the US console games market, but it wasn't the only option.
phire 8y ago
The Japanese called it "Atari shock" and I suspect this is a much better name for the phenomenon. It wasn't a problem with people getting sick of video games. It was a problem with Americans getting sick of the Atari 2600, other similar video game consoles and the distribution model of cartridges sold in toy stores The sales of home computers in the US massively increased during the "video game crash", especially sales of the Commodore 64. I suspect those C64s spent the majority of their time playing video games, off floppy disks. Nintendo must have done their market research, because they clearly identified the source of the problem and cleverly marketed the NES as "Not a video game console" and "Completely different from the Atari 2600".
- frostburg 8y ago
  Off tapes, not floppy disks, probably. Those drives were expensive.
  - phire 8y ago
    It's my understanding that the majority of C64 users in the States used disks, while the majority of European C64 users used tapes.
    - dahauns 8y ago
      It was different per country. In the UK, tape was quite dominant, but at least here in Austria, the 1541 was far more common. AFAIK it was the same in Germany.
      - royjacobs 8y ago
        Indeed. I think in the US basically everyone had a disk drive whereas in the UK almost nobody had one. In The Netherlands and Germany they were quite common, as well.
      - digi_owl 8y ago
        Not sure if the nordics were a mixed bag or not, as i don't recall anyone using tape for their C64 (but a few had UK computers, the Amstrad CPC in particular).

greggman 8y ago

I am curious if we are ever headed there again. Unity, Unreal, GameMaker and all the others are super amazing in that they let almost anyone make a game. Unfortunately they also allow cheap clones and shoveware to the point there are apparently 20000-40000 new games shipped per month, mostly on iOS and Android but even Steam is at or around 1000 a month. Not that there is anything to be done about it it's just when the barrier was higher it forced at least a small increase in "average" quality

s3krit 8y ago
I predicted the same around 10 or so years ago with the massive deluge of free mobile games flooding the market, making it hard to find genuine quality. Turns out I was wrong.
ionised 8y ago
Every Unity game I've played seems to suffer performance problems of some description, or completely shits the bed when you try to add mods. I've basically just learned to stay away from Unity games at this point.
- Fifer82 8y ago
  Unity is fascinating. I remember upgrading from a old gaming PC to a brand new one. I sat down and fired up Kerbal, and it was almost as bad. I don't play Unity games any more. I really hate that Unity games are mashed with traditional games as well and that I can't filter that shit out on any popular stores such as steam. Drives me wild.
- crysin 8y ago
  It's not Unity, it's the developers. Unity can perform very well if enough care and effort is taken to understand it. The problem is a lot of Unity developers don't take the time to learn it's mechanics or just don't understand programming all that well. If you were to attach Unity's profiler to a majority of the Unity games out there, which I'm sure with some you could because they're probably built with the autoconnect profiler set to true, you'd probably see a monstrous amount of garbage collecting occurring. Not understanding update cycles or the performance implications of newing each update is what I've seen be the true source of performance loss in Unity, in general. Unity also has a GetComponent<T> because they need to access a class attached to a Unity GameObject, but instead of caching that reference to the gameObject they just do the GetComponent each frame or each method call, which has a performance impact because Unity needs to filter through all the active GameObjects to find either the first one or all of the ones that have said component. Stuff like that is why Unity games run so poorly, the engine is almost to accessible.
jdietrich 8y ago
Now, as then, the key is good journalism. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com https://www.rockpapershotgun.com
- ferongr 8y ago
  Link unrelated?
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    There's a deluge of crap games on Steam, but there are also journalists sifting through all that crap to find the hidden gems. RockPaperShotgun are (IMO) the best of the bunch.
  - izacus 8y ago
    Not really, RPS is (I feel) one of the best journals out there when it comes to gaming. Too bad they only review PC games though :(

jdietrich 8y ago

I think Nintendo's quality control gets too much credit. The European market was flooded with C64 and Spectrum games of wildly varying quality, but a) they were cheap and b) there were credible, independent games magazines. The European computer games market in the mid-80s wasn't too dissimilar from the PC games market of the mid-90s. A full-price Spectrum or Commodore title cost £8-£10 ($30-$40 in today's money), but a budget title cost as little as £2 ($7.50). The low cost of cassette media drove down the price of games, so young gamers could build a collection with their pocket money. Crash, Your Sinclair and Zzap!64 weren't afraid to slate a bad game, so you could have a reasonable degree of trust in their reviews. Your Sinclair had a regular feature called Crap Games Corner, dedicated to taking the mickey out of genuinely awful games. By the late 80s, all the major magazines had cover tapes with demos or free games. Nintendo's strict quality control was a particular response to the severe asymmetry of information in the US console games market, but it wasn't the only option.

phire 8y ago

The Japanese called it "Atari shock" and I suspect this is a much better name for the phenomenon. It wasn't a problem with people getting sick of video games. It was a problem with Americans getting sick of the Atari 2600, other similar video game consoles and the distribution model of cartridges sold in toy stores The sales of home computers in the US massively increased during the "video game crash", especially sales of the Commodore 64. I suspect those C64s spent the majority of their time playing video games, off floppy disks. Nintendo must have done their market research, because they clearly identified the source of the problem and cleverly marketed the NES as "Not a video game console" and "Completely different from the Atari 2600".

frostburg 8y ago
Off tapes, not floppy disks, probably. Those drives were expensive.
- phire 8y ago
  It's my understanding that the majority of C64 users in the States used disks, while the majority of European C64 users used tapes.
  - dahauns 8y ago
    It was different per country. In the UK, tape was quite dominant, but at least here in Austria, the 1541 was far more common. AFAIK it was the same in Germany.
    - royjacobs 8y ago
      Indeed. I think in the US basically everyone had a disk drive whereas in the UK almost nobody had one. In The Netherlands and Germany they were quite common, as well.
    - digi_owl 8y ago
      Not sure if the nordics were a mixed bag or not, as i don't recall anyone using tape for their C64 (but a few had UK computers, the Amstrad CPC in particular).