On October 15, 1983, the prestigious weekly All books della Stampa comes with an article, by Giampaolo Dossena, entitled “Are video games already in crisis?”. Years later, the question mark must be appreciated.
The journalist was referring to an article, yes a bit catastrophic, by weekly Time titled Video Games Go Crunch!. Rereading it is interesting because it tells the cycles of innovation well, the too much ease with which in the newspapers we take a phenomenon for dead (when you read a title that begins with “Goodbye …”, you always doubt, if someone is not dead). But it also tells the year in which the videogame bubble exploded, leaving failures and layoffs on the field, but then starting again stronger than before on completely new foundations. In short, the October 1983 Time reports that, while the Christmas season is about to start, the videogame industry, which up to that moment had grown a lot, was at stake for “excessive competition”, for “an excess of games” and “a race to the bottom of prices” with relative “collapse of profits” and a change of tastes among young consumers. “For dozens of companies, the name of the game is now only one: survival!”, Said the weekly. Some examples of the 1983 chaos: Atari had lost $ 356 million, laid off 3,000 employees and moved production to Asia; at Mattel they had losses of $ 201 million by firing more than a third of its 1,800 employees; Activision, despite the success of Enduro e Robot Tank, lost $ 5 million; and Bally, who built the arcade game machines, had seen profits plummet by 85%.
What exactly happened? A passage in the article tries to explain: “While they continued to keep their customers excited, video game makers have been displaced by the boom in personal computers, which can also be used to play “. In 1982 the Commodore 64 was released, for one thing, “and all the machines you could only play video games with seemed less interesting.” But there was a new generation of video games in sight, with new protagonists (like Nintendo); and soon that Christmas of 1983 will be remembered as a nightmare. The journalist of La Stampa correctly concluded thus: “Probably the future is not of arcade or domestic video games, to be applied to the home television, but video games to be applied to the personal computer or to be invented with the personal computer. Billions of cartridges will go to the incinerator, millions of consoles will go to the wreckage (and even some personal computers are bins, not unlike some ice cream machines) … But from here to the sinking and death of video games it passes “.
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