this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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As late night show hosts have learned for years, the average person's opinion is pretty fucking stupid a lot of the time.
(I'm sure I'm not an exception.)
She wasn't too far off. The whole industry crashed in North America the following year. iirc, basically anyone could make a 2600 game. So you got hot garbage like Custer's Revenge and ET. This opinion was published before the crash and before Nintendo entered North America and essentially saved the industry here by implementing quality standards.
It probably would have eventually picked back up, but not for several years.
Damn, I remember when Nintendo used to be cool.
I think the problem was a lack of foresight about the potential of the technology because of limited awareness of what was going on at the time. If you had looked over at games for computers that weren't affected in the crash like the Apple II, you'd see that they were gaining increasing complexity. But, of course, a lot more kids had, at the very least, a pong console in their home by 1982, so this person probably was only familiar with those cheap 2600 games.
Even an Atari 2600 was too expensive for the average family in 1982, about $1000 in today money. The 80s were not a great economy for most people, Reagan's fuckery and I believe really high interest rates thanks to 70s inflation meant that even the cheapest home console was wildly unreasonable. It was 1982. Colecovision was on shelves. Television was still a very pricey home luxury in 1982, not a universal yet, so never mind the game console. The VCR wasn't really a thing yet. People were still using radio a lot at home. You could afford radio.
Video games looked like they were always going to cost too much money to see really mainstream adoption. That thought isn't even wrong, people just try harder to find the $1000 for a new console now, because it offers more. Sharon thought video games looked like shit, and she was right, they did. They didn't look exciting, they just looked like a weird side technology.
For her, video games were a thing in a dark corner of the amusement park, they were literally Pong, and cost quarters to play, 80 cents today, for a five-minute experience or a lot less.
Pac-Man was the current gold standard of games in 82. Did kids like it? Sure. But remember Pogs? Fidget spinners? Those snap bands for your wrist? How many things have been wildly popular with children and then into the trash they go, forever? Did Pac-Man look like something that nobody would ever grow tired of, forever? Or did it look like an excuse to sell toys? Because it very much was, they sold a lot of Pac-Man toys and merch about it, just like the 80s cartoons that faded into obscurity once they were also done selling toys.
Sharon didn't have a lot of evidence before her that would show any other outcome. She couldn't see 2023 while staring down at the Pac-Man quarter muncher at the local pizza shop in 82. It's miserable, because a proper fad and the wave of the future both look the same in the present.
Sharon was a "word processor" in 82, she was well ahead of the curve, working with computers - or at least their precursors - when most people hadn't even seen one. Somebody shoves a mic in your face, asks for a quote, and you give them an opinion, which haunts your fuckin ghost decades later. Maybe five years later she thinks oh, I was wrong on that, but it's too late now.
This is why we don't try to predict the future any more than we have to. Today's information is never good enough.
I think it kinda depended on your interests as well, my grandfather, great uncles, and great grandfather were all guessing that games would become a big thing. My grandfather even started to program his own by 83 sadly he passed in 84, but yeah they all gave an I told you so to their wives once wolfenstein came out. But these are also men who had pinball and arcade cabnits in their dens.
The issue with ET, just like today, was circumstance. A bunch of suits came to a programmer with almost no time to develop the game and shoved it out the door. The reason it's cited as the industry killer is so many people bought that trash game they lost faith. There was so much shovelware back then.
Nintendo learned from that mistake, that's why they had their console on lock down. If you didn't have their blessing, you didn't make a game on their platform. There was a lot of lawsuits towards Nintendo because of that, but their intense scrutiny is why those games were generally quality and why they revived the home console industry.
Today we are back to where we were with the Atari, companies that don't have the skills to develop certain games are being asked to do it, often under extreme deadlines. Look at what happened with Gollum, basically a modern day equivalent to ET imo. The reason the industry almost died is because so many people got burnt by things like ET. You would think it's bound to happen again, and it might, but then again people still preorder stuff post disasters like no man's and cyberpunk.
There are a lot of mistakes that could be learned from in that era of gaming, but damn if we aren't hellbent on repeating it.