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The Great Video Game Market Crash of 1983-1984!!
It's Video Game history's darkest time! The time when the all powerful Atari fell from grace and virtaully ended Video Games as we know it. It all started in 1981 with the Atari 2600 version of PAC MAN. Pac Man, of course, was a huge mega hit in the arcades and Atari was lucky enough to score the license from Namco to do the arcade game on home release. Atari was hoping to sell 20million copies of Atari Pac Man thus making the Atari 2600VCS even more popular than it already is. Unfortunately, Atari Pac Man (considered to be a awful translation to most critics) only sold 7Million copies, a sure fire hit by today's standards but a disappiontment to Atari's lofty expections.
Atari needed another hit to recover from the loss of Atari Pac Man, so Atari got the rights to create a game based on the movie E.T. (sounds like a good idea on paper, eh?) This time the E.T. game needed to sell 25million copies to make up for the cost of buying the rights to the license. "People HATED it!!" The E.T. game only sold a mere million and Atari had tons of unsold games on the store shelfs. With two huge multi-million dollar disasters from the leader of video game sales, most stores discoutiuned all video games sales and discounted all they had left (mostly for a dollar). That meant ALL video games too; ColecoVision, Intellivision and everyone else were ruined. By 1984 the whole video game market crashed.