Video game crash of 1983

What it'll be, we don't know, but obviously we are headed down a path towards something new.

And so I was curious, does the video game crash of the 80s provide us with useful parallels? Can we learn from the cultural and economic realities of that moment, even though the games themselves were far more primitive than they are now? And of course, what actually happened back then, as opposed to these stories that we have heard repeated over and over that got handed down via legend and hearsay and rumors and all of that? Was it really as simple as a bunch of games being so bad that they destroyed the companies that created them? And was the crash so calamitous that people just stopped liking video games? I'm going to give you a hint.

The answer to both of those questions is no.

But to answer these questions in more detail, I reached out to Alexander Smith, host of video game history podcast, They Create Worlds, and author of what is perhaps the definitive book on early video game console history, They Create Worlds, the story of the people and companies that shaped video game history.

It just became completely unprofitable for a company to release a game.

It was just not economical anymore to release a game for a console.

But yeah, because like going through all of this, that was sort of like what was striking to me is that for some people, another myth could be that there just wasn't a video game crash.

Right.