A hidden room credits a programmer Atari would not name
Denied a credit on the box, the designer of Atari's Adventure concealed a secret chamber bearing his own name inside the game, and hiding messages in software became a lasting convention.
1980-1989 · 31 entries
Boom, collapse, and a business rebuilt on rules
The best years the arcades ever had, a collapse nobody planned for, and a recovery built on the power to say no.
What was happening
Start with the noise. For the first three or four years of the decade the coin-operated business was the loudest and richest part of the medium, and its designers were solving a commercial problem that happened to produce superb design: how to make a stranger spend money again within ninety seconds. Escalating difficulty, a visible high-score table with room for initials, and characters recognizable from across a crowded room all came out of that pressure. A maze game built deliberately to appeal to women and children, rather than to the young men already filling arcades, became one of the highest-earning machines ever made and proved the audience was far larger than the trade had assumed.
Mainstream America noticed. A novelty single about an arcade game climbed the pop chart, a Saturday-morning cartoon followed, national magazines put cabinets on their covers, and the mall arcade became both a fixture of adolescence and a target of municipal ordinances about loitering. This was a boom with all the usual features of one, including the confident assumption that it would simply continue. Manufacturers, publishers and retailers planned on the basis of demand that only ever went up, and the home side of the business filled shelves with cartridges made quickly by companies with no track record, sold at whatever price would move them off the shelf.
Then the American home market fell apart. The causes were structural rather than mysterious: too many incompatible consoles chasing the same buyers, too many interchangeable cartridges of poor quality, no way for a parent to tell a good purchase from a bad one, and a platform owner with no mechanism for refusing to let anything be published at all. Prices collapsed, publishers closed, and one company's unsold inventory ended up buried in a New Mexico landfill, a story treated as folklore until it was excavated decades later. Estimates of the contraction's exact scale still vary between accounts, but the direction and the severity were never in doubt.
Recovery came from Japan, and it came with rules. A console released in Tokyo in 1983 reached the United States two years later, carefully positioned as something other than a game machine, complete with a robot accessory and a light gun, because the category had become poison at retail. More important than the presentation was the control. A chip that rejected unauthorized cartridges, a licensing program that limited how many titles a publisher could release in a year, and an approval seal that gave retailers someone to hold responsible. Quality control became a business model, and the platform holder's leverage over publishers dates from precisely this arrangement.
The software that arrived on that hardware is why the arrangement stuck. A side-scrolling platform game taught players its own rules without a word of instruction. An overhead adventure saved progress to a battery and let people wander a world with no fixed route through it. Games stopped being sessions and became things you came back to for weeks. Europe meanwhile went its own way, with cheap keyboard computers loading from cassette, teenagers mailing their own programs to tiny publishers, and 16-bit machines used as much for music and graphics as for play. Inexpensive liquid-crystal handhelds put games in pockets, and two Japanese firms were about to spend a decade fighting.
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Designing for a stranger
Peak arcade design was economics made visible. A machine had ninety seconds to persuade someone to pay again, so it needed instant legibility, a fair-feeling failure, and a reason to try once more. High-score tables, escalating waves and memorable characters were all revenue tools first. They survived into home games because they turned out to be good design independent of the coin slot.
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Structural causes of collapse
The North American crash was not caused by any single bad game. It came from a market where anyone could publish anything for the leading console, retailers could not distinguish quality, and shelf space was flooded faster than demand grew. When discounting began, it went all the way down, taking publishers with it. The lesson learned was about gatekeeping, not about creativity.
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Europe on cassette
While North America crashed and Japan rebuilt, Britain and continental Europe built a separate culture around inexpensive keyboard computers. Games arrived on cassette tape, often written by teenagers and sold by mail or in small shops, and magazines printed listings to copy out by hand. That low barrier produced a generation of developers who founded studios still recognizable in the industry today.
Watch for these as you read
- arcade peak
- cartridge glut
- licensing control
- character franchises
- bedroom coders
Narrow the record
1980-1989 Entries in order
Battlezone renders a wireframe battlefield seen from inside a tank
Atari's tank game drew its battlefield as glowing wireframe outlines viewed through a hooded periscope, giving arcade players an early taste of moving through a three-dimensional space rather than watching one from outside.
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Infocom sells a cave of words to computer owners
Built by programmers out of the MIT computing world, Zork reached home machines with a parser that understood far more than its competitors did, and it turned careful puzzle writing into a commercial product.
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Two Apple II series turn tabletop adventuring into software
Ultima and Wizardry arrived in the same year, each translating pen-and-paper role-playing into code in a different way, and together they fixed the conventions of the computer role-playing game.
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Donkey Kong rescues Nintendo and introduces a future mascot
Asked to salvage unsold cabinets, a young Nintendo designer built a climbing game about a carpenter, an ape and a captive woman. It saved the company's American branch and produced its most valuable character.
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IBM's arrival makes the personal computer respectable
Announced with published specifications and mostly standard parts, IBM's machine gave desktop computing corporate legitimacy. The compatible clones it invited eventually turned that design into the most widely used gaming platform in the world.
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Arcade characters move from the mall into American pop culture
A novelty single about a maze game climbed the American pop chart, a Saturday-morning cartoon followed, and magazines put arcades on their covers. Video games had become a mainstream subject rather than a youth curiosity.
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Pitfall! wrings a jungle out of a few kilobytes
David Crane built 255 connected jungle screens for the Atari 2600 out of a tiny amount of memory by generating them from a compact rule, and the result became one of the console's biggest sellers.
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The Commodore 64 sells a capable computer at a mass-market price
Commodore paired custom graphics and sound chips with aggressive pricing and sold its computer through department stores and toy shops, building one of the largest single markets for inexpensive games.
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A film tie-in built in five weeks becomes a cautionary tale
Atari paid heavily for the rights to a summer blockbuster and left its programmer about five weeks to finish the cartridge. Enormous production runs met heavy returns, and the episode became shorthand for industry overreach.
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An oversupplied American console market collapses in on itself
Too many competing machines, an unmanageable flood of low-quality cartridges and no gatekeeping produced a severe collapse in the North American home console market, from which it did not recover until Nintendo arrived.
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Dragon's Lair puts hand-drawn animation inside an arcade cabinet
Cinematronics built a cabinet around a laserdisc player, so arcade goers watched full animation directed by a former Disney artist while making occasional timed inputs. Crowds gathered, and operators charged more per play.
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Atari buries crushed unsold stock in a New Mexico landfill
Trucks carried crushed cartridges, consoles and other unsold material from an El Paso plant to a municipal landfill in New Mexico. Long dismissed as a rumor, the burial was verified by a documented excavation in 2014.
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Sixteen-bit home computers arrive with real multimedia
The Commodore Amiga and Atari ST both reached buyers in 1985 with 16-bit processors, dedicated graphics and sound hardware and windowed operating systems, and they became Europe's leading game machines for the rest of the decade.
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The NES restarts the American console business
Nintendo introduced its redesigned console in New York with a robot accessory and a light gun, deliberately avoiding the discredited language of game consoles, and rebuilt retailer confidence through strict control of cartridge supply.
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Sega brings the Master System to Western living rooms
Sega repackaged its Japanese Mark III as the Master System for Western markets. Nintendo's exclusivity terms starved it of American software, but it sold strongly in Europe and Brazil and made Sega a credible console rival.
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The PC Engine is small, fast and first to optical discs
NEC and Hudson Soft launched a strikingly compact console in Japan, later sold in North America as the TurboGrafx-16. A compact disc attachment followed, making it among the first consoles to use optical media.
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Sega attacks Nintendo directly with the Genesis campaign
Sega of America launched the Genesis and, under Tom Kalinske, combined arcade conversions, sports licensing, price cuts and advertising that mocked its competitor by name into a strategy that won real market share.
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The Lynx offers a color handheld screen at a steep cost
Designed by engineers who had worked on the Amiga and then picked up by Atari, the Lynx shipped with a backlit color display, hardware sprite scaling and cable multiplayer, but battery drain and a thin library kept it marginal.
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What the period left behind
The 1980s taught the industry its hardest lesson and then acted on it. An unmanaged flood of product destroyed a market in a matter of months, and the recovery depended on a platform owner willing to refuse publishers. Almost every argument since about approval processes, storefront curation, licensing fees and how much control a hardware maker should hold over software traces back to what happened between 1983 and 1985.