The Great Video Game Crash of 1983

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983

by glennos • 14 years ago

6 1 14 years ago

tzs• 14 years ago

Ah, I remember that time well. After graduating from Caltech in 1982, and then spending a month at a defense contractor (hired for an interesting project, project got cancelled before I started, and the alternative work they found for me sucked), I went to APh Technological Consulting, a Pasadena company consisting mostly of Caltech engineering graduates.

APh had done the electronics design, system software, development system, and early games for Mattel for the Mattel Intellivision. There were some amazing people there. Perhaps most memorable was Hal Finney, who later became well known as the second developer hired by PGP Corporation and as a cryptographic activist.

We were working on the next generation Intellivision when the crash happened (and I got laid off). APh was designing a new, much more powerful, GPU for the new system. For the prototype units we developed on the GPU consisted of a card cage with several hand wire wrapped circuit boards.

For everyone who was NOT Hal, this was a fairly typical occurrence:

1. work until very very late on your game, which is supposed to be shown at a closed demo at CES. Finally, you just have to go take sleep. Do so.

2. get back to work and you find a note from the hardware guys. They've rewired your GPU, adding or removing registers, changing graphics modes, sprite handling, and so on.

3. rewrite your code to deal with the hardware changes. Since all the code was in assembly language (for the annoying GI1620 processor), this was non-trivial and time consuming.

Somehow, Hal was immune to this. He could fix up his assembly code to cope with any change the hardware people made in just a few minutes.

Anyway, the article's point about poor quality third party games eroding consumer confidence is correct.

The first group of third party developers were fine. Activision was formed by former Atari developers. They knew the Atari system in and out, and could produce top quality games. Imagic was formed by Atari and Mattel people, and there were some former APh people there too. They understood the Intellivision and could produce top quality games.

The second generation of third party developers did not have that kind of knowledge. We saw independent Intellivison games that didn't take any advantage of the Intellivision system software--they just talked directly to the hardware. These games were almost all crap. The Intellivision firmware essentially consisted of a small game oriented operating system. It would let you do things like give it a sequence of images and a rate and it would animate a sprite with those images at that rate for you. You could give it a velocity and it would move that sprite for you. You could register event handlers that it would call when things collided, when controls were pressed, and so on.

It was that system software that let APh and Mattel write complex games like Baseball when limited to a 1k cartridge (actually, Baseball may have been a 2K cartridge) and something like 320 bytes of RAM. If you didn't take advantage of that system software and so had to do all that animation and event handling and hardware management code yourself you either had to restrict yourself to much simpler games, or you had to make a cartridge with bigger ROM and onboard RAM, which would greatly increase the price of your game.

The Great Video Game Crash of 1983

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