How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 78

During the second generation we also see the rise of companies that
will remain big-time players in the industry (at least as of this writing,
and probably well beyond it). Atari saw huge success, of course, but also
we see the beginning of Activision, which was founded by some disgrun-
tled Atari employees. In 1982, Activision created Pitfall! , which, along
with Nintendo's Donkey Kong , was one of the first platformer games.
I really can't stress enough how important this time period was. Dur-
ing this time we saw more innovation in digital games than we will ever
see again in such a short time. There was so much more to talk about,
such as Nintendo's release of the Game & Watch line of electronic hand-
held games, or the first stirrings of online gameplay through dial-up bul-
letin boards. Things then were really great in the game industry, both for
the players and the creators. According to Steven Kent's The Ultimate
History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon , the golden age of video
games started in 1978 with Taito's Space Invaders (a company that is still
thriving). Unfortunately, such a rapid burst of success often has a down-
side, and the second generation certainly had its downside in the form
of a massive crash in the North American video games industry in 1983
that the industry hadn't seen before or since.
Historians point to several factors that caused the crash, the best
known of which was the failure of E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial and a poorly
made port of Pac-Man , both produced for the popular Atari 2600. These
two games were rushed to meet huge demand, and they were both ex-
pected to be massive hits due to the arcade success of Pac-Man and the
cinematic success of the film E . T. When they finally came out they were
pretty awful. Pac-Man didn't hold up at all next to its arcade version—
and not just for trivial reasons, such as the graphics not being as nice, but
because the gameplay was dramatically worse than that of the original
game. Meanwhile E. T. was notoriously cryptic and weird to play, and
left many players feeling as if it was unfinished There's a famous story
(legend, perhaps) about Atari burying thousands of unsold cartridges of
E. T. in a New Mexican landfill
But I don't think you can pin the crash on a couple of bad games
(or even a couple of really bad games). I think it was a product of an
extremely immature industry and culture getting much too big to sup-
port its own weight. I often feel that something similar could happen to
us again, although perhaps to a less dramatic degree. The industry is in
a different situation now: the standards for “bad� are much lower, and
many of our journalism outlets are controlled, either directly or indi-
rectly, by huge publishers. Great changes are coming, but who knows
what form they will take. To quote Mark Twain, “History doesn't repeat
itself, but it does rhyme.�