In a recent video on his YouTube channel, veteran RPG developer Tim Cain shared his memories of the 1983 videogame industry crash. In particular, he emphasized that, although bad—like, really bad—he doesn’t believe the current employment and studio closure crisis matches the impact of the infamous ’80s collapse.
Cain got his caveats out of the way early, though: He cited a figure of 10% of game developers being affected by the current crisis, a tragedy for the medium in no uncertain terms. “It is bad,” Cain declared. “It’s bad. Quote me: ‘It’s bad.'” With that out of the way, Cain still asserted that “it’s nothing like the 1983 crash.”
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“To me, the 1983 crash is still the biggest [games] industry crash that I’ve ever seen, ever experienced, and I think ever was,” said Cain. “I don’t think there’s ever been a worse time in the games industry, especially in the United States—it was very centered in the US.”
Consoles and console games were tarnished in consumers’ eyes, and Cain recalled that this was the first time he and many other gamers switched to the home computers of the time, such as the Atari 800, Apple II, and the grandaddy IBM PC. Consoles’ reputation and sales began to recover in 1985, but the jobs were primarily growing in Japan for years after the crash, thanks to the market dominance of Nintendo.
Cain’s first industry job involved games on cable set-top boxes, then PC, and he recalled being relatively insulated from the crash professionally. “My first PC game, Grand Slam Bridge, shipped in 1986, and the company folded soon after that,” said Cain. After that, he entered grad school, programmed for Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) as a hobby, and didn’t work in computer games again until 1991.
“Imagine everyone in the industry in the United States—if you were making an Xbox game or a PlayStation game, or any kind of console game—you were just laid off,” Cain said of the ’83 crash. “Boom. You don’t work anymore. And you’re trying to get what few PC game jobs are starting to grow.”
By the time the PC market really kicked into high gear in the ’90s, according to Cain, a lot of devs who lost jobs in the ’83 crash were gone for good. “It was incredibly devastating. We lost an entire generation of game developers. The entire US videogame market collapsed,” said Cain. “There were no jobs for console developers of any kind. It was just gone.
“Took about a decade … to even recover those jobs in the PC market, and even longer for the US-based console developer market to recover enough to even say that it was on par with what it was like in 1983.”
In one sense, I find Cain’s long perspective on the matter comforting: Games still got made, a lot of people still had jobs, and eventually things got bigger and better than they were before the crash. At the same time, I find the parallels to the current state of the industry disquieting:
- An overwhelming amount of games. Some shovelware like the ’80s consoles, sure, but not really a quality issue writ large: Even great games struggle to find audiences in the 2020s.
- A general devaluing of games: Subscription services and constant sales leading to the (completely understandable) “I’ll wait for it to go on sale” mindset.
- An uneven crisis, largely not felt by consumers. Like how ’80s gamers just pivoted to PCs and Japanese games, the industry is global and diversified enough that the end user still gets great games—until their favorite goes offline or ceases content updates.
For a contrasting take to Cain’s from industry peers who also witnessed the ’83 crash, John and Brenda Romero argued that the current crisis is “definitely crashier” than what they saw back then.
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