Here’s the second post that got gummed up in the system.
Episode 125 of You Don’t Know Flack is all about the video game crash of 1983. “It was a dark and stormy night…” or was it really? In this episode I talk all about the causes of the video game crash of 1983, and why I missed it. From the voice mail box I answer the question, “what’s the worst arcade conversion I’ve ever seen?”
Link: YDKF Episode 125: The Video Game Crash of 1983
Facebook: You Don’t Know Flack
(Video Game Crash. Get it?)
The crash was easy for the target demographic to miss – unless you were reading the magazines at the time (which I was). I remember my dad sitting me down to tell me that, unless the Wall Street Journal was way off the mark, there probably weren’t going to be any more Atari or Odyssey2 games. Like you, you’d be hard pressed to notice this under the weight of all the five-buck games that could be had at TG&Y. There were three places in Fort Smith that had Odyssey2 games, and literally, in the space of one week, the prices on new O2 games at this one non-chain/local electronics store went from $30 to $3, and suddenly BOOM, I was awash in brand new O2 games. The flipside of that is that many of them were games I never would’ve bothered with otherwise – Football, Basketball/Bowling, any “edutainment” titles I didn’t already have (WOOOO!)… basically, nothing we would’ve gotten for full price. My mom was so certain that it was a mistake that I remember we all but raced out to the car with him, as if the guy who just rang us up was suddenly going to look up from his cash register in horror and start running toward the door yelling “NOOOOOOOOO!” in slow motion. And that’s the story of how I had a nearly-complete O2 library as early as 1984!
Oddly enough, what helped me to all-but-ignore that crash was that my parents got me a modem and I got into the nascent local BBS scene at that time. I was a SysOp inside of a year. Too much “serious business” to take care of, less time for games.