Videogames are Dead

      And good riddance. I totally dropped $200 on my Atari VCS at Sears back when it first came out in 1977. I know a lot of other people did, and it was pretty cool to be jumping on this new “video game” fad. Mostly, you have to go to arcades to play the best games, but the VCS lets you play arcade games at home. Before that, your only home options were variations on Pong, and you could only play them when friends came over. But the VCS gave us tons of great games at first. Nobody at school could beat my high score at Space Invaders! Pac-Man wasn’t as good as the arcade, but it was still pretty cool. I spent a ton of money on games, but you never really knew when you would get an expensive dud. Those were few and far between at first, but then things changed.

      Atari made all the games and the programmers who worked there and wrote the games weren’t allowed to sign their names to their work like authors or musicians can. Sometimes they snuck their names or initials in the games, and if you were clever, you could find it. They were also annoyed that they got paid the same if their game was a smash hit or a total flop. So one day a bunch of them quit and started to make their own games. They started a company called Activision, and they made (generally speaking) better games than Atari did. They put their names on the games and they had photos of the creators in the manuals. It was kind of like being a rock star because if people liked one of your games, they could easily find others that you wrote. But it turned out that Activision’s awesome games were the beginning of the end for the video game industry.

      The problem was that when people saw that you could make a company and release your own video games, everybody wanted to do it. They hired away Atari programmers and reverse-engineered the hardware to make cartridges of their own. Some places made great games like Parker Brothers, but most of them were not so good. Things started spiraling downward. Customers were tired of paying $20 for games that turned out to be horrible. Most of the low-quality titles were bad rip-offs of games that Atari made years ago. So the low budget game publishers started making games cheaper and faster to replace quality with quantity. Toy retailers were sick of buying bad games that wouldn’t sell and so they dumped the rest of their stock and stopped carrying video games. Atari was struggling for cash since Pac-Man and ET didn’t sell nearly as well as they thought they would. Other consoles were released like the ColecoVision that started eating into Atari’s hardware profits as well. In 1983 Atari was sold, and it doesn’t look like its ever going to be the same. Dozens of game publishers also went out of business, crushed under the weight of disenchanted retailers and customers.

      So I had bought a dozen games that year, and none of them were any good. All of them played like a horrible version of Space Invaders or Pac-Man. This told me that game makers had run out of new ideas and that this video game fad has burned itself out. I sold all my stupid video games to buy something with lasting value that will never get boring. Toy robots! Seriously, everybody loves robots now and they are all over the place. Kids can’t get enough of them this year! The only way I would ever consider buying video games is if, like, I had a robot that would play with me. Yeah, like robot games! I bet that’s what that new Nintendo thing is going to be. It’s got a neato keen robot on the front of the box and I think it might hook up to the TV or something, but from all the ads it looks like it’s all about the robot. Well if they are just using the robot to swindle us into buying video games, they should pick a better name than R.O.B. Maybe L.A.R.C.E.N.Y. was already taken.