Do Go On - 38 - The Video Game Crash of 1983

Episode Date: July 13, 2016

The video game industry was going along swimmingly in the early 1980s... until the video game crash of 1983.Twitter: @DoGoOnPodInstagram: @DoGoOnPodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DoGoOnPod/Email us: [e-mail] the show and get rewards like bonus episodes:www.patreon.com/DoGoOnPod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melbourne and Canada, we got exciting news for you. And we should also say this is 2026. Jess, what year is it? 2026. Thank God you're here. Right now, I'm in Melbourne doing my show with Serengy Amarna 630 each night at the Cooper's Inn Hotel, having so much fun. We'd love to see you there. Canada, we are visiting you in September this year.

If you've somehow missed the news, we are heading up Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Toronto for shows. That's going to be so much fun. Tickets for all this stuff, I believe, are online. And I'm here too. To do go on. My name is Dave Warnacky and I am here with Matt Stewart, Jess Perkins. Let's do this, guys. How are you?

We are very well. I'm pretty well. I'm really well. I'm also well. I was speaking for both of us for some reason. I'm sorry about that. No, if you could speak for me for the rest of the episode, that would be very helpful. No problem.

Matt is a little tired, but still... I feel like we start maybe every second episode with that phrase. Matt is a little bit tired. Yeah. One of us has always just gotten off. a plane recently. And both of you have just gone off a plane today. Yeah.

We've been in the Northern Territory. If we've got any Northern Territory listeners, hello. We had someone tweet in asking if you were... Yeah, in Alice, yeah, that's right. It's really good. It was a good time. I love the tropical winter weather. 30-something degrees up in the north and part of the north.

Is it that 30 degrees Celsius is every... But in the morning, it's quite cold you were saying? It's cold overnight. Yeah, because it is a desert. Certainly in Alice it was, but up in Darwin it felt it was so warm into the evening. Yeah, yeah, it was lovely. I think Catherine was similar. It was like the perfect weather.

But unfortunately, I just love Lady Melbourne. I love it so much. What a lady. What a lady. A cold, cold lady. What a classy dame. She's a classy dame. What a lady, what a night.

And I've spent many nights here because I've not been away. But I've been good. Thanks for asking. Good. Nobody asked. Let's keep talking about the Northern Territory all episode, all right. Unless that's topic today. I'm going to, I'll put out a, we took a photo with you up there.

I should put that out. Took a photo with me up there. Yeah, well, your head. Did you notice that your head was missing briefly? What shot did you use? Do that look good? One of your promo shots. One of those classic Warnocky pointing down the barrel.

Great. One of the action shots. I reckon it's just after a clip. Click. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that one. One of those. Hey.

Dave's here. Do you know if he's making that noise? Hey. It looks like he could be. Yeah. I think I actually am, to be honest. Yeah. Nearly every photo.

Great. It's hard when you're trying to get a passport photo taken. Hey. You're like no, sir. Please just close your mouth. I wish you could smile in passport photos. It looked like an obese serial killer in mine. I'm not looking forward to traveling again.

We have to hand it over, sort of embarrassed. And I'm blonde in it too. I look like a slim. a slim serial killer. Do you? It's quite a flattering. Have you got Dreadlock serial killer? No, that one's gone.

Oh, man. Have you seen that? I think so. I think so. Did you used to have dreadlocks? Yeah, but, yeah, just by, well, anyway. It was mainly the whack of combing my hair. It's pretty fucked.

Just being a dirty boy. I probably had three. Oh, I don't usually. Did you just have one rope hanging from your head? I had one dreadlock about that big. Oh, that's big. Be serious? Yeah, I remember I spent a whole evening picking it out on the sofa watching the OC season one.

And did it take every episode? It took a full couple episodes. The highs and the lows were felt. Yeah. Well, you picked a trip. Just chop it off, man. Yeah, start fresh. Probably could have.

Grice. And it was in the form of a mullet as well. I was very funny in my younger years. Wow. Get it? I don't know. Well, the OC was a great show that we can all agree on that. Sandy Cohen, am I right?

What a guy. Everyone's dad. Everyone's dad. What does that mean? The dad of the people. Father to everyone. Father to all. But what's, uh...

Well, he did have a habit of adopting runaways. We did. One time. If you call one time a habit. I do. You've got a habit of holding a pen right now. Yeah, I sure do. Yeah.

It's my worst habit. You got to kick that habit. My mum always tells me off for it. It's not like the idea of you have to kick your habit of adopting strange skater boys. I love it. I love doing it. Sandy? No, he's no good.

He's from the wrong side of the bloody road or whatever. The wrong side of the cliff. He came from the ocean. Like a salmon up his reign. He's a seaman. Get rid of the seaman. Oh, not another seaman. Oh, no.

Too much seaman in the last episode. Well, who knows how much semen we're going to have on this episode. How much... How much... Seamen is too much semen, Dave? Okay. I think... Probably an hour and 20 minutes since the last episode. If you haven't heard the Diathola of Pass incident, go listen.

But Matt, it is your turn to do a report this week. Yeah. And it's a corker. It's a corker? It's about corks. It's about the town of cork. No. It's about bottle openers.

Well, the things that do the... corking. So much editing, so early. Some sort of bottle machine. Yeah. Cool. Corker, the one that puts the corks in. Yeah, yeah.

It's about the history of corking machines. Okay, so we always start with a question. Have you got a question for us? Yes. And as always, I write the best questions. And I think you guys, you know, I know Dave writes the best reports, but I definitely write the best questions. And I write the best fun facts.

Answers. Oh, fun fact. No, you definitely. Well, though, can you remember the last time we had a set of fun facts officially? Good point. Good point. Yeah, I don't have any fun facts. I have been neglected.

But then again, my last couple of topics have been kind of dark. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm lightening it up next week, and there will be, like, just a bit of a bit of a sizzle, a bit of tease for you. There will be fun facts next week. Oh, that's great. Well, if you say it now, you have to come through. I know. They'll be angry.

They'll come for you with pitchforks if you don't have fun facts. By they do you mean you? Oh. Yes, I do talk about myself as a collective group. Unfortunately, you guys. No fun facts this time. No fun facts, it's also quite a dark topic. Oh, dear.

We're on a real streak of the moment. We really are. A bit of heavy lifting by the other two has been required. Is that going to be required of us this time as well? Yeah, always. Always in my paper-thin reports. All right, great. So hit us with the excellent question then.

In 1983, what now booming industry was nearly wiped out? Okay, industry nearly wide to 83 or so. And is this, oh, yes. The my brother was born. Oh, so the child rearing industry was going quite well. Very well. Very well indeed. Okay.

And I was only going to get better a few years later. Seven years later. Possibly seven. So are we talking, is this confined to Australia or a worldwide industry? It's a worldwide industry. This particular event was more north. America based. Something happened in North America.

Do they all give up on NFL that season or something? Is it NFL? That's not, but that's a good guess. It could have happened. Quite an industry too. Yep. All right. Look, I mean, I gave you a very little chance of getting it.

Is it gold? Gold. They thought they found all the gold in the NFL. Is it getting closer? Imagine if it was that, but Matt didn't give it to me when I said the NFL. No, you had to say gold. I, no, it's darker than that. Oh, I forgot he said dark.

Oh, dear. The topic this week is the video game crash of 1983. Video game crash. Video game crash. I kind of feel like video games are doing okay. Yeah, that's what I said. It's the now booming industry. Oh, you did say that.

Oh, jeez. Louise is good. He's right good. It was also known as the North American video game crash of 1983. which is quite a similar sort of sounding thing. And also in Japan it's known as Atari Shock, which is way better. I like that. Now, this was a listener suggestion.

Because I remember seeing this. This came out of the hat. This was suggested by a man known as 3PHRD. I guess it's Shepard. Okay. Shepard. Is that a Twitter? That's a Twitter handle, but also his name.

I guess. Cool. So thanks so much, Shepard, for sending us in. I have a funny feeling that you're going to know way more about this than I do.

As I, the only video game console I ever owned was a Super Nintendo. Oh, one of the best. Which came out well after, we got it well after it would come out.

I think... Was it the cousins or something? I think, no, I think we got a new one, but it came, we got it when the, maybe the 64 or whatever the following one was,

came out. so the price drop. Trying to get, just throwing him out. And we all got a game. We had Battletoads, me and my siblings, Battle Toads. Nigel Mansell's racing. Oh, Formula One? Yes.

Mario Paint. Mario Paint. I've never heard it. I love it. What's that? It was a Mario-based paint game. So it's sort of like... Interesting. I mean... I mean, it was self-explanatory really, wasn't it?

But it included this game. I don't know if you guys ever watched Amazing on Australian TV, Channel 7 Afternoon Show with James Champagne Sherry as the host. Is this one we had to find the keys? Yes, that's one. Yes, great. And at the end, you have to play a game to win the, I think the game at the end was a video game.

And it was always a super NES game. And it included one of the games from Mario Paint, which was like this fly-swating game. That was like this little game inside the game of Mario Pan. Oh, wow. Did you have gaming consoles? Did you match a gamer as a kid, Dave? I've never been really much of a gamer, but we had a couple of consoles.

I had a Nintendo 64. It was the first one we got. And then a PlayStation 2. Very nice. That's seen as one of the classics, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was great, you know, because it also had the DVD player. Oh, yeah.

Suddenly you got two DVD players in the house. Oh, my God. Oh, geez, Louise. We had a Sega. Well, my brother had a Sega. So I played that a little bit when I was really little. And then we didn't really have anything. I was like, that's why I loved going to Friends houses

because they'd have PlayStation's and I'd get to play. But then when my, I think I was about 18, so my brother was 25, and he had, like, temporarily moved back home. And mum bought us a wee for Christmas. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, it's so good. I think it was kind of who I'd be like, don't leave. Don't leave again.

So we were weird. Oh, no. He's taking the way. Yeah. No. Why didn't I chain it to the wall? So we, we, why didn't I chain him to do? Yeah.

Damn it. Never leave me. But he did leave. Oh, Annie. He did leave. Isn't Annie a sweetheart? She's a sweetheart and he's married and lives with his wife, which makes sense. Who's got the Nintendo Wii?

It's still at mum and dad's place. Oh. It is, I feel like the Nintendo Wii is a bit of a mum and dad's console. Yeah. Why mum and dad have a Wii? I think I'm going to take it. Do they ever use it? No.

It feels like because everyone gets that Wii Fit game and then no one uses it. We bought Mum Wii Fit and she used it about twice. I'm like, I don't know why I buy you nice things. Anyway, so that's our gaming history. But I had no idea that it crashed even before I was. was born. Yeah. Yeah,

well... I had no idea, so let's find out. Okay, so I mean, you're probably asking, what was the video game crash of 1983? I feel like we literally just asked that question.

I prefer to phrase it as what was the Atari shock of 1983. Mm. I wish I could speak Japanese. I would have had something really good for you right then. Ichini Sonshi. Well, that's not right. Do you just count yourself in?

I can't myself. One, two, three, four, report. It was a huge recession of the video game industry. Would you believe it? And it occurred from 1983 to 1985. The crash was serious enough that it brought an abrupt end to what is considered the second generation of console video gaming in North America.

Uh-huh. In Japan, the second generation kicked on for a few more years because it didn't have the big old crash. Interesting. Do you know much about the generations? Yeah. Are we like up to the seventh or the eighth generation or something now? I've got no idea at all.

I'm not sure. I only looked in, I'm like, what the, I'd never heard of generations. So every time a new one, so you know, you've got Nintendo 64 versus PlayStation 1, and then PlayStation 2 comes out, so they have GameCube, and then PlayStation 3 comes out, and Xbox has got the 3, you know, they all have it's every few years, they have to bring out something new to try and capture them. Interesting to say that, because it wasn't all. always done that way. Oh, really? So it was a little bit more haphazard in the early years in terms of

bringing it. These days it's every, you know, five or six or seven years. They all kind of bring them out at the same time. They've all sort of fit into a rhythm, meaning that you've given yourself time for the players to, you know, get a good life out of that console. Yeah, so you don't feel like you're upgrading all the time. Yeah, which otherwise, well, you'd stop buying them if you were thinking, oh, there's going to be a new one in six months anyway. Yeah, but I imagine it's also they bring him at the same time so you can be like, hey, you were a Nintendo guy before. You're still a Nintendo go, right? Yeah.

Don't try that PlayStation. Nintendo's still cool. Yucky. Don't try that yucky. Icky. Icky PlayStation. No. I'm so tough.

Icky. It very nearly put an end to the industry altogether, actually. Like it got pretty dire in America for the home gaming consoles anyway. Wow. the time. There are many reasons for the crash. I'll go and know a few of those. But, you know, when I was reading about the generations,

I made me think, oh, what was the first generation sort of thing? So I looked into that a bit. It said the first generation began in 1972, which seems crazy to me, with the Magnavox Odyssey. Well, I've never even heard of that one. No. And the Generation 1 lasted until 1977, when the Pong style console manufacturers left the market

due to the video game crash of 1977. Oh wow. So they've got precedent for crashes. Yeah, apparently. And I did not look into it at all, so maybe we'll do that another week. Some characteristics of the first generation consoles were, the game's very basic, would you believe it?

Were they 3D? No. No, no, they weren't. I'm not kidding. Of course they weren't. That was great. They were zero D, I think. Zero D.

There was no dimensions. They hadn't invented the D yet. The D came later. That was the 80s. There's the hashtag. The D came later. First generation consoles had games integrated so that, you know, they were inside the machine. They weren't cartridges.

All right, so you buy it and that's it. Yeah. Like those are the games you've got, yeah. Rather than, you know, having the removal. media that we're more used to now. Entire games were restricted to only one screen, you know, like Pong and stuff, the whole game exists on that one

screen, you're not scrolling through or anything like that. Color graphics were very basic, mostly just black and white, and they only included very basic for no audio at all. Great, you know what's great? Just playing video games in complete silence. That's

so good. In complete black and white? I don't really like how the sound effects of video games really round out the experience. I find it overwhelming. I don't enjoy it at all. I can't concentrate on the skateboard if the music's playing. That's it actually.

One time I had a... This is really late. I won a Lord of the Rings PC game. And I was playing it and you've got to like sneak through a field past some wolves. And I had to turn the music off because it was making me too scared. I was like, I can't concentrate getting past the wolves with just scary music. You turn it down. But then you missed the clue that the, like the...

The wolves are nearby. The magic wolf is like speaking into. You are you? Turn left, turn left. Didn't hear it. Didn't hear it. I was busy hiding behind hay bales. Okay.

The three hours. Mom had to come in and pull the plug out from the wall. It's just a game. It's just a game. It's not a game. Mum, there's wolves. There's wolves, I tell you. Didn't sleep for that year, but that's all right.

But pretty glad you won that competition. Yeah, it was a great game. Wolves are scary. I think that's fair enough. That's the lesson here. I think I actually, I'm quite into those. those really basic games. Like, I never play them, really, but things like Pong.

I remember Pong being, there was a game when I was a kid. I think it was probably even old when I was a kid called Commander Keen. And it was it... Was it Commander Keen for Paine? Yes, Commander hashtag Keen for Pee. You know, I was so close to doing the report on Pene this week. I started looking it up. And because, you know, that...

What did you mean? Penis. I was just going to report about penises. Wikipedia. Penis. Enter. This is a bad mistake. Man, there is a whole... Wikipedia's got quite a long article about pain.

Quite a long article about pain. They've got photos of elephant pean. Okay. Wow, maybe you could do it. I don't think I want to be part of that episode. The corkscrew duck pain? Okay, yeah, I don't want to hear that episode. Thank you.

No, thank you. But it did make me think when I was looking into it. Into the pain? Into the eye of the pain. So to speak. Gross. No, no, literally. Quite literally.

Yeah, he really gets research. That's how I think. That's how I do my best thinking. But you said, oh, one of you guys who ever posted last week about our most ever requested topic being the Dilettov Pass. DiLatlov Pass. DiLatlov. Incorrect. Pain by a long way.

Keen for pain by a very, very long way. Because people tweet in Keene for Pien. Yeah. That is what that hashtag was born out of. I was requesting pain as a topic. So I think we really have some sort of responsibility to give the people our pain. I protest my interest in being part of that episode. Well, stay tuned for a couple weeks time, guys, because I might be going to the peen hat.

Oh, I mean, I'm not. I'm not. The peen hat. Just imagine there's quite a small hat. A little peen hat. Good sir. Is that a top hat? It's all sorts of different hats. It's a little be a little beanie.

He's a classy fellow. Red Beret. Top of the morning. The second generation kicked off just prior to the crash in 77 actually, with the release of the Fairchild Channel F and Raydo Finn Electronics 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System in 1976. You ran out of breath. Okay.

First rule of marketing something. Make it something you can say within a breath. It's got to be easy enough for Mum to go to Kmart and remember what it's called. He wants the 12-9. Oh, I don't know. I'm getting him a T-shirt. It's funny. There was so many.

Amanda. Getting him a T-T-T-A. Thanks, Mom. Anyway, there was all these different brands. I'd never heard of, like, Calico or something like that. Oh, anyway. Some features that separated the second-generator. from the first include a micro processor-based game logic.

Ah, yes. Now you're talking my language. Now I understand exactly what you're talking about. They introduce computer-based opponents, so you could do single-player in a like a multiplayer game. Oh. Which is cool. Surely Pong was like that, but I guess they don't think of the paddle or whatever.

No, what is it? How does Pong work? I can't even remember it. Pong's just like... There's two paddles. Yeah. Oh, so the original one... You couldn't play by yourself.

Oh, man. What about it for all those only children out there? You have to run from one remote to the other. Just put them next to each other. You know, I want my child to exercise. Why don't just play with the child? Never. I also do not want to do that.

Games on cartridges allowing any number of different games to be played on one console. Yes. The removable media was introduced. Yeah, which is a great idea. Games started to span multiple screens. Oh, yeah. So you can move through the world. And that introduced basic colour graphics.

Generally between two colour and 16 colour. Excuse me? Can you even name 16 colours? I bet you can't. No. Blue, green, yellow. Three. Red.

Orange. Pink. Magenta. We're only up to seven. Hang on. Hang on. Black. Eight.

Wow. Is that not a colour? We're not counting that one? I'm not counting that one. All right. Get rid of black. Grey. you.

I'm not counting that. Brown. Nine. So we've got seven colors here. Hang on. Okay. Well, give me a chance. Have you even got, have you got yellow yet?

Yeah, I said yellow. I went, I did those. You got red? Yes. What about purple? Rookie mistake was just saying magenta. You should have said dark blue and then light blue.

Navy blue. Cyan. Cyan. I don't even sure what that is. It's like a pink? Coral. Somewhere between red and orange. Salmon.

So we're up to, I'm up to 11. I don't think the 16 colour. Graphics included salmon. Salmon. It was there. Or coral. beige? beige.

Oh, you guys are fucked. Emerald green. Bottle green. There we go 16. Boom. Bang. Don't ask me stupid questions like can you name 16 colors? This game sounds incredibly colourful.

It's got beige in that. Bage and salmon. And grey. It says that on the box, now including grey. I can see a rainbow. See a rainbow. See a rainbow, see a rainbow too. What's that, what's the fun color in the rainbow?

You know, they're all normal and there's one fun color. Indigo. Indigo. What a fun color. Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue. Is that it? Oh, is that what is? Okay, great.

I think so. Yeah, indigo. Anyhow. I didn't say indigo. 17. No, you've missed. No, the game can only handle 16. You chose salmon and beige over indigo. They were your fault, to be fair.

And great. Shit. Shit. So things were looking pretty great for the video games industry. Looking pretty great. Pretty great. Great. Really great.

Through 1982, they'd have... I don't see anything bad happening. It sounds amazing. To be honest, it sounds like it's just getting better and better. Up to 16 colours, my friends. Well, how many colours do you need? Yeah. Was that part of the crash?

They ran out of colours. Yeah. This is a guy in Tokyo at Atari going, fuck, we're done for. No, Atari's American. Japan was going fine, Dave. If you're not going to listen to me, I've just honestly... Is Atari not Japanese? Take a fucking walk.

No, I'm pretty sure. It's American. It's American. Hey, guys, there's just a little too much swearing on this podcast. I mean, I know it's always from me. It's coming from your mouth. So things are looking pretty great for the video games industry through 1982. having gone from a niche industry,

game cartridges were now in mainstream stores like large music and video cassette retailers. What? You don't have to go to that dingy dungeon anymore to buy your games, kids. Come up here to Magic Mike's big old retail store. Everyone in, we got Madonna on this sign. We got Bono and his band, the U-2 over here.

And behind me, all the video games you like with colors. ranging from grey all the way to beige and everywhere in between. Thanks, Mike. Mike sounds like a really fun guy. I like Mike. I mean, I hear he skinned a kid in his basement. But that was after. That wasn't enough to turn you on him?

You know me. I'm not one to turn on people. That's true. It's a good point. I hear some stats from a website that I liked the name of called the dot eaters.com. The dot eaters. I think it's a Pac-Man reference. Ah, yes.

When we go around eating the dots. Num, num, num, num, num, num, num, num, num. I like to make that noise when I play back then. You turn the sound down and do your own soundtrack? No, lo, lo, lo, la, la, do that for a bit, too. That's the ghosts. Do you ever gets full? No.

Oh, yeah. You don't say it. It happens off screen. Yeah. He's vomiting. He's bulimic. And when the screen changes over, he's just there going, Oh, God.

Please stop. No more. Please let the ghost fucking kill. Kill me now. I used to be a stick man. Now I'm just a big flat circle. I don't even have a body anymore. So yeah, the dot eaters had these handy stats on there.

So around this time, sales and home video games across the board rose from $950 million in a year up to $3.2 billion. Billion with a B. So I don't know if you can... That's tripled. Tripled. So pretty good, more than tripled even. Yeah. Because in America,

thousand millions a billion right correct is that in australia as well yes now internationally we all treat it because in britain it was for a while it was a million a million a million and a billion million million and a billion billion is a trillion but that means we'd never get there because that's so many million is that why we changed it so we could have billionaires yeah otherwise we'd have none now that would be lame who could we hate i just like you guys are aspiring to be that yeah i was literally about to say i'd just like to be a millionaire and then you made an Do you think anyone buys that? I mean, you do come from the Apple and East, but you guys are very poor. I was so poor. So poor. I've got nothing. I mean, you, from the start your parents gave you. You guys have done awfully. Oh, my parents gave me a very good education. Not like, not the best Melbourne had to offer, but it's pretty good.

Sounds a bit of resentment there, isn't it? Not the best. They could have done better, Mum. I just meant when I said like they gave me a very good education, it's like, well, it was fine. I was a good education. It was a good education. occasion. I'm put myself through uni. Wow. As everybody does with hex now. You mean the government put you through uni and you promised to pay them when you make enough money but you never will. I'll never make enough money. Sucked in, Hitler.

Because I'm a comedian. That Hitler stuff would not make sense to new listeners. It doesn't really make sense to all listeners. I know. I actually don't know where it started. Which episode was that? Was someone about Dave and his... Nazi sympathising? Yeah. Don't say ways. Cobbettler

Anyway, Matt, please do go on So 15 million consoles Have been sold overall Along with It sounds like it's booming 65 million cartridges So this is hitting a peak right Because I was thinking before

When you said they've introduced Like the cartridge That's genius Because then you're not just selling That one console And then your business is done You keep making money from them You get new games

It's like the Sims With all their expansion packs And I fall for it every time Because I fucking love the Sims It's got a new type of hairbrush Yeah Oh my God I can buy, sometimes you can buy

expansion packs that are just stuff. It's literally called the Sims 3 stuff, and it's just objects you can buy for them. So you play a lot of the Sims? Oh, fucking Lord of the Sims. I can talk about the Sims all day. I'm writing that down as a topic I'm going to do. The Sims. The Sims. Oh, so good.

Yeah, pretty, I mean, pretty good. 25% of US homes at this stage have at least one system. That's crazy. I feel like here it wouldn't have been that for a long time after. Yeah, so it was going off. So one in four people has one at homes. One in four homes, yeah.

So far, it sounds like a boom rather than a crash. I think you've written down the wrong word. I think you mean the video game boom of 1983. By mid-19. By mid-1983, there have been over 12 million Atari 2,600s. Do you guys know how that's meant to be said? Is it 2,600? No, 2600.

So by mid-193, there have been over 12 million Atari 2600. Sold. Sold. 12 million. So giving them about 70% of the market share. Wow. So they just dominated. And they employed almost 10,000 people in Silicon Valley.

They have more than 200 games available for their system. And new games are hit in the market every week. They were owned by Warner Communications. And Atari made about five times. the revenue at that stage of Warner's film division. What? Wow. What?

So this is still mid-1983. Things seem to be going really well. Because Warner's been around for ages, like, you know, 50 years at this stage, and then suddenly... Video games just take over. Yeah, you talked about the Warner Brothers in the Academy Awards. Yeah, Jack Warner is the most famous one, but there are like four brothers. And they kick... It was like the 20s or something, right?

Yeah, I think maybe the 19th. 30s for the Warner Brothers, yeah. Wow. Man, imagine what Jack Warner would have thought. Probably good on you. Good on you, Tarie. Wow. And yeah, so that revenue accounts for over 60% of Warner Brothers corporations' profits.

60%. Yeah, so they're doing a lot of heavy lifting for Warner Brothers that year. I mean, it was a real spike, though. Yeah, so people are suddenly real rich. At the same time, there are a million Intelivisions sold by Mattel, so that's another console that I've never heard of before. What's it called sorry? Intellivision.

In television sold by Mattel, the toy company. I don't know of that one either. And another million and a half colico visions sold by Colico or Colco. Wow. Another one never heard of. In my head, like obviously we all grew up after this time, but in my head it's Nintendo and Sega and then it's PlayStation and Xbox. Yeah. Yeah.

I thought they were the ones who made it up. Yeah. I'd vaguely heard of Atari, but I didn't really know what it was. Yeah, same. Like I knew it was a brand or a company, but I wouldn't have known the consoles and stuff like that. Weird. So yeah, so things are going pretty well. What about a Commodore 64?

Who makes that? They're more of a home computer. Oh, right. I've just heard of that, but I went before. I found out a little bit about them. I think they get a mention at some point during this. I was reading this article in The New Yorker just earlier, and it said that Atari was your classic Silicon Valley startup, right?

And it even employed Steve Jobs for a time. Ah. And according to this article, they found a quote, from Walter Isaacson's biography of jobs. A quote in there said that he was asked to work night shift after his co-workers complained about his abrasive personality and body odor. Hey, you can have one, but not both. Pick.

Pick, either have a shower or put a smile on the da'all, mate, or work all night. I don't care. They're your options. You'd be a great boss, Dave. I really would. And he's like, fuck you, I'm making my own company. I'm going to be one of the richest men ever.

Okay, yeah, good on your man. Yeah, yeah, sure, man, sure. All right. Tell you, Sir, Hawkin. Yeah, that isn't at all relevant, but, you know, interesting. Yeah, it's cool. Stanky jobs. Have some respect.

The man died. Oh, yeah, that's a bit rich. That is a bit rich. Every episode is about dead people on this show. We never have any respect. I think. I think we're very respectful. What about the episode devoted to death?

That was the best. In the early days, Atari had in-house video game developers, but they didn't credit them. The developers, the guys who made the games, guys and gals, they were mainly guys. They developed the games, but they weren't able to put their name to them. Due to this, over time, due to this and the fact that they thought they were underpaid, several of the programmers left to form their own rival video game company

called Activision. Have heard of Activision? Yes, because they made the Tony Hawk games. Yeah, so they obviously did, they've continued to do pretty well. Yeah, right, so that's made by people that want more credit. Yeah. Have you ever finished a video game, which I really have? But you get to the end and often it's like, congratulations, you've passed.

And then it's like a three-minute credit sequence of all the people. And you're like, I don't give a fuck, I just finished it. Yeah, give me a trophy. It's not a credits. Or like if it's a sport. game. It's like, yeah, well done, you won the season. Now here's 700 animators who made the soccer players uniforms. Oh, God. But it's like, I mean, that's the same forever. Exit. Exit. Skip, skip. You work on a TV show that doesn't do credits. Is that you just being bitter? Yeah, I think

every episode should finish with a three minutes credit sequence of all the people that made the soccer uniforms for that episode. Yeah, I think that's fair. Wait, is that what you do? You make soccer uniforms. Yes, it's a sport show. It's not at all. What are you talking about? I'm so confused. Am I confused? No, he's making a very funny joke about what he just talked about. Well, then I am very confused, Jess. Now I'm more confused. Just do go on with your report, Matt. Listen back to it and you might understand. Okay, I look forward to that. At the time, the biggest selling console was the Atari 2,600 as we were talking about. But if you knew how to make Atari 2,600 game cartridges, you could, right?

And obviously the new Activision Company already knew how to write the code. So when they figured out how to make the cartridges, they started doing, they started making their own sort of third-party games for Atari consoles. Right, but could they legally sell them at the shop? So you have to do it in an alleyway? Atari sued. Okay.

And the case was settled out of court. But the end result meant that the precedent was set so that third-party manufacturing of Atari games had become legal. legal yeah they're able to do it so at this stage the market became flooded with many different games

manufactured by uh oh I'm starting to hear flooded isn't a good word this is not good for a market that's doing so well flooded is never a good word hang on let's think of a context flooded with cash

there we go flooded with yogurt when you really want some no because if it's flooded that implies like a lot of mess and it's everywhere it's not in a nice contained little bowl My mouth was flooded with yogurt.

Oh, hello, there we go. Yep. That's pretty good. Fluttered with yoga. Fluttered with the perfect amount of yogurt. Yeah, I think we got it. So just those two cases, everything else is bad. Everything else is bad.

My mouth was flooded with water until I died under the water. What about? That's a bad one as well. The area was flooded, but the only person living there was a convicted serial killer. Still bad. He died. Yeah, but flooding's now. never good. It has other effects.

He was about to push the button that would have killed everyone in the world. And flooding is good. Flooding! Flooding! Flooding! I'm up for a good flood. Interesting, you didn't jump on board with my flooding chant. Anyway. Too late. I'm always... Too late. I'm always too late.

Do go on with your silly little report. Tell us about this market flooding. With all this flooding, the quality control was obviously very poor because there wasn't any. It was just up to the individual... So a bunch of people have worked out how to make their games. Yeah. Not just these Atari. I mean, Activision.

Yeah, the Activision guys were probably the ones you might want to do it, because they had some skills. Can't people just buy the good ones? For example, you go on the Apple App Store. There's 10 billion apps. But you just download the good ones. Quality floats to the top. Yeah, but you wouldn't necessarily know which ones are the good ones.

And probably the shit of ones are probably cheap, so people would buy those. Do you reckon? Well, I reckon, they'd stay. stay posted at the end of this paragraph. Okay, we're jumping the gun a little bit. I want tender hooks on this paragraph. Is it going to talk about the app store?

So when you bought cartridges in the app store, something happened and it was really good. All right. Flooding, flooding, flooding. Due to the oversaturation of the market and of the poor quality, sales numbers dropped dramatically. But this meant that a lot of those companies, those new companies went out of business,

and the shops couldn't return their products to them because they're out of business. So they just started slashing prices. Oh, right. So they're like, well, we've got 600 of this video game that doesn't exist anymore. But the Atari system still do.

So they can still be sold. Just for like a buck. Well, they went from being like 30 or 40 bucks down to five bucks. So is Mike maybe slashing the prices? Mike is slashing prices. What would that sound like? Oh, guys, hey, I mean, Madonna is still at full price.

So if you're in the market of, some Madonna, but you can't quite afford it. Well, why don't you have a look over here and down in the dungeon area that I've reopened? Because you weirdos, just don't have the money, but I've got some cheap games here. Look, I got knobby, knob-nob games down here. And I've got...

I'll take one. How much, sir? Three bucks. I'll give it to you for two. Thanks for playing. You're not very good businessmen, aren't you, Mike? This is all a front for my drug business I feel like I'm the kid that's going to get skinned

Yes you definitely are You're going to live in that basement now kid You can live in the basement And I can live in your skin It's like how old You two still full prize Bono's band Bono's band

The U2 That was great So because of the price came down if, you know, some games are under five bucks even when they'd gone. What's that as a percentage? Say a game was 40 bucks down to like $4.99 or something. 12.5%.

All right, that was very good. Initially, I'm going to assume that's right. Initially... Well, it was five. You've gone 4.99. But slightly... We're the same five. Yeah, rounding up. So, yeah, initially it was just the poor quality games that reduced in price.

But due to market forces, people were all buying those cheaper games that forced the better games, the better quality games. Because it had to have to drop in price as well. to compete with the flooding and the saturation. So basically the whole market just ate itself. Yeah. And this is obviously that they're the biggest factors, probably in what the crash was.

People talk about other things, which I'll talk about a bit. Here's a paragraph out of that New York article that was better words than I could write. Atari hadn't yet figured out, this is another potential reason. There was lots of factors at play. but Atari hadn't yet figured out the precise timing required to successfully transition from one generation of consoles to the next, like I was kind of talking about before. Today's console makers have set it into the predictable rhythm, typically releasing new machines every five or six years, enough time for customers to trust that a next generation system will be genuinely superior to the one it had replaced. But in the early 80s, the process was far less orderly.

manufacturers like Atari issued new systems much more frequently and their newness often hinged on gimmickry such as a built-in screen or a different kind of controller rather than any major technical milestones. This one's got a blue controller. Oh my God, I need it. I think gimmickery might be one of my favourite words ever.

That's where you go to the New Yorker. The New Yorker. It's funny that the word gimmickory in a way is a type of gimmickory. Atari released the 5200 console, which was their next generation on the 2600. And probably twice as good, I imagine. It was released in 82,

meaning that it cannibalized the sales of the older Atari 2600, but didn't offer enough technical improvements to persuade many people to trade up. Even as Atari promoted the new console, it flooded the market itself with games for the 2600, which is... Oh, come on. Normally they'd like stop making games for the older models,

so you had to get the new. The last year, there's not many new games. You're like, oh, I want the new games. Got to get the new thing. Yeah, build up some pressure. But they're like, hey, we've got some sweet games for the old one, but the new one. But I don't need it. You've got all the good games for the unit I already have.

Yeah, no, but this one's got a bigger number. Oh. It's 5,200. It looks much the same and doesn't have any of the good games available for it. I'm not sold yet. It's got some blue plastic on it. Oh, hang on a second. I'm going to put both of you on the basement.

Okay, I'll have my... Sorry, my... The boy, maybe the boy, did the boy take Mike's skin? Yeah, the boy sounds scary. Very confusing subplot, but I'm enjoying it. I'm sure it will be resolved by show's end. I don't know that it will. In addition, company executives at Atari were very optimistic,

almost overly optimistic for Reddit properly, producing the 104,000. No! They produced 12 million copies of a Pac-Man game. Kids love Pac-Man. 12 million copies for the Pac-Man game for the 2600, even though they'd only sold 10 million consoles at that point. Some kids are going to be dumb enough to buy two, right?

That doesn't make any sense at all. Well, I think their theory was that the game would make people by the console as well, but it didn't turn out that way. Yeah. They ended up selling... I've seen different numbers on this. fact, but the New Yorker said that they ended up selling 7 million copies, making it the best selling video game in history, so, you know, pretty good, but nearly, that was only about

half of the games they'd made. So it's the best selling game ever, still? Yeah. Oh, no, at that stage. And it's still only about half as many copies as they made. Yeah, so they were pretty confident. We wanted to double the record. Yeah, amazing.

So that was seen as a bit of an embarrassment for them. But apart from that... They accept the gold record certificate for the... The Guinness World Record for the most games ever sold, but they're crying because they've still got 5 million copies in the warehouse. Bittersweet. When it was released, there was a lot of hype around it, the Pac-Man game. It was very highly anticipated.

But unfortunately, the release was rushed and the quality was poor. I read somewhere that the guy who made it, the programmer, he delivered a prototype and they're like, let's get it to market. He's like, no, this is just an early... It's only got 15 colours. I haven't put grey in yet. No, print it, print it, 12 million copies. I've got beige in there because without beige.

The game, it just wouldn't work. The background's beige. You see-through. Imagine a see-through game. So it just, it was, it was, the arcade game was very popular, but it just, look like a really, really poxy knockoff. You know, the dots were dashes. The mouth, like, continuously opened even when it stopped.

Just, like, weird little things like that. The music, which I've heard, is so bad. It just sounds... Can he give some impression? Sound like someone fell asleep on a synthesizer, face first. He probably did. And at the same time, or around that time as well, the other big game that they made that was seen as maybe contributing a little bit to the downfall of the whole industry was a game called E.T. The extraterrestrial. I don't know if you have you heard it all about this. I've heard of E.T.

Yeah, it's from a movie. It's pretty. The movie E.T. It's from a movie. You've probably never heard of it. Do you mean E.T? Biggest selling movie in, or biggest grossing movie of the 80s. That is the film you're referencing, isn't it? The film E.T. Are you talking about E.T?

The Stephen Spielberg film. This one was... So there's a video game to go along with it. Yeah, and it was a genuine rush job. I'd never heard of it, but apparently it's infamous in video game circles. It was a super rush job. Like, from programming to manufacture the whole spectrum, like, from the idea, from the first, like, typing of the keys. Can we guess?

to it being printed and manufactured. How long do you reckon? Two weeks. Oh, no, that's, I mean, that is... Too far? Too silly? That's too silly. Imagine that. So it's longer than two weeks.

A month. I reckon three months. Six weeks. Six weeks. Four. So, yeah, I mean... I'm not that impressed then. After two weeks, it doesn't...

I still am because that's half the time that I... I guess. Yeah, but like three times what I guess. So that's six weeks from coming up with the idea. Yeah. How long does it take? I've come up. with joke ideas on a morning and performed them that night.

Then they've got to design it. Like, that includes everything. And it, apparently... Maybe if they stopped procrastinating, they could get it done in two weeks. So Atari, they'd spent over $25 million on the rights for ET for the game. Oh, you don't spend that much money, then it takes six weeks. And then save money, they just smashed through it, but also because they wanted to get it out in time for Christmas. Sure.

The end result is... A shit game. Widely known as the worst game of all time. Again, accepting the Guinness World Record with some tease in their eyes. And this is mainly because it is boring and nearly impossible to play. What a combo. That's the review. It says that on the box.

It was such a rush job they didn't read their own review. It just took a quote, printed it. 12 million copies went, oh, that doesn't sound very good. Shit. I think the point of the game was that you were meant to find. pieces of a telephone, I guess, to phone home. To see your phone home, sure. But you'd fall down pits and you just couldn't get out of them.

You'd be stuck there. I don't think you'd die, but you just be stuck there. So fun. And apparently, you know, if you went into play it, you wouldn't just figure it out. You'd have to go read the manual. Like, you just, in most games, you'd be like, all right, I'm starting to get the hang of this and pushing some buttons. I can see which one makes it go forward and stuff.

It's just like. It's so confusing. To turn right, it's like a nine key combination. Oh, that's left, fuck. To turn right, you've got to go to the fridge, get a bottle of milk, pour it on your head, spin around three times.

Sing the first verse of the national anthem. Yeah. Of? Your choice. Any country? Yeah, that's the thing. It was very loose in some time. They programmed 200 national anthems into the video game.

Very specific, but also very loose. The majority of the games were returned. It's that bad. Even at Christmas time, people are... Yeah, people are just like, the fuck is this just like i just picture millions of people sitting in front of their console just like with a blank look on it by the what has just happened i'm stuck in a pit i'm just got to keep resetting every time i fall down a pit oh some reason that i enjoyed that so much i love that

why is there so many why is there so many pits yeah where are they it's just all pits pittsburgh ah now which isn't that's a topic in the hat yeah Pittsburgh well there you go well i think we can tick it off the list. But if we mentioned a topic, does that mean we've covered it? I think so. I don't think so. Let's just go through the hat one day, read the mail out and we're done. I'm looking forward to doing Pittsburgh one day.

If we get through the hat, I think we should say, at the moment, it sits at about two years worth of episodes, so we're going to keep going forever, guys. But that's like, as it is now, we get suggestions all the time. Which is great. I'm confident of pushing through. I mean, we're doing one right now. That's true. Unless two have come through, we've at least stayed steady.

We definitely got one this morning, so. Oh, no. No, please keep them coming. They're amazing. Because there's stuff that we never consider. Like, I've never heard of this. Yeah, I'd never heard of it either. I found some other funny things like advertisers also started making Atari games

because just like anyone could say, companies were just making promotional material that was an Atari game. I reckon McDonald's had to have had one. The McDonald's How to Order a Large Fries video game. The one that, I bet you they did, but the one I read about, you got no Kool-Aid? Yeah. It's like they're cordial, I think, in America. So Kool-Aid released a game about a character called The Kool-Aid Man.

Oh, he's often parodied in cartoons saying, oh yeah. Oh, really? Cool-aid kid would have made more sense, right? Yeah, that does sound better. Alliteration. The title character in the game had to chase down tear-shaped villains called Thirst. that were trying to take away the world's cool aid supply from the children.

And you'd get that game by buying a certain amount of coolade. So it was free basically. Free, but every two metres you fell in a pit. And you had to start again. A bit of Kool-Aid. You drowned in a pit of Kool-Aid. What a way to go. Flooded.

Now that's a good way. It flooded with Kool-Aid. Yeah, I'm into it. It's sticky. Love it. Well, that is my... nightmare. Lots of gross cash-ins like this were made, which obviously continued to lower the reputation of Atari and video games more generally. So Atari controlled such a huge

percent of the video game market, right, in 1982 and into 1983. Only a year later, an urban myth started around the ET time, started doing the rounds, which said that the dramatic drop in demand for video games meant that the company dumped 14 truckloads worth of game cartridges into a New Mexico landfill and poured cement over the top. So no one can ever play them again. What? They literally went into a pit. They fell into a pit.

No, that's a nightmare. Falling into a pit. Had not considered that, that is very good. That just winked to me. Like a proving of my joke. Not with laughter. With a series of winks. So that was like, that became this really big.

urban myth and it was talked about through gamer circles around the world like a lot and it had been for years and years until it was uncovered as being true in 2014 they found the pit Yeah

They dug it up Yeah yeah And they were There weren't the millions of ET games That they thought they were But they were still heaps There was like at least nine Yeah there were nine

Nine hundred played How do you know they were unplayed But like they took them out of the concrete And you know how you can just blow on them? They're good to go. Yep. Fire them up. Plug it in.

Oh, shit, I'm in a pit. Oh, crap. So the industry's revenues had peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983 and then fell to around $100 million by $1985. So it was almost reversed back to where that peak and it came back down to that same level, which said on a few different things. I'd trust their maths because it said it on a few different website. So it's a drop of about 97%. is a relatively big drop. Relatively, yeah.

That's huge. No, I'd say it's relatively big. Relative, like, compared to, like, say, like a 95 or 94% drop. If you compare it to a 99% drop, then it's not relatively big. Yeah, relatively small. 100% drop. It's tiny, nothing. Relatively small.

90% percent. Everything's bellative. Isn't it just? That's a good point. Even the scale of 0 to 100, it's relative. Wow. What an excellent point to make there, David. And also, Jess and her brother.

We are relatives. We are relatives. But how... Mention earlier in the episode. So that's tying it all back neatly together. Very good. It was at the end of our subplot? Jess and her brother are related.

Yeah. Yeah, we still haven't talked about the Mike's skimming the kid, but we'll get there. Well, do you know my brother's name is Mike? Yeah. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh, my God.

Skidded kids. Skidded. He skidded kids. He's nice now. Yeah. You can reform. He's better. He doesn't skin anybody anymore.

Just cats. Yeah. No one likes cats. Oh, gross. He doesn't. He's very nice. I'm sorry, Mikey. His name is really my.

Yeah, his name's Michael. Hey, did you guys know after last week's episode about the Dilatov Pass? Diolatov Pass. Every time, yeah. I woke up the next morning with bruising on my body with no reason. Oh, my God. You know how they didn't bruise? They got internal injuries.

They got internal injuries. bruising and somehow I took the bruising. You got their external injuries. Yeah, I had them up on my shoulder and down my arm and then a little bit on my neck. Oh my God. It was really weird. Wow. Like a lot of bruising?

Yeah. Like this weird yellow bruising. And also the next day I was in a cafe and Rod Stewart's song with mandolin played, I'm not even fucking with you. Did you freak out a little bit though, to you honest? Yeah, yeah. I was like, what are the odds of this? Oh, weird.

Like the song before it was some sort of minimalist dance, and the song after it was back to that weird sort of techno, but in the middle, out of nowhere. Do you know what's so strange? Actually, now that you mentioned, I completely forgot that we talked about that. But the day after that we recorded that episode, my tent got hit by a car,

and there was a Yeti. Driving the car. Are you for real? And a golden woman, and I died. Are you fucking with me? I'm not fucking with me. You can't fuck with me on this. I would never.

So that's so... She thinks they're connected? Nah, couldn't be. Got to be a coincidence. Jeez, Louise. Of course. So anyway, the crash was rough. The car crash into my tent, yeah. The car crash was rough. But, you know, Jess has kicked on from death, and she's moving on with her life.

I think I look better, dead. You look good. You look good. I pull off death well. Yeah. I would say... Death becomes her. That's the thing, I'm pretty sure

I want to say that you look just as good Just as good dead as alive That is really sweet guys Try and work that compliment out Well I'm guessing then that you're seeing me dead Which means I have an open cask funeral Which means my asses been packed Are we talking goon?

You're wearing plastic underwear right now Plastic underwear and they've packed my ass For seatage Please. We all know what they've done to your ass. You don't need to talk about it. Again, very confusing for new listeners. Go back to episode 10 and enjoy.

This is a real one for the fans. Sorry. Sorry everyone else. And even the fans are mad of us for that. Yeah, so the crash in the video game world was rough in 1983. Many companies went under. And that, you know, to be honest, that sucked in some ways. But...

Oh, is there a but? But on the plus side, that meant that many families who wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford gaming consoles could. And they could all play that terrible, terrible ET games. Crack the shits and vowed and never play a game.

So I meant that a whole generation of gamers were introduced to video games that wouldn't have otherwise been. And I've read a lot of blogs and stuff, people talking about it saying it was bad, but if it wasn't for that, my family wouldn't have got it. And now I'm, now I run the website

called I'm a gaming nerd man.com. You know, like people got right into it because of that. I'm a gaming nerd man.com? Well, that may not be, that may not be an... What if it is? If that doesn't exist, we'll, we'll buy it. Yeah, that's ours. That'll be our website.

I'm a gaming nerdman.com for all your do-go-on needs. It makes no sense. I have to keep writing it out. It's an in-joke that really wasn't even in-joke. Yeah. I mean, it was in. Yeah. But was it a joke?

Was it in? It's out. The industry recovered a few years later after the crash. So, but did you say before that Atari's gone? Atari's gone. So they've bowed out. At one point, their CEO was on charges for insider trading as well. Like, a lot of things went wrong for Atari.

So they're not very good. But they were at one time, there was 70% of the market, and now they're not there anymore. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, too big, too soon, and they just obviously had confidence, too much confidence. Yeah. Hey, people, feel free to correct me on anything that I've said wrong, and I'm sure I've said some wrong things, but... That's a spirit.

Thank you. No, I've probably fucked all that. You're probably all really mad at me. I'll accept your feedback, video game nerd.com, man. Dot com man. That's a different guy. It's very confusing. Yeah.

And they're both called Steve, weirdly. Yeah, they really have a rivalry going. Who's that? I think Auntie, it sounds like Aunty Donner are rehearsing out the fire. People like it when we talk about Aunty Donna, or one guy does. Yeah, he's named Broden. I love it when you talk about. That's not my Brodden impression.

Hey, you kids, walkie, walkie, walkie. That's your impression of him. I'm Broden Kelly. How there, you naughty boy? You fuck! Anyway, that's another thing that's... I hope he hears that. I'm not going to mention it to him at all and then just wait for him.

We share a studio with Arne Donner. Look them up. Very funny sketch comedy troupe. Anyhow, the industry recovered a few years later, and this was mostly due to the widespread success of the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Ah. Which is launched in late 1985. So they've come from nowhere, have they?

Yeah. Japanese brand. I think they came from Japan. So they learnt a lot of lessons from the crash, including the fact that, you know, because they were sort of out of fashion of it, they tried to market themselves as separate from gaming consoles. That's why it was called an entertainment system.

Hey, we're not a video game system. We're an entertainment system. Yeah, the system remains. Hey, you've got to have a system. Take away the system. What have you got? chaos when Nintendo. It doesn't translate very well, but in Japanese

that's sounded amazing. In Japanese it's beautiful. It's strangely poetic. It's a hykid. Yeah, it's in aiku form. It's an advertising haiku. They weren't from the third party issues, the third party producers, which led to Nintendo having much stricter quality

control, but also they include a special chip in every cartridge that meant that only games approved by them could be played in their consoles. Clever. If you wanted, if you had an idea for a game that you wanted to be a Nintendo playable game, you had to go to Nintendo and get approval, go through their system.

Which makes sense. Which I have and failed many times. It's because it's just you wearing a little vest. Yeah. How about this? How about this? How about a game about me? Hey, how about a game where it's me, but I'm a monkey.

and you can throw bananas. Oh, that's pretty much Donkey Kong, right? Oh, yeah. Okay, hang on, hang on. But mine is Davy Kong. How about I'm wearing a hat and I've got a brother and I'm a plumber? Pretty original. Okay.

That was something else I read about a bit that all the different manufacturers of games. They didn't necessarily have exclusive rights to different games. So there was heaps of different Donkey Kong games made by different people, different Pac-Man, that sort of stuff. She led to some issues as well. Something else that Nintendo learned was that they went to a lot of effort to make the console look more like some sleek modern technology. They wanted it to make it look more like a VCR than a gaming console. VCR's were sleek and sexy at the time.

Apparently, yeah. At the time, yeah. I mean, this is in 1985. Now it's like, what is this shoebox-shaped thing? I think we got a VCR in like 95. or something I reckon, or maybe later. Did it have the ability to record shows? Yeah, I remember being very exciting.

Very exciting. And then did have the, my dad always did this. There'd be some sporting event on the middle of the night. So he'd set the thing to automatically record at, you know, 1 a.m. to 1.45 a. And the game would finish it too. Yeah, and it was like, or dismiss. It would start at 12. They're always fucked up.

Penalties shoot out the bat. And here he comes. This is for the, this. Oh. Oh. And then, yeah, he'd always come and be like, fucking machine. So funny. Life is really hard.

Narnies. We didn't have Eye View. Didn't have Netflix. So a lot of these strategies, I'm not, I'm not vibrating on a high frequency today. You're doing okay, buddy. So these new strategies that Nintendo put in place, like with the tighter controls and that sort of stuff, ended up. been taken on board by a lot of the future big players in a video game consoles like Sega, Sony and Microsoft.

Not all of them were as strict, but they used a lot of those ideas. And obviously they all, I think they all still, oh, Seeger is Seagher still around? I don't know what their story is, but Sony and Microsoft still. The last one was the Dreamcast. Right. I don't think that did very well. I don't remember it at all. But Sony's PlayStation, right?

And that's still going very strong. Yeah, the PS4. And is Microsoft Xbox? Yep. That's weird. Microsoft ended up being one of the big players. I didn't really mention in the report, but the video game crash didn't actually affect,

it only affected those consoles. It didn't affect computers. Computers actually took over a lot of that market share. Steve Jobs was like, fuck you, I haven't had a shower in weeks. Yeah, like the Apple 2 came out during that period, and the Commodore 64,

and the prices of those came down as well, making them a lot more affordable. So they became, and more and more, more games were released for those as well. And they're also seen as being superior to families. Or that's how they were marketing it as because they were game and computers, but also you could do word processing and all sorts of other stuff, use them for more practical things.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How about that? That's where it lets me down. Yeah, that's true. There was no system there. The Apple MacBook system.

Oh, okay. Hello. I'll take three. I'm in. All right. So just to finish up, this is another, This is from the New Yorker again. After Atari's collapse, its successes release new consoles at a slower pace,

finally settling into a five-to-six-year cycle by the time the sixth generation of hardware was released in the early noughties. This generation included Nintendo's GameCube, Sony's PlayStation 2, and Microsoft's Xbox, which was the first American-made console to gain significant market share since the days of the Atari. I see, it's Harry. So it's been 30 years since, or 20 years at that time, since America's had a go. A big go. It was time. But they were back in the game.

Anyway, that's sort of bringing me to the end. As I like to finish a report, you know, sort of fade it out. Just let it fizzle. Yeah, fizzle. Yeah, great. Well, it's cool. Obviously, video games now are, like, bigger than ever. They make, like, it's multiple billion dollar industry.

And it's getting, they're going in different directions now, like 3D stuff, and, uh, What do you call the one where you go inside of it? Oh. Sex doll. No. Seriously, where can I get that? Virtual reality is what I was meaning to say. What do you mean when you go inside it?

Virtual real. It's what he means. Yeah. So, and I was so skeptical. Friends got a thing called a, it's called something weird like an Oculus Rift. Yes. I was going to say a Mopouloulos. But yeah, Ocalaimlipp.

Which is that, is that Mark Zuckerberg? Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg. He was my friend who, and he had it. I was hanging out around at his joint at the Facebook mansion. And he sort of, he's like, have a go of this guy. I'm like, oh, I don't do the sex style. Hey, Zuckerberg, take your fucking little toys and go play with the other kids. I'm not in.

I don't need that shit. I got my sextole right here. I'm getting in something. Anyway, I, um, anyway, he gave it. He gave me a goal. of it and and I honestly was going this is going to be shit and I put it on.

Because every virtual reality you've ever done in the 90s, how bad they were terrible. We're awful, really bad. I've never even done one before but somehow that seeped through into my head and I'm like this is going to suck and anyway I put it on and it blew me away. It would just go on.

Much like the sex style. Yeah. Both great experiences. But yeah, it was amazing. Oculus Rift. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. It was fucking.

sick. I couldn't believe it. Couldn't believe it. There was like, I was ducking from dinosaurs and then I was like on a ledge of a building. Wow. What? And all these weird things. Why are the dinosaurs and buildings in the same thing? Yeah, I think I was just on some sort of like intro screen. You just trying to hit start, start. He's already too much.

I'm just like looking the menus over there and then I'm walking into tables and stuff trying to get away from bullets. Wow. And there was a lot going on. Geez, it was good. Anyway. It's dinosaurs, buildings. Exciting stuff. So who knows what's going to happen in the future of gaming, huh?

Yeah, where do you go from there? Only time will tell. I'm like, I want back in. Can I just live in there now? Yeah. Great. I'm talking about the sex tall again. Okay, gross.

I want to live in there. Well, that's weird. I'm going to edit those last bits out. Probably won't. Hey, thanks for listening to me. That was cool. That was very interesting. I had no idea about any of that.

Me either. I'm not a video gamer, but I found that fascinating. I was, yeah, totally the same. Just never, it's never really got me. But, I mean, there were periods where I played a little bit when I had that super N-E-S. Played some Donkey Kong Country 2 or whatever. But, yeah, I find it fascinating. And it is a world where people who get into it get deep, deep into it.

Which is great. It's really cool. Yeah, awesome. That's really interesting. Yeah, so thanks for having me. We should thank at SH3 PRD, whatever. Shepard. Thank you for the suggestion. Thank you very much, Shepard.

Hopefully, yeah, that covered off some of the things that you wanted it to. If you, like Shepard, want to get in contact with us, you can do the tweets like he did at Do Go On Pod. Or you can email us, do go on pod at gmail.com. We've got the Facebook going now. We're getting a few people on there, which is pretty good. It's awesome, yeah. Please follow all that kind of stuff. And, yeah, the more suggestions, yeah.

The longer we have to go. Yeah, we're going to keep going to we tick them all off. So keep us here for another 10 years. We're very anal like that. Oh. Stop talking about your sex doll. Don Jess. You can't make me stop.

But until next time, do you guys have anything else to announce? No, I don't think so. I think all I would like to announce is have a lovely day, everyone. I would like to announce friendship. Great. That's a great. I think that's a great thing. Nice announcement.

Yeah. Apart from that. I could get behind that. That sounds a lot like gimmickery to me. Yeah. I just wanted to use that word. Did I use that properly? Who knows?

It's probably not even a real word. But thank you for listening, ladies and gentlemen. We will see you or you'll hear from us next week. And until then, we'll say goodbye. Bye. Don't forget to sign up to our tour mailing list so we know where in the world you are and we can come and tell you when we're coming there. Wherever we go, we always hear six months later, oh, you should come to Manchester.

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