CREDIT: ATARI, INC.
It’s Pac-Man on the 2600, and it’s absolutely dreadful.

It's just one of those things; you wonder why your grandma calls all video games “Ataris” and you mother, “Nintendos.” Or maybe if you're more into video games than the average person, you're probably thinking about exactly how this American video game pioneer lost the marketplace hard to a foreign company; the story becoming part of that '80s fear of Japanese economic domination, which gave us the likes of Ron Howard's Gung Ho, among other things. But I'm getting sidetracked here. Nintendomination began with the 1983 video game crash.

The year 1978 was a watershed one in home gaming. Atari's 2600 home console picked up the slack, where the Magnavox Odyssey and Fairchild Channel-F home consoles had failed; the 2600 had a simple joystick, ports of popular arcade titles to buy and, most importantly, made abundantly clear that it was compatible with all existing TV set brands (yes, this was a real issue, people wondering if the Magnavox Odyssey worked with non- Magnavox televisions). The games were simple but fun, even for today's standards. Atari ruled the home gaming market with an iron fist, producing their titles in-house as a means of quality and product control.

And then along came Activision.

The then-tiny game company was punk in every way. It was formed by a band of disgruntled former Atari programmers, pioneering titles like Pitfall!, who sought to be credited for the games they created. Atari's practice of being secretive about their programmers, out of fear that they might've been hustled away by a tech company with a more enticing offer, created a backlash that would slowly seal their fate. Pitfall! out-sold Atari's own in-house software, and this was quite upsetting to the Big A. Naturally, filing suit was in order, Atari seeking to prevent third parties from manufacturing or selling games for the 2600.

And boy did it backfire.

Being struck down in court meant that just about anyone could make a game for the omnipresent 2600. With that realization, a glut of low-quality titles filled store shelves in North America, Atari's home base. Some of those titles were pornographic, and caused probably one of the earliest video game controversies. Without the benefit of having video game review magazines, let alone the Internet, to know good games from bad, consumers gave up. The home video game market was dredged in sludge, expensive, $60-a-cheap-cash- in-game sludge. Even Atari was guilty of screwing up, with the infamous E.T. game and terrible Pac- Man port disappointing consumers everywhere. Voting with their wallets, people chose to simply stop buying games, and the market crashed.

They had to face it: video games were starting to look like a passing fad. Atari was on the verge of bankruptcy, and were soon swallowed whole by Jack Tramiel's Commodore computer company.

Overseas, however, something entirely different was going on.

Europe and Japan were relatively untouched by this disaster. The European continent was more satisfied with gaming on Commodore 64s and BBC Acorns, which had the benefit of being able to do more than just play video games. Japan, too, chose to separate videogame dedicated devices to the arcade, opting to go with Microsoft's MSX and the like. It was in the Far East, in the midst of the economic boom, a trading-card- turned-arcade-game company named Nintendo, who had previously made games for the 2600, began a turn-around.

Check out this column in next week's issue for the rest of the story.