Games After The Crash

Talking smack about MGS4 : quickest dislike in my life; won't even watch the rest of the video. Let me guess, you think MGSV is a fine game? I played the series since the beginning and I remember Famitsu giving MGS4 a perfect 40/40 grade but I'm sure you know better.

I can't wait for Gaming History to be an acceptable field of culture historical study and I will be able to say “I've studied under the likes of Leon Massey“ and they will have no choice but to say “Sir, please, this is your sixth bottle. And this is a kindergarten.“

The tone of Leon Massey's video essays is like he's come to terms with the fact the world is about to end and he's reflecting on everything that's happened in his lifetime.

I am convinced that the original Zelda and Metroid were designed to sell Nintendo Power guides. I'm surprised you didn't mention Manuals as a source of information.

Banger video, pipe bomb's in the mail

19:36 god damn super mario bros 1 isn't even released yet? so we've just been playing a leaked nintendo game for this entire time?

As The AVGN once said: "...The knights take nine hits. NINE FUCKING HITS! You can't even concentrate on attacking them because you're too busy dodging Medusas! But you can't dodge the Medusas because you're too busy dodging the axes! But you can't dodge the axes because you're tryin' to hit the knight! BUT YOU CAN'T HIT THE KNIGHT BECAUSE THE GAME'S DRIVIN' YA FUCKIN' CRAZY! It's like a test. It's a test... to the SHIT."

As a mahjong fan. I can explain the difference between the two early mahjong games: 4-Nin Uchi Mahjong is a passable implementation of four-player mahjong given the hardware limitations of the basic NROM cartridge, and Nintendo Mahjong is a game that people only bought because it came out first, because it's two-player mahjong and literally nobody plays two-player mahjong.

"Kirby's adventure is still the best NES game" damn right

The way you approached this video was really interesting. I've never given much thought into how developers wouldn't exactly know what made gaming fun early on. Cool vid.

It should be noted that the '83 crash wasn't the first video game crash. Fewer people remember the crash from the late 1970s, when Pong clones and other machines on the market saw an insane dump in sales, with the Atari being the only system that survived it. Furthermore, the impact of the '83 Crash has been grossly overexaggerated with time and the US-centric point of view; it only impacted the US market. European markets were their own ecosystem with their own machines, with homer microcomputers being the systems of choice. Asian markets were their own thing, with China and Korea mostly pirating and copying neighboring systems.
Nintendo's place as the world-leading gaming corporation doesn't hold water in its worldwide context, where Nintendo didn't see much success in PAL territories, where Sega ruled the console space. They offered better prices and better selections for the Master System next to the dirt-cheap cassette you could pick up for your Amstrad or C64. This was Nintendo mismanaging the PAL regions t no end, and would not see proper success in the PAL markets until the early 1990s, with them becoming the powerhouse people often depict them to be in the era with the release of the Super NES, and even that took until the release of Donkey Kong Country.
In the worldwide context, this is a rather dismissive view of gaming as a whole, as it suggests the Japanese and European markets weren't doing completely different things before and during the same era. While Nintendo often gets the label of saving gaming and the NES having all these newfangled ways to play, express or approach games, they were just as much following trends as anyone else, even if their corporate culture doesn't want to admit to it. Games after "the" Crash really weren't any different than before; the US just got to see what Japan was cooking while ignoring how European developers had already gone the same lengths, if not further in some cases, on their local systems.

I think the whole "where do I go" had two intentions, besides limited hardware.
1 - When you go on an adventure, as an explorer, you need to take closer looks to surroundings, get a notepad, draw a map, etc. It becomes less about exploring if you are given all tools, it makes the game more gamey if it needs to give you the info and also keep it for you. I Love when i go through my stuff and find my notes for kh, which enemy drops what, or my maps for phantasy star 1. It makes it feel like "yeah, i did this, i explored, i took these notes, i went through it all, it was a journey". But has we get older and live in a world where basically everything is given and kept by technology, we just immedeately remove us from the equation, and so those immersive pixels become less and immersive in the end, all we get is the skill to play, but thats it.
2 - sell those guides beybee!

It actually wasn't quality control that caused the crash. At least not in the United States. We had a massive recession and this was before people realized that during recessions spending on entertainment products stays the same or actually increases. Retailers panicked at a temporary drop in sales and dumped all their inventory and stopped stocking video games. Thinking the fad was over.

If they had more data they would have known that people were still buying Atari 2600s. One of the reasons Atari made the 2600 Jr was it they ran through all of their stock of original consoles because people kept calling them and ordering them directly.

Americans didn't give up on video games retailers did. That's why Nintendo was such a huge success.

It doesn't help that the people running the companies that could release game consoles thought people would buy expensive computers instead. So when they did push something for game playing it was a computer. Those computers were many times more expensive even when they were 8-bit. If Only because we didn't use tape drives

19:39 damn, Miyamoto really was ahead of his time...

Thank you for being specific about what The Video Game Crash actually was, Leon.

This has always been a story told from a very U.S centric perspective, and since a lot of games media online is made by U.S creators, has also come with the traditional U.S tunnel vision of equating American history to world history. It’s also why for years, U.S games media always talked about how, unlike in America where Nintendo ruled supreme, Europe favoured Sega consoles up until the Playstation, which of course wasn’t true at all for most of Europe, but just them equating the U.K to ALL of Europe.

I’m not gonna say this was all American game’s media writers, because there were exceptions. And it’s gotten a lot better in the last 5-10 years. But it always stood out when I first started following online games media, as somebody who grew up reading local Swedish gaming mags that definitely always specified The Video Game crash as a principally American phenomenon. Even more confusing when you think about how the Famicom launched the same year as the Crash, and there was certainly no shortage of Famicom discussion in retro game focused U.S media.

I hope that we can all start calling it the The American Video Game Crash instead. Would cause a lot less confusion, without always having to clarify what the Crash actually was.

I remember the release of Mario, 2985 was an excellent year for games.

that was the fastest click of my life

"Progression that isn't putting more shit on the screen!"
*Chuckles in shoot em ups

19:36 man I can't believe that Super Mario Bros was released in the future that's crazy

Nowadays, all I wait for is new Leon Massey content