In 1983 the American video game business fell apart. Sales dropped from about $3.2 billion to about $100 million in two years, stores gave up on games, and Atari buried hundreds of thousands of unsold cartridges in a New Mexico landfill.

This is how it happened: too many consoles, a flood of bad games, a rushed Pac-Man, E.T. made in about five weeks, and cheap home computers. And how Nintendo, a company that started out making playing cards, got the NES into stores by calling it an entertainment system and packing in a robot.

0:00 1983
0:19 The boom
0:58 Activision and the flood
1:40 Pac-Man and E.T.
2:24 The crash and the landfill
3:34 Nintendo
5:03 Why it still matters

If you'd been a kid in 1983, would you have bought E.T.?

#gaminghistory #atari #nintendo