Racing the Beam : the Atari Video Computer System - Index of

sole responsibility for the crash, but, like a fi nger pointing to the moon,
it shows that the industry was putting effort into licensing rather than
design and programming, inundating the market with less innovative
work that had been forced through the development process quickly.
This crash was not the end of the Atari VCS—or, as it had come to be
known by this time, the Atari 2600. But it was the end of one incarnation
of Atari, a company that had already been transformed under Warner, and
it was the end of the boom years for the fi rst popular cartridge-based
system. Many thought that it was end of video games, which they imagined
were a passing fad. This line of thinking wasn’t correct or productive, but
it did allow the American videogame industry to be greatly outpaced by
Japan’s Nintendo and Sega, companies that continued to innovate with
the next generation of consoles, the Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment
System) and SG-1000 Mark III (Sega Master System). In the context of
the toy industry’s troubled relationship with video gaming, and given how
the industry was burned by the crash, Nintendo managed to persuade
American retailers to stock its system only by packaging it with a robot
and a light gun so that it became recognizable as a toy.
Nintendo also learned from Atari’s harsh lesson. When Atari designed
and released the Atari VCS in the mid-1970s, it seems unlikely that anyone
at the company seriously imagined that games could be made for it by
some other entity. When many other companies did exactly that, Atari had
no way to control which titles appeared on its system. Nintendo devised a
way to support retailers and third-party developers—yet also to control
them. The company’s fi rst-party licensing method required outside
developers to submit applications to qualify for third-party status, to buy
offi cial development kits from Nintendo, and to submit their titles for
review, quality assurance, and release planning. Nintendo used the system
both to police quality and to limit the number of games that each developer
could produce per year, preventing another glut of titles. Nintendo
convinced retailers that games bearing its quality seal would sell well, and
this method worked.
Without Nintendo’s leap, the retail videogame marketplace might not
have recovered from the 1983 downturn—at least, not as quickly as it did.
But video games paid a price for their renewed commercial success. Activision
had thrived thanks to strong creative vision and experimentation.
Nintendo’s fi rst-party licensing model set the stage for the more homogeneous
and anonymous work-for-hire mode of videogame development
that remains the norm. It also introduced a culture of “soft censorship”
in video games, with console manufacturers getting the last word on what
they would and wouldn’t allow on their hardware.
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