Thought Experiment: The Gaming Crash

Originally broadcast on 2015-09-24.

What if the 1983 Crash never happened?

2025 EDIT: A few years ago, I was at one of my Dad's performances at a back-water bar (He's a guitarist), and I saw on Atari Age a question of "You're the CEO of Atari, how would you survive the 1983 Crash?", and most of the comments mostly said something like "Cancel E.T.", and I thought that was rather lacking.

I took the approach of rebuilding Atari's reputation after the 5200 and Pac-Man blunders, and instead of coughing up money for the E.T. and Superman licenses, I'd put more into R&D, complete the deal to distribute the Famicom as the Atari Advanced Video Computer System, and build working relationships with Commodore, and many of the computer dev houses, quietly phasing out the Atari computer division, and ultimately buying Commodore, repurposing the Amiga as not just the home computer, but also the dev kits for the AVCS.

Eventually, I would draw up plans for the late-80s, up into the mid-90s. I really need to do a sequel to this video, detailing these ideas.