therabidcow

It's kind of funny that this debate is happening now. I happen to be taking a course on game programming right now. We're into the second week, and one of the introductory topics was the crash of '83. So I look in my book and find this:
"...In early 1983, with Atari still struggling to recover from E.T., a crash occurred in the video game market. Retailers had tons of unsold games on store shelves, and many of them offered very low quality. Game prices dropped sharply. Titles that previously sold for $40 were selling for 99 cents, which resulted in many companies going out of business. Others would survive, but would never quite recover from the hit."

That's from Daniel Sanchez-Crespo Dalmau's Core Techniques and Algorithms In Game Programming.

And for those of you who are curious, I'm taking the course at Case Western Reserve University.