If you consider yourself to be a budding gaming historian, then the Video Game Crash of 1983 will be an event you're at least partially aware of. To cut a long story short, Atari created an enormous market in the US for video game consoles, only to tank it all via an oversupply of low-quality games, effectively sinking an industry that wouldn't recover until the introduction of the NES a few years later.
However, the story in the US isn't universal; in Japan, Atari wasn't a big name, and the crash actually happened in the same year Nintendo launched its hugely successful Famicom console.
Meanwhile, in Europe, consoles had never really taken off in the same way they had in North America, and home computers like the ZX Spectrum, C64, and (later) Atari ST and Amiga were the big gaming platforms. The crash in the US went almost entirely unnoticed in other parts of the world—something that isn't always obvious when you're reading up on video game history, which tends to take a very US-focused view of things.
This is an issue which crops up every few years, and this time, it's esteemed journalist Jeff Grubb who has poked the hornet's nest.
"I get the online backlash from Europeans about how there was no video game console crash where they were, so it's clearly overblown," Grubb said in a post on social media. "But the reality is that the entire European market was maybe 5% the size of North America for console games. The home computer scene created a different set of tastes unaffected by a crash, but it *was* merely a scene."
As you can imagine, trying to frame the European video game market as nothing more than a "scene" hasn't gone down well with gamers from outside of North America.
Industry veteran Julian "Jaz" Rignall—a British games journalist who worked on magazines such as Zzap!64 and CVG in the '80s before launching Mean Machines, the UK's first console-centric monthly—has been perhaps the most vocal. Rignall has really seen and done it all; he recently moved back to Europe after spending a couple of decades in the US and has worked both in games media and inside the industry itself, having taken a role at Virgin Interactive back in the mid-'90s. His most recent role was at VGM, a market research firm which is the largest provider of custom research to the video game industry, and has a client list that includes Square Enix, Sony, Sega, Nexon, Bandai Namco, 2K, Zynga, EA, Activision Blizzard and Tencent.
"Euro console market was tiny cos they were expensive," Rignall says in response to Grubb's post. "Which is why people bought computers. The Euro market boomed off that while the US collapsed ‘cos of oversupply. People think the crash happened in both places. It didn’t. US gaming boomed & stalled; Europe started later, boomed and kept going. Basically, consoles had low impact in Europe the early 80s. It was all computers until the early-to-mid 90s, when the gaming market began to align into a more worldwide business driven by consoles and the PC."
Citing a chart of global game revenues posted by Grubb, Rignall digs in a little more:
I mean, just looking at 1985, the C64 sold 1m units making around $150,000,00 in revenue (rough estimate). Where’s that money on this chart? Add in the Spectrum and Amstrad, and that revenue climbs hugely. Again, WTF is that revenue not on this graph? Poorly analyzed US-centric garbage, basically.
And yes, I’m building a full head of yeah-I’m-really-annoyed steam about all this. Ultimately, Jeff’s like, no big deal man, just a scene. And I’m like, what he’s saying is exactly the kind of thing that drives Europeans nuts - because he’s perpetuating US misunderstanding of Euro gaming history.
Also, early Euro games dev was super-competitive. Programmers had to be clever to maximize the performance of their computers. That expertise resulted in many Europeans being poached by US publishers where they made many console games that defined US kids' childhoods. Something many seem unaware of.
Rignall's final comment could be seen as a reference to many British companies and developers; take Rare, for example, which was spawned from Ultimate Play the Game, a British code house which produced some of the best home micro titles of the 1980s.
Rignall isn't the only one who has waded into this debate with some rather passionate opinions:
To his credit, Grubb later said that he wants to "bridge this divide":
I want to bridge this divide. But the way to do that is to recognize that it was a real, global video game market crash because it affected people who made games globally, and then also, there were massive, insulated alternative markets that did not rely on that same global market.