Mystery House was there instead of King's Quest.

There will be massive fallout from the lack of Fallout.

That's right, I went there.

That's not entirely true. Japan was already playing a major role in the video game market prior to the '83 crash. It was Taito's Space Invaders that truly started the arcade gaming craze and Namco's Pac-Man was the first game to attract a significant number of regular female users.

Perhaps the single most important factor in the '83 video game crash was Atari's lawsuit against Activision and Activision's countersuit.

Scenario: Disgruntled programmers, upset by their lack of royalties on video games and lack of recognition, leave Atari and form Activision and begin developing games for the Atari 2600. Atari sued, claiming that Atari itself had sole rights to produce games for its console, Activision countersued and won, establishing the legality of third party software. And then the floodgates opened. Hundreds, if not thousands, of games were produced for the 2600 and the lack of quality control sent the video game industry into a downward spiral.

When the industry crashed, Nintendo was there to pick up the pieces. To avoid a second crash, they made their hardware proprietary, a business strategy that would be copied by nearly every console to follow. That way, companies needed authorization from Nintendo to release games on the NES. This allowed Nintendo to limit the number of games that came out on the console and prevent market oversaturation.

Haha, I used to love Atari Pac-Man. And the game, despite being a weak port, was about as good as you could do on the 2600, and it sold VERY well. Problem was, Atari pressed 12 million copies of the game when there were only 10 million 2600s in homes. They expected it to sell the system, and it didn't.

ET was pretty bad.