The videogame crash of 1983 is one of the most interesting periods of video game history. You can basically point to every single company involved and show that they made mistakes.

The primary cause of the crash, for those who haven't looked into it, is that Atari lost control of the market. All sorts of companies rushed to try to capitalize on this new video game market, and the result was a huge glut of games being released. The notorious examples are of games created basically to hawk Purina dog food, and the creation of a video game studio within Quaker Oats. The number of poor quality games depressed the market and created a public perception of all video games being poor quality. Why buy the new game now for $30 when it will end up in the bargain bin for $2 in two weeks? The public got fed up with the poor quality, the revenue dried up, many companies got burned or died, and so the video game industry became a wasteland.

What everyone failed to realize, however, is that the public still had an appetite for video games, and Nintendo was the one to capitalize on it and risk releasing the NES. It was a huge battle to convince the once-bitten retailers to carry the NES, but their "gamble" paid off. Largely, it was due to several draconian measures instituted by Nintendo to prevent any semblance of the causes of the crash. Nintendo maintained strict control over the games for the NES. Companies could not create a game for the NES without getting approval from Nintendo. Nintendo was the only company allowed to create the actual cartridges, and other companies who tried to do so (100-in-1 games!) faced legal action.

Additionally, companies were only allowed to create 5 games for the NES per year. The reasoning behind this was that if companies could only create a limited number of games, they would be more likely to put more resources into each individual game and therefore create better quality games, as opposed to trying to cash in on the latest fad by releasing 50 sub-par games. Many companies familiar to kids who grew up on the NES were actually created for the sole purpose of getting around the 5 game restriction! For example, Ultra Games was a subsidiary of Konami. These kinds of measures, encompassed and represented by the Nintendo Golden Seal of Approval (remember those?) prevented a quick repeat of the video game crash of 1983.

Fast-forward to 2010. This past month saw E3, the industry's showcase for all that is great and new for the coming year. The big announcements were Sony's Move and Microsoft Kinect. Everybody is basically jumping onto the bandwagon that Nintendo created with the Wii (with improvements! /s)

Here's my take. Nobody has really figured out how to make this new control scheme work. I mean, we've seen lots of demos, and we can get players to do a variety of things (think party games), and it's perfectly serviceable to navigate menus. But nobody's created a huge new game genre or found a way to migrate existing genres to take advantage of this new control scheme. I'm thinking about how FPS made the transition from keyboard to keyboard/mouse. It's perfectly possible that someone will figure this out, but right now motion control is a gimmick. It can't support the depth and variety of games that the industry is used to. But all the companies are emphasizing these games.

And as everyone stumbles around trying to find out how to build a game around motion control, the quality of games will drop. Guess what the first thing that hits your eyes when you browse the Wii section? Shovelware. Which is about to duplicate itself into the PlayStation and Xbox areas. Shovelware everywhere. Does this start to sound familiar?

The good thing is that every major console manufacturer has learned from the crash of 1983. Random company PQX can't make their own Xbox or Wii game and sell it to retail stores. They have to go through an approval process with Sony or Microsoft or whoever. So we can't truly fall into the depths anymore.

Also, despite what it might seem, I like motion games. I like Trauma Team. But "surgery" games cannot be the same depth/breadth as "FPS" games or "RPG" games. The market can't support that. I think of motion control being able to support similar numbers to "rhythm" games. But the industry thinks that motion control is their savior, and that motion control games can be equal to all the previous genres combined. Motion control is much better (currently) at enhancing games, just like rumble/vibration. The killer motion control genre has not appeared yet, but the industry is copying mediocre motion control games indiscriminately to cash in.

Handheld gaming is proceeding nicely, with Nintendo continuing to push the edge with 3DS. Strong competition from the iPod/iPhone as well. The casual gaming market continues to improve its production quality while keeping prices relatively constant. $1-5 for games in the AppStore and $3-6 from places like Big Fish Games is starting to put pressure on the "traditional" PC and console games. As more gamers become more aware of what value can be had for <$10 games, I'd like to think their expectations for $60+ games will increase as well... And innovation is still strong in all sorts of genres in the indie area...