However Atari's "concern" for the customer backfired on them. In the previous years, there had been a very fine line separating arcade game quality from home game quality. With arcades utilizing storage capacities ten to forty-five times larger than home systems, that fine line became a chasm. Arcade games seemed to be evolving exponentially, while home systems seemed "stuck in a time warp."The public quickly became uninterested in video game specific consoles, and sales plummeted.
This would mark the end of Atari's reign of the video game market. To this day, Atari has not produced any significantly popular systems apart from their original Pong and the VCS/2600. Since 1985, they have slowly been picked apart by the industry. Splinter companies can be seen everywhere. One of which, known as Tengen, would play a crucial role in the Fourth Generation during some heated legal actions involving Nintendo of America.
Two innovations in the computer electronics industry had to occur before home video games could achieve similar popularity as in the Second Generation. Both transpired in 1984. The first was the reduction in cost of Dynamic RAM (DRAM) chips that allowed programmers more memory than conventional RAM and accessed at much higher transfer rates than magnetic disks. The second was the production of higher power 8-bit processors, which lowered the prices of the pervious chips. This made the two technologies easily accessible to video game companies.
These innovations were ideal for the production of home game consoles that could compete with the ability of arcade machines. Several companies from the previous generations (Atari, Mattel, and Magnavox) tentatively tested the gaming market. However, they simply released updated versions of their older systems. The successes of the Fourth Generation would come from unknown companies with fresh consoles.
Sega was the first of the Japanese companies to try a new system. Created in 1954 in Japan by an American David Rosen, Service Games originally produced coin-operated mechanical games. In 1965, Rosen purchased a Tokyo jukebox and slot-machine maker and adopted a shortened version of Service Games, Sega. During the Pong era, Sega was busy making very popular pinball games. Later, under the direction of Gulf & Western, Sega entered into the video game market with the arcade game "Periscope." They would be an integral player in the industry, eventually suffering during the gaming market crash in the Third Generation. When DRAM chips and inexpensive 8-bit processors became available in 1984, Sega, being headed by Hayao Nakayama at the time, entered the home console market with their Master System. The Sega Master system would sell very well, but its success would be short lived |
