Fallout lead developer Tim Cain argues that the video game industry’s current crisis has not reached the level of the 1983 crash, but he is not trying to downplay the present situation either. The veteran RPG developer says the collapse of the US games market in the 1980s wiped out entire generations of developers, while today’s wave of layoffs and studio closures remains a serious blow to the medium.
Tim Cain, one of the key developers behind Fallout, recently looked back on his memories of the 1983 video game industry crash in a new video on his YouTube channel. The veteran RPG creator mainly emphasized that, although the current employment crisis and wave of studio closures are serious, even extremely serious, he does not believe they match the impact of the infamous collapse of the 1980s.
Cain made his caveats clear early on, however. He cited a figure suggesting that around 10 percent of game developers have been affected by the current crisis, which he described as a tragedy for the medium in no uncertain terms. “It is bad”, Cain said. “It’s bad. Quote me: ‘It’s bad.’” Even so, he added that, in his view, “it’s nothing like the 1983 crash.”
Cain Says The 1983 Crash Is Still The Biggest Industry Disaster
“To me, the 1983 crash is still the biggest [games] industry crash that I’ve ever seen, ever experienced, and I think ever was”, Cain said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a worse time in the games industry, especially in the United States – it was very centered in the US.”
Consoles and console games were severely tarnished in consumers’ eyes at the time. Cain recalled that this was when he and many other players first shifted toward the home computers of the era, including the Atari 800, the Apple II and the foundational IBM PC. The reputation and sales of consoles began to recover around 1985, but for years after the crash, job growth was mainly happening in Japan, partly thanks to the market dominance of Nintendo.
Cain’s first industry job involved games for cable set-top boxes, then PC development. He recalled being relatively insulated from the direct professional impact of the crash. “My first PC game, Grand Slam Bridge, shipped in 1986, and the company folded soon after that”, Cain said. After that, he entered grad school, programmed Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, as a hobby, and did not work in computer games again until 1991.
An Entire American Developer Generation Disappeared
Cain described the severity of the 1983 crisis with a very simple image. “Imagine everyone in the industry in the United States – if you were making an Xbox game or a PlayStation game, or any kind of console game – you were just laid off”, Cain said of the crash. “Boom. You don’t work anymore. And you’re trying to get what few PC game jobs are starting to grow.”
By the time the PC market truly accelerated in the 1990s, according to Cain, many of the developers who lost jobs in the 1983 crash were gone from the profession for good. “It was incredibly devastating. We lost an entire generation of game developers. The entire US videogame market collapsed”, he said. “There were no jobs for console developers of any kind. It was just gone.”
The developer said it took about a decade for those jobs to even recover in the PC market, and even longer for the US-based console development market to return to anything that could be compared with its position in 1983.
The Current Crisis Is Dangerous In A Different Way
Cain’s long-term perspective may be comforting in one sense: games continued to be made after the crash, many people still had jobs, and the industry eventually became larger and stronger than it had been before. At the same time, several unsettling parallels can be drawn between the current situation and the 1983 crisis. Today, an overwhelming number of games are being released, and although there is some cheap shovelware, just as there was on 1980s consoles, the problem is not simply one of quality. In the 2020s, even great games can struggle to find an audience.
The general devaluation of games is also a major factor. Subscription services, constant discounts and endless sales all contribute to the completely understandable consumer mindset of “I’ll wait for it to go on sale.” Over time, that can distort how the entire market functions, especially while development costs keep rising and audience attention becomes increasingly fragmented.
The crisis is also uneven, and consumers often do not feel it directly. Just as 1980s players simply pivoted to PCs and Japanese games, today’s global and diversified industry can still deliver great games to end users. At least until their favorite game goes offline, content updates stop, or the studio whose work they follow shuts down.
Other industry veterans who also witnessed the 1983 crash take a darker view than Cain. John Romero and Brenda Romero, for example, have argued that the current crisis is “definitely crashier” than what they saw back then. In other words, even among those who experienced one of the industry’s most severe historical breaks firsthand, there is no full agreement on how today’s crisis should be measured.
Source: PC Gamer
