The Third Generation

The third generation opened with a crash. The video game market crashed in 1983 and a lot of companies went bankrupt. This crash almost destroyed the video game industry and brought about an abrupt end to the second generation of video game consoles. There are many reasons for why this crash came about. First the market was flooded with too many consoles, giving consumers too much when it came to which system to choose. Companies also failed to make any good new games for their next generation systems leaving consumers with a lot of consoles but no games to play. Finally competition from personal computers almost destroyed the video game industry. With prices of PCs coming down in the early 80’s people were less inclined to buy consoles. Although it’s called the crash of 1983 most of its effects wouldn’t become apparent until 1984.

The first system to come out in the third generation is the Japanese Famicom in 1983. This system was released in the US under the name Nintendo Entertainment System or NES. This system would come to dominate the North American gaming industry over the next few years. The NES used an 8-bit processor and although the previous generation used 8-bit CPUs this would be the first generation to be called by their bits. It is during the third generation that most of the famous franchises were founded. Some people refer to this as the first generation because it defined video games as we know them today.

The other system to compete with the NES was the Sega Master. The Sega Master was more popular in Europe and South America than in the US, but still sold less units than the NES. The third generation also saw the first side scrolling games such as Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. Atari also released a system, the Atari 7800, but this system didn’t gain as much widespread popularity as the NES and Sega did.

Sega Master	Atari 7800