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It's true that the console market had dried up, although there was still a very active computer gaming market. I remember seeing Atari 2600 and 7800 cartridges going for $5 new in the store, where they would have gone for twice or three times that earlier. I was a bit younger at that time, but had I realized that the console market was tanking I might have been a bit upset at the prospect. A lot of my gaming after Atari's consoles went south happened on various computers, those of friends and a few of my own, including the Tandy CoCo, Commodore 64, Apple II series, Atari 800 series, and others. Nonetheless, Nintendo did singlehandedly bring consoles back into the running with the NES. The gamepad controls, along with a reasonably powerful platform for games at the time, returned consoles to the level where the games could be a serious alternative to a visit to the arcade and even computers to a degree. I sunk quite a few hours into the NES version of Ultima Exodus.