The parallel I am making is not so much about Atari and Nintendo that about the games being developed for the respective platforms.

The Atari crash encompassed a lot more than Atari as a slew of developers went down at the time, it would be very limiting to just consider the games developed by Atari.

The issue was that everyone could make games for Atari2600 and Atari had no control over it.

The market only recovered when Nintendo had the brilliant idea to have their console check for ' licenced by Nintendo'  on the cardridge before accepting to play a game. ( that's the simplistict way to say it, the console checks for a key chip and the game has to acknowledge they licenced it..)

Yeah, that's how you can't develop a game for the Wii, the PS3 or Xbox360 these days  without the console maker getting to QA and approve it because the console looks for the licence and you can't infringe it and still sell or you get sued big time..........

 So yes I have a pretty good idea of what the crash was about and the issue is not so much how badly Atari was managed at the time and how well Nintendo is now, one of the big reason for the crash aside from Atari's idiocy was that the market was suddenly flooded by games as everyone tried to make a quick buck out of what seemed an easy market at the time. That is the parallel you can draw with the DS these days, the Wii isn't there yet.........

PS : What happened to summarize the crash is that the game market exploded, everyone flocked to it and it led to a crash which lasted roughly 2 years in the US until the NES came out...

That's what Japenese developers are afraid is happening for the DS now in their home country.

 If you compare 2007 to 2006 the market over there grew by 13.4% ( media create numbers) and seeing how a huge part of those were casual titles you can't but believe that the core market probably actually shrunk.

The weekly numbers we see on this site for Japan doesn't make it look like the core market has recovered at all over there as aside from a few big hits the weekly software sales for Japan are quite depressing........

The best we can hope for is that the 40+ responses of opposition per thread will be enough to deter the same user from bringing up the same topic twice. It will take some time but eventually the community will come to consensus and even the the most hard stubborn fanboys usually don't want to bring hate on themselves (in the form of a ban, because failing to cease stale arguments will be seen as trolling). 

Ail, I don't think you're understanding this. The Atari crash did not occur because people made so many bad games -- the crash occured because everyone lost a ton of money. That is always, always the bottom line in business.

Now, one could claim that the bad games caused Atari to lose money, which caused the crash, and I'd agree with that. But the ultimate cause was, once again, that everyone lost a ton of money and most went bankrupt. If Atari was still making cash, they obviously could have recovered from dangerous economic conditions.

By contrast, Nintendo is making more money than anyone in the history of gaming. In fact, Nintendo made more money last year than Sony has made in gaming total, since they entered the industry in 1998. That is effectively the opposite of causing a crash.

Crashes do not occur because too many bad games get released. Crashes do not occur because too few games are released (meaning, what if a company raised standards so high that only 4 games could be released a year?). Crashes occur because industries start losing tons of money, and right now, it's the PS3 and 360 that have bled tons of money, while Nintendo is raking it in hand over fist. Again, if anyone is going to cause a crash, it's Sony or Microsoft, and absolutely, positively not Nintendo.

I'll say it again, there is just no pleasing everyone.

If Nintendo implements stricter quality control, there will be endless whining about how Nintendo is turning into the old Nintendo and is trying to control everything.

And that will ruin the industry.

If Nintendo does nothing, there will be endless whining about how low quality software is flooding the market.

And that will ruin the industry.

That I can totally agree with and that is the issue Nintendo has to deal with right now...........

A flooded market is to noone's advantage as it forces people to spend more cash on marketing to get their game known and personally I would rather have the cash spend on making the game than on marketing it :P

Um, lots of us read that article this past weekend That developer's arguement fails as does your copying it. The 2600 died because ONLY shovelware was being released at that point. I remember how much those games sucked compared to the early games. The DS & Wii have lots of great games, the shovelware developers might indeed die.

 http://vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=16273 Wii

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=222049 DS

The best point in this thread is that without Carnival Games GTAIV might never have made it to stores. That's more frightening than what you are frightened of.

::chuckle:: I've always wanted to create a thread titled "Evolution of the Wii Naysayer".  And put together old links to articles and threads and show all the reasons the Naysayers would give that the Wii would fail, and how the reasons change over time. 

Display how it's changed from "The Wii will never succeed" to "The Wii's Bubble will burst here, at any time" and "Everyone will stop buying Wii when this other platform's game comes out".  And eventually to "Wii will ruin all of gaming!"

You have selective memory.

The year of the crash was the year the following games were released :

- Mario Bros ( excuse the chuckle when I see a Wii Fan calling the first Mario console game shovelware :P)

- Pole Position

- Mrs PacMan.

- Battlezone.

Hardly only shovelware... 

PS : It's foolish to believe GTA4 only came out because of Carnival Games. As the recent EA bid for TakeTwo showed as well as the 50 million$ loan from Microsoft, plenty of companies are interested in the success of the game and would have done what needed to be done so that the game came out anyway...

Has everyone read the wikipedia page for the Atari 2600? There is a lot of citation needed, but it has a well structured explanation for the decline of the 2600. From what I read it seems like Atari made a lot of bad decisions... as somebody said here.

 EDIT: See also, the video game crash of 1983.

 Nintendo did attempt to enforce stricter quality control at the start of the N64 era and look what happened to them.  Third parties just went elsewhere.  There are always going to be companies looking to make a quick buck and they will exploit the most popular machine to do so.