More than any other companies in the history of electronic gaming, Nintendo, Sega, and later Sony established video games as a lifestyle, a hobby that would endure beyond the “video game craze” of the ’70s. Following the Great Implosion of ’83, as the Age of Atari crumbled, game console and software sales tanked and American industry and retail alike closed the coffin lid on the video game as a viable entertainment format and shoveled on the dirt.

In their heart of hearts, after all, most American retailers and even many executives within the industry itself had always viewed the video game boom as a fad. Throughout the entire mid–’80s, the only place most Americans played electronic games was on computers or at the arcades. And the only games the computers offered were coin-op derivatives or text (and later illustrated and even animated) RPGs and adventure games. For most Americans, video games were now perceived as the carrot-on-thestick gateway to the computer-in-every-household world that many people thought would take place 20 years before it actually occurred.

But the Japanese never lost faith. Japanese coin-op manufacturers had, in many ways, helped create the second generation American video game boom (i.e., the Age of Atari) with games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man and they saw no diminution of interest among Japanese gamers.