I think that it is entirely a myth that the video game crash of '83 had anything at all to do with a decline in the quality of games. The fact that a couple of anticipated games (ET and PacMan) turned out to be dogs is coincidental. There had been dogs all along. What actually happened was that the videogame fad had finally run its course. For a while, videogames were novel enough that consumers were willing to buy just about anything that they could play on a video screen. Then, as invariably happens with fads, they were old hat. It wasn't just console games that hit a slump--it was arcade games and computer games as well. Videogames had to rebuild a market based not upon novelty of playing games on a video screen, but upon the quality and features of the individual games.