Yoshiki Okamoto: DS might experience Atari crash

Posted May 2, 2008 at 3:34PM EST by QJ Staff

Listed in: Nintendo DS Tags: Atari, Game Republic, NES

Yoshiki Okamoto, known for his work on Street Fighter and head honcho of Game Republic, made an alarming observation predicting a dark age for the Nintendo DS.

In particular, he brought up the Atari crash (more commonly known as the video game crash of 1983/1984) and said history may repeat itself.

Talking to Gamasutra, Okamoto was quoted saying:

...this is those whispering voices saying this, but you've started hearing the phrase "Atari crash" pretty frequently. People are talking about how the second "Atari crash" is around the corner. And Nintendo is the one that has to figure out a way to stop it.

The Atari crash saw the market saturated with low-quality games and the biggest video game company at the time losing money before Nintendo came to save the day with the NES. Chances of it happening to the DS, according to Okamoto, won't go down unless Ninty improves support for third-party developers.

"Looking at the way things are right now, it is a fact that first-party Wii games are the only titles selling well," he said. "But if the first-party titles are selling, third-party games should be able to sell too, so long as their creators have a good working relationship with Nintendo."

Okamoto stressed out that the DS market "blew up more rapidly" than expected, which could easily cause early deflation following relentless releases of DS titles.

To illustrate how bad the situation is, Okamoto looked at brain training games. With the cost of development for the platform "close to nothing," we've been seeing more brain training on the DS than one person needs to be mentally healthy. Okamoto then said:

Nintendo put a lot of thought into the original, and ran some really cool commercials for it. But some of these companies just slap something together, put the word "brain" in the title, and release it. There are a ton of them, and barely any of them are interesting.

Via Gamasutra

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Hey, the video game market is already flooded with crappy games ranging from rip offs of other games to ports of older games without improvements to movie tie in games that are quickly thrown together to capitalize on the name of the movie for sales. The Atari Crash is not going to happen, it IS happening among most console systems.

At least the Nintendo DS does have a decent amount of good games in the handheld market, and Nintendo has not yet stopped creating more games that are actually pretty good.

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Yoshiki Okamoto: DS might experience Atari crash

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