Over the last year or two I've had journalists suggest that I had coined three common industry terms. In two cases they may be right. Here's what I know.
"Next Gen"
I did not introduce this term to the industry.
In 1982-83 we were working on a new Intellivision console at Mattel -- a machine that was never to be released. I referred to our machine and the Atari 5200 as "next generation systems," but we were using the terms interchangeably with "next round of systems" and "more powerful systems" etc. The standardized term had not emerged.
I became aware of the phrase as an industry term during the time when Nintendo and Sony were jousting to drum up buzz for their systems before the PSX was introduced by Sony in Japan in 1994.
Next Generation Magazine debuted in 1995, and in my mind they played the key role in making the term a standard for consumers as well as for industry people.
"Console Wars"
It's possible I was the one who put this phrase into popular use.
In team meetings at Intellivision in 1981-83 I referred to our competition with Atari and Coleco as "Video Game Wars" and "System Wars."
Not as dramatic sounding as The Peloponnesian Wars, but kind of catchy.
Consoles in those days were usually called "game systems" or "video game systems," and the use of "consoles" as a generic term dates to the late 80's and early 90's.
Having been Design Director for Intellivision, I've been answering press questions about the market for game consoles since the early days of the industry. Throughout that time I referred to the competition as a "video game war" or "console war" and talked about the pressure all developers felt to take sides.
After discussing the issue so many times, in the 1990's I started doing presentations simply called "Console Wars" at major venues, including GDC. I still get asked to do sessions on the topic today.
The Console Wars brought many new opportunities to our team, since we often had very early hardware prototypes and began working on games well before machines were released to the public. We guessed right every time on which systems to support from 1988 to 2008, and not one of our 42 titles over 20 years shipped on an unsuccessful console.
Was I the one who coined the term "Console Wars" or just one of the people who popularized it? We may never know, but I'm flattered to have the press suggest it may be true.
"The Video Game Crash of 1983" (or 1984)
This is a phrase I almost certainly coined, although absent an academic publication we'll never know for sure.
My parents, like those of many in my generation, were products of the Great Depression of the 1930's. As I was growing up they told me stories of what it had been like, how so many people lost their jobs.
When the console business was swept away in 1983-84 and virtually all of the thousands of jobs at Atari, Intellivision and Coleco were lost, it felt just like the stories my parents had told me. Within just a few months apparently-healthy businesses with thousands of employees withered and died.
Our team at Intellivision went through a major layoff every two or three months in 1983, until there was almost nothing left. Atari and Coleco and Activision were all doing the same thing.
In GDC presentations and visits to universities I knew of no other way to communicate the utter destruction of the era than to equate "The Great Crash of 1929" to "The Video Game Crash of 1983." Years later I started to see the phrase turn up on the Net.
Today our industry has safeguards built in against some of the factors that produced that Crash. Those of us who worked in the industry and still had game development jobs in those dark years of the mid-80's still carry the emotion as well as the memory of that time.
So there you have it: one industry phrase I used but definitely did not popularize ("Next Gen") and two that may have started with me, ("Console Wars" and "The Video Game Crash of 1983").
Copyright (c) 2010, Don Daglow. All Rights Reserved.
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