The tone is angry ("Poorly Analyzed US-Centric Garbage") but the point is a salient one: the European world of 8-bit and 16-bit computer gaming is improbably excluded from retrospectives. Put simply, American journalists think nothing was going in in Europe because so few game consoles and IBM-compatible PCs were sold there in the 1980s. But Europe had different machines—including American-made ones that American companies couldn't figure out how to sell in America.
Industry veteran Julian "Jaz" Rignall—a British games journalist who worked on magazines such as Zzap!64 and CVG in the '80s before launching Mean Machines, the UK's first console-centric monthly—has been perhaps the most vocal. Rignall has really seen and done it all; he recently moved back to Europe after spending a couple of decades in the US and has worked both in games media and inside the industry itself, having taken a role at Virgin Interactive back in the mid-'90s. His most recent role was at VGM, a market research firm which is the largest provider of custom research to the video game industry, and has a client list that includes Square Enix, Sony, Sega, Nexon, Bandai Namco, 2K, Zynga, EA, Activision Blizzard and Tencent.
"Euro console market was tiny cos they were expensive," Rignall says in response to Grubb's post. "Which is why people bought computers. The Euro market boomed off that while the US collapsed 'cos of oversupply. People think the crash happened in both places. It didn't. US gaming boomed & stalled; Europe started later, boomed and kept going. Basically, consoles had low impact in Europe the early 80s. It was all computers until the early-to-mid 90s, when the gaming market began to align into a more worldwide business driven by consoles and the PC."
This history is my history: I grew up with the Amstrad CPC and the Commodore Amiga A500. Along with various others, these "low-end" personal computers were so successful in the UK/European context they limited the appeal of dedicated game consoles—which were less affordable there to begin with. The results were local products, local businesses and local culture, some of which is very bizarre. But now the relevant European torch-bearers are aging out of focus, social media monocultures are losing their long tails, and even US-centric retrogaming nostalgia is heavily depleted and reprocessed.
Perhaps an underlying problem is that the stastistics being kept in Europe are hard to collate and this results in underestimation of how many systems and how many games were sold. Lots of different machines, lots of countries/markets, lots of local tax and administrative strategies, and generally poorer record-keeping, at least in public/marketing contexts. And on top of that, there was prevalent, pervasive piracy on every system. If you want to understand the world of the beans-on-toast British gamer, you need stats from Memorex or Maxell as much as those from Microsoft or Microprose.
The 5(?) million ZX Spectrums sold in the U.K., for example, are at least comparable on a per capita basis to the 30 million Nintendo Entertainment Systems sold in the U.S. Neither are the be all and end all of gaming in each region, but you wouldn't call the NES a hobby scene and neither was the top-selling system in the U.K. It was just cheapskate and disconnected from more persistent global trends (e.g. Nintendo's character franchises) that provided continuity with future systems and game cultures.
Previously:
• A cheap and easy retrogaming console
• Antec Core Micro is a tiny pocket retrogame handheld
• Mac Mini G4 great for Mac retrogaming
• Atari's 2600+ gets retro gaming right
