And I guess that's the thing – the North American Atari Crash could happen for the same reason the market there was so huge; the economic powerhouse that was the US suburban middle class 1950-2001. Kim made a good point that a big part of the problem was that "everybody" (i.e. US middle income households) had an Atari VCS but Atari didn't have a Next Big Thing to sell them and drive games on from the "we already have dozens like that at home".

In Europe middle-income households just weren't as rich, certainly in the UK with its economic situation of the early '80s. I'm sure like me you remember boggling at US-made films and TV showing "typical" families with entire closets full of toys, TVs in every bedroom, two cars on the drive and a pool in the back yard. While there were definitely saturation and oversupply issues (the '84 slump which did so much damage to Acorn) there was always the fallback of people who wanted a home computer, hadn't been able to afford one, but could if the price dropped to £129, or £99, or came with a monitor so they didn't also have to buy the kids a TV, thank you S'ralun.

This gave much smaller peaks but also shallower troughs, and drove so much of our market – those "pocket money" games from Mastertronic and Codies and the like. I think that also helped even out the ebbs and flows of consumer demand even before you hit the "for every game you bought, you pirated ten" side; you bought a budget game, you knew it would be crap and you'd get bored of it, but by the time you were bored of it and your mates didn't have anything good to copy you could buy the next budget game and start the cycle afresh.

I lost track of a point somewhere round here and I think it's this: I wonder how much that strong attachment to the idea of "the global video games crash" is tied up in a sense of longing for the silver age of the American middle class (and by extension, its 1950-1963 golden age) – that the veneration and overprotective attitude is not so much about the crash, but the idea that ordinary households held that economic power, that within a mere couple of years families were going out and buying the expensive NES packs with the robot and the zapper and in going, "sure, but that was only you" we're also on some subconscious level saying, "look, we existed perfectly fine over here without this notional great lost age of suburbia, stop tying your country in knots trying to recapture it". Maybe that's a reach but then, hey, I'm looking at that from the perspective of someone living in a country that's spent over 100 years trying (and failing) to come to terms with no longer being the sole global superpower.