10 Worst Mistakes Ever Made By Video Game Companies

The video game industry before 1985 was a free-for-all, oversaturated with tens of similar-and-yet-kind-of-different consoles, absurd numbers of rudimentary video games that felt like rehashes of one another, and motley crews of startup developers.

At the top of the pile was Atari, one of the world's most profitable companies at the time and makers of the most popular pre-NES consoles. Games were selling in absurd quantities, with the industry being worth around $12 billion, causing anticipated profits and sales projections to become vastly overblown.

With shoddy rival consoles entering the market, Atari aimed to solidify its dominance by releasing a console version of the arcade hit Pac-Man, and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial - to be released in time with the movie. Despite huge sales, neither game met the projected sales figures, leaving millions of copies unsold (with excess copies of E.T. being infamously buried in the Arizona desert). The games were also just bad, even by the standards of the day, which caused gamers to lose faith in the market.

Game prices plummeted, and Atari's (and other companies') share prices plummeted with them, causing the industry to go into a full-on recession. Countless game companies went under, while Atari went through a complete restructuring in which thousands of jobs were lost, with the company being effectively ousted out of the games console market.