By the end of 1983, the U.S. video game industry resembled the radioactive ruins at the end of a round of Missile Command: a multibillion-dollar marketplace reduced to just a hundred million over the space of a few months. The carnage all but ensured that no company would dare to produce a home video console for the foreseeable future.
No company in America, anyway. Ready, player two?
—Matt Alt, Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
"No one knew anything. Certainly, no one knew how to replace an existing console with a new one."
"The real one-liner about why the game industry crashed and went away is that, is that it was a first product life cycle, and no one knew what to do."
—Tod Frye and Howard Scott Warshaw, the programmers of the Atari 2600 Pac-Man and E.T. respectively, give their two cents about what caused the crash; from Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration
