Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.

Koss introduced these headphones over 40 years ago, and they remain affordable favorites to this day.

¡Ay, caramba! El "Great Video Game Crash" En Español

You can point your joystick a whole lot of directions to try to target the exact cause of the Great Video Game Crash of the early 80s. Home computers were on the horizon, reaching a level of sophistication that 70s era game console hardware couldn't touch. There were a couple of high profile failures at Atari in the form of that poor anemic Pac-Man, and the much maligned E.T.. Then there was the avalanche of atari 2600 shovelware littering shelves.

The Atari 2600 didn't have any sort of built-in security, so anyone could figure out the workings of the system and develop a game for it. [Nintendo was able to reboot video gaming a few years later by building a lock-out chip into their NES system so only licensed games bearing the "seal of quality" would run.] The tremendous profits that Atari was raking in attracted developers who were less invested in creating cool games, than they were in cashing in on the fad.

Atari_Japaneses_logoGenuine games from Atari cost $30-40 back then, but this new breed of budget releases were hitting shelves at $10-20 driving the overall market down. Many of these poor games made the Atari 2600 look even longer in the 8 bit tooth, weakening confidence in the market.

Here's a TV commercial from the mid 80s that bundles together several third party games (with doubtful claims of the games' value) into a mega-bundle deal for $19.95. The Game Crash may have been over, but there was still a lot of crap game inventory to blow out. It's a long ad too - 90 seconds to offer UHF audiences everywhere (at least in Chicago) about this Five Pack of not-so-great games. Even at this price, it wasn't that great of a deal. My local Zayre was already selling these titles at 88 cents a piece at that time.

No cash grab is complete without reaching the largest audience possible, so here's another version of the ad (that's even 30 seconds LONGER!) en Español as it was broadcast in Chicago on Sunday June 9th, 1985.

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