Find out how one of the biggest collapses in the history of video games led to the huge, unique computer game market in Great Britain and longstanding success.

When you apply for a degree to get involved in the vibrant British video game scene, many people come away challenging their previous assumptions about not only how computer games are designed but also about the conventional wisdom surrounding the history of the medium.

The biggest example of this is the effects of what is often claimed to be the biggest and most disastrous moment in the early history of gaming, the Video Game Crash of 1983.

In the United States, this was a catastrophic shrinking of the video game market from a market worth over $3.2bn (which adjusted for inflation is the value of the UK game industry alone these days) down to just $100m.

It was, to contemporary observers in North America, a symbol that video games were just toys; they were a fascinating but ultimately short-lived trend that children were moving on from, and it took the Trojan Horse tactics of Nintendo and their Robotic Operating Buddy to revive the industry and turn it into a global concern.

It is treated like a worldwide event, although this is far from the case. In Japan, it is known as the Atari Shock and is one of the biggest reasons why the country is one of the biggest and most important developers of computer games in the world.

In the UK, however, there was no crash, and the era when video games faced an existential crisis in the USA was when computer games sold on home computers were becoming even more popular in the UK.

The cheapness of home computers such as the ZX Spectrum, the Computer Literacy Project run by the BBC and the punk DIY ethos espoused by tens of thousands of teenagers and young adults making their own games and selling them successfully led to an era of truly unique games.

It would not be until the 1990s and the rise of 16-bit computers such as the Commodore Amiga and the success of consoles such as the Sega Mega Drive that the market would more closely resemble the rest of the world, but this unique history still shapes the British gaming scene today.