The Atari 2600 which arrive in the late 70s actually but had its glory years in the early to mid-1980s and it wasn’t cheap, the console itself came in at a staggering US$199 (equivalent to roughly $820 these days) so we can see it wasn’t a casual purchase.
Atari didn’t last as the main player for a long time as the more powerful competition from Nintendo and Sega in the mid-1980s.So it was 1985 that saw the launch of the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) in the USA, although it had appeared in Japan two years earlier and was much better than their first attempt at home gaming, the Famicom.
Although the Master System was their first big success there had been three previous attempts in the SG-1000, SG-100 II and the SC-3000H.
But they did not come cheap, your average new release cost of a game in the 1980s was around $50, this equates to around $120 in today’s money.
Computer gaming was also very popular and you had machines such as the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, and Commodore Amiga where games coming on cassette tapes or floppy discs were a fraction of the cost of the cartridge games on offer from the likes of Sega and Nintendo.
One issue with these systems thought was that piracy (illegal copying and selling of games at a discount) was rife as it was much easier to duplicate these games on the cheap.As we moved into the 1990s the gaming world was still vastly dominated by Nintendo and Sega and at the time it was difficult to see much changing at all about this.