1983 in video gaming

1983 was the year when the American home gaming market began to crash (see North American video game crash of 1983), with more game systems and games than the market could support, and quality control from the console companies being absent. In Japan, the Nintendo Famicom would make its debut.

Business

 * The US arcade game market's revenues drop to $6.4 billion in 1983 (equivalent to $ in 2024).

Games

 * Arcade
 * March: Bally Midway releases Journey, the first game with digitized sprites.
 * May: SEGA releases Astron Belt, the first laserdisc video game, which uses pre-rendered, computer-animated film footage as backdrops, overlaid with sprite graphics.
 * May: Atari brings Star Wars to the arcades in the form of a 3D vector graphics simulation of the movie's attack on the Death Star sequence and featuring digitized samples of voices from the movie.
 * June: Data East releases Bega's Battle, one of the first video games to use cel-animated video instead of computer generated graphics. It was also the first game to use full motion video cut scenes.
 * June: Cinematronics releases Dragon's Lair, one of the first video games to use cel-animated video instead of computer generated graphics.
 * December: Libble Rabble is released by Namco. It runs on the Namco Libble Rabble hardware, Namco's second arcade system board to use a 16-bit processor.


 * Computer
 * Nihon Falcom released Panorama Toh (Panorama Island), an early action role-playing game for the PC-88. It was developed by Yoshio Kiya, who would go on to create the Dragon Slayer and Brandish series of action RPGs.
 * Mike J. Henry released Benji's Space Rescue, an action science-fiction game for the Commodore 64.
 * ASCII released the Sharp X1 computer game Bokosuka Wars, an early tactical RPG.

Console Hardware

 * Nintendo
 * Family Computer (released outside Japan as the Nintendo Entertainment System)

Key Events

 * Nintendo
 * Koopa Troopas made their first appearance in the Mario series.