My story, below, was prompted by reading that an Atari video game cartridges from a 1980's landfill sold for $37,000. The past rushed back at me as I re-lived an earlier very dramatic time of my life. Brace yourself.
If your first video game console was a Nintendo, this story might as well be about dinosaurs or the Roman Empire or The Middle Ages. If you are older than that you might find some memories and may notice that little has changed since those times except the absolute speed of change (the relative speed of change has not and more of that later). In hindsight, the risks of high-tech startups do not seem to have changed much and the planning to deal with it requires the same considerations today as it did then. The roman-candle story of RomLabs Inc. may give us a glimpse into it.
The business environment
It's 1983, the first "video games bubble" has been running since 1980-81 and it was a classic "bubble" unbeknownst to all industry participants. The key players of the second generation of video games devices included video game console (VGC) makers Atari, Intellivision, Coleco (also Commodore, Radioshack, Texas Instruments) and third party developers (game software only) Imagic, Activision and Electronic Arts and a host of other minor participants.
