Robert Garriott warned there were too many PC games 37 years ago

At the 1989 Computer Game Developers Conference, Robert Garriott, the business brain at Origin Systems, warned that there were simply too many computer games on the market. He also flagged another problem: some of the games sucked. "The consumer is being very confused," Garriott went on to say.

"The consumer doesn't really know what to buy for their computer, and they're being basically lost from the entertainment market." Garriott admitted he was uneasy about the industry's direction, saying he was "embarrassed to say that I don't believe software publishers really understand the relative weight of all these factors," while expressing confidence that sales would recover.

He could not have known then how gargantuan PC gaming would become, or that someday more games might launch on a single digital storefront in one day than the entire industry of 1989 saw in a month. He closed with practical advice aimed at differentiation and quality: "We have to develop products that cannot be duplicated on game machines.

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