Season 2 of Geekstorians continues with a story about collapse.
In ‘When Giants Fall’, Dave looks at three companies that once seemed unstoppable — Atari, Sega, and Blockbuster — and how each of them, in very different ways, lost their grip on the future.
From Atari’s collapse after the video game crash of the early 1980s, to Sega’s spectacular inability to get out of its own way during the console wars, to Blockbuster staring straight at the future and somehow deciding it probably wasn’t important, this is an episode about what happens when success turns into inertia.
It is also a story about what comes after.
Because these collapses did not just leave wreckage behind. They reshaped the industries around them. Atari’s fall cleared the way for Nintendo. Sega lost the hardware war but survived as a games company. And Blockbuster became the monument everyone points to when talking about businesses that had every chance to adapt and somehow talked themselves out of it.
If last week’s episode was about a film nearly vanishing, this one is about something bigger: the moment giants stop noticing the ground moving underneath them.
Geekstorians is a documentary-style podcast from Dave Elliott of Geektown, exploring the hidden history of geek culture, fandom, film, television, comics and gaming.
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