Interphase Up, Interphase Down

Interphase was a small Canadian videogame software company that produced a handful of cartridges and disks in the mid-1980's -- their best known titles were Sewer Sam and Blockade Runner, for the Colecovision and Intellivision systems.  They were still a fairly new publisher when the industry took its major nosedive, and their ads illustrate the big picture more concisely than I can.

Early 1984 full-color, full-page ad:

Early 1985 1/3 page, black-and-white ad:

 See?