At the time, I was ten and was more or less only noticing the appearance of bargain baskets and bins filled with legit and off-brand A2600 carts. Would scour through them and pick out one or two games to buy with the money I was just starting to earn from odd jobs after school doing yard work in neighborhoods for homeowners near to the low-income apartments I spent some time growing up in. Still mostly trading games with classmates at the time, though, and, really, I was more into arcade games and early computers (when I could get time on them) at that time. Didn't really know of a 'crash' until a computer game magazine I had read through at a local bookstore did a whole article on it and its ramifications for the wider electronic gaming scene. Wasn't until '84 and '85 that it was obvious that no new Atari (or any other) console games were due any time soon with the regularity of super-cheap pre-NES console games. By then, though, my interest in console gaming had evaporated and I was fully transitioned into Apple ][, Commodore-64, and Atari 8-bit computer games, swapping copies with those few fellow geeks at the semi-regular computer club meetings at school, using copied tools to hex-edit and copy software, and, in general, learning to program and use early graphics and sound creation programs. The crash was more or less something that came to be known in the years after through magazines, fanzines, and some more knowledgeable gaming geeks in the later 80s, IME.
