I put just as much weight on the other factor the page you lists gives. The raging storm of crap games hitting the market.

Not only the insane crud being put out by the non-console companies but the unplayable junk being put out by the console companies themselves.

Atari was really done in by it's managers, the company that owned Atari brought in the this old school clothing executive to run Atari and he tried to treat the enginers and game designers the same way he treated the ones at his old company. The good ones jumped ship and the quality of Atari games fell through the floor.

There is also a third factor that probably had an impact. Essentially the bubble had burst on all video games. Video games had been hot for a while, now they where not. Nothing directly to do with quality and everything to do with time. People had moved on to the next latest craze.

As for another console crash, I don't see one like 1984 happening again for a long time, if ever. Console games have become part of life for a lot of kids, I don't see them giving it up entirly. But it's a very faddish market and we will probably see individual companies come and go steadily.

The market could easily mutate beyond recognition though. There are any number of things that might break the strangle hold the console companies have over developing games for their consoles. Anything that broke this hold would fundamentally change the way the industry worked. Console companies would have to move to a system that pulled most of their money off the sale not off of liscensing and consoles would get far more games, but would also get far more bad ones.

Jay