I've always felt like this as well. The "great video game crash of 1984" was very much an American phenomenon. It affected many of the consoles of the era in America, which were getting long in the tooth and were quite underpowered, especially (but not only) the Atari 2600. I get rather fed up of hearing people refer to it as a universal, industry destroying event.

The crash occurred because the market was flooded with cheaply made, poor quality, simplistic games, which were about all many of these consoles were capable of running. People became bored of them.

There's basically no comparison between these consoles and the NES. The NES was vastly superior and hence allowed the creation of much more involving games.

By contrast the early to mid 80s in the UK and Europe looked quite different: here it was the 8-bit computers that ruled the roost. These had more memory, and often better graphics and sound capabilities. Again, this allowed for the creation of more involving games. As a result many of the machines - and perhaps the C64 the most - had great libraries of games. And of course they were programmable and affordable, which made them vastly more interesting to homebrew hackers on a budget. (Apple and IBM machines were considerably more expensive.)