Games History 1980-90's.

While I touched on arcade gaming in my last post it is normally said that the Golden age of arcade games was 1978-1986. With the release of ‘Space Invaders’ in 1978, it’s success encouraged other manufacturers to join the market. In 1979 ‘Galaxian’ was released along with Atari’s ‘Asteroids.’ Between the three games they sold over 400000 arcade cabinets worldwide! 

During the golden age you would find arcade machines in all sorts of mainstream locations like shopping centres, restaurants, convinces stores and in a traditional arcade centre.

Colour arcade games also started to emerge. With the release of ‘Pac-Man’ in 1980 the popularity of colour games increased. The arcade gaming industry reached it’s peak in value in 1982 when its quarterly income was $8 billion which is equivalent to $18.5 billion dollars today. This was just arcade gaming alone, combined with the home video game industry in the same year the was $11.8 billion for the video game industry (equating to about $27.3 billion in today’s money.)

During the late 70’s and early 80’s there was also a revolution going on in the home. With the appearance of home computers in the late 70’s it allowed their owners to be able to program their own simple games. The majority of these programmers were creating clones of popular arcade games and hobbyist groups were forming which was followed by PC game software. The spread of this hobby was through source code in books, magazines and newsletters. This worked by giving somebody a code which they would type on the computer to make a game work.

My Dad used to be a big fan of doing this himself. I remember when I was a lot younger when I got my first Gameboy one Christmas and my Dad telling me how he used to play PC games, and it had seemed so alien and so much effort. He told me how him and his friends would meet up to sit and type code out to play a very basic game, they would trade source codes and would save them to floppy disks, cassette tapes, and ROM cartridges to distribute between his friends.
 

The next milestone was in 1985 when Nintendo release the Nintendo Entertainment System. The first sight of classic consoles games such as Super Mario Bro’s, Metroid and the Legend of Zelda came with this console. The NES swiftly breaks all games sales records and tops the best-selling console in video game history. By now arcade games had well and truly lost their popularity. The home console was the next craze. Nintendo shortly release their next big thing, the Game boy. With titles such as Tetris and Super Mario Land making it an instant hit! The same year the Atari Lynx and Sega’s Game Gear being released also, the arcade golden age was well and truly over.

After the 1983 video game crash in 1984 the computer gaming market advanced to over take the video game market. Computers had the same game playing capability and were just as easy to use. With the release of Windows 1.0 in 1982 as well as the Apple Macintosh arriving in 1984 making personal computing more readily available to the consumer, meaning more people had PC’s and were open to PC gaming.

The 1990’s brought lots of change to the games world, with the introduction of 3D graphics being the biggest change. Also we were introduced to new genres such as first-person shooters, real-time strategy and a long with the introduction of the World Wide Web came the Massively Multiplayer Online games. Home consoles where now the most common form of gaming with releases of consoles like the Sega Mega Drive, Super NES, Atari Jaguar and later after 1993 The Sega Saturn, Playstation and the Nintendo 64. The Playstation and Nintendo 64 are most noted for the rise of fully 3D games, many games considered to be miles stones were on these consoles, for example ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’ on the N64 is considered to be one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time. Other notable titles being Final fantasy VII (Playstation), GoldenEye 007, Lara Croft, Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and Resident Evil.

The transition from Cartridges to CD’s was also starting as CD’s offered more storage capacity than what was previously possible.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_and_video_games#Genre_innovation
http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/windows/history
http://www.pong-story.com/