The 1980s – 1990s! Where did it go after Spacewar and Pong? Let's go back a couple of years, as well all know most “computer games” were run on HUGE machines such as the PDP-1 which cost thousand of dollars to make, so it was used by many people rather than one person in one home. The idea of a computer that was suitable for one person to have on a desk only came in roughly around the mid-seventies! So after personal computers were made around the mid-seventies a more of a Role-Playing Game (RPG) was being invented. This ended up as “Adventure” (Crowther & Woods 1977). This is the first text based game made which was 15 years AFTER “Spacewar” was made.
Within text based games the user will manually enter their command such as “enter building” and “turn left” whereas now we can either move the analog stick/joystick, controller or mouse to whatever way you want to face. A typical text base adventure looks a bit like this:
You are standing at some cross roads. You can take the left road or the right road. The path ahead of you is blocked by some fallen wood which could be moved with the right tools
>take the left road
>Wake the bear
YOU ARE DEAD! GAME OVER
Ok, I may have taken a
slight twist on this text based game, but I found it amusing. I also
started to come up with my own story, but that's beside the point. As
you can see whenever the “>” appears this is the users
commands. Then the computer will keep playing the game depending on
what the user types. This type of game play is based on the books
written by J.R.R Tolkein with elves, orcs and the lot! EXCITING! A
typical game involves travelling through a system of caves to find
treasure! It involves a lot of puzzles such as to open gates, find
keys, look for items to make a new path and a lot more. In the 1980s the adventure genre was renamed to “interactive fiction”. Some guy started to jabber on about how this is wrong and to be honest I don't really care about the name. People can call it what they want, what i'm more interested in is the game itself, the graphics, the gameplay, the feel of the game! Pshhh about some guy saying its wrong!?
Anway! The company “Infocom” decided to take games and include the user. What I mean is that the player basically becomes part of the story. The games from Infocom suggest that the qualities of their games of these “interactive fiction” or adventure genres or RPG games are more of the novel than an action game.
Thus in the mid 1980s out popped the moer graphical early hybrid game “The Hobbit”. All interaction is text based and all game elecments are described through text but some specific locations are graphial! However the end of text based games came to end at the end of the 1980s... SAD FACE :(
So now that i've gone on about the games itself between the 1980-1990s i'm going to start talking about the consoles between this time!
But, in 1977 video games had a massive crash within the stock. The crash was caused by a huge flood of Pong consoles for both arcade and home use. It came to an end with the game Space Invaders released in 1978 which produced a pathway for consoles in the future. Space Invaders was licensed for Atari which then boomed and thus Atari recovered their losses from Pong. Atari was thriving up until the the North American Video Game Crash in 1983.
Slightly before 1980 between 1977-1983a new breed of console came about. Before this consoles were a one purpose system. They involved hardware which was only programmed for one thing and that thing only (bit silly really, but everything has to start from something). All the wiring and microchips using discrete logic which did not allow additional games to be added. So for developers and users alike this brought on a difficult situation where developers would have to build a brand new console for the new game and so users would have to buy this new console to play these new games. But by the mid 1970s consoles were being made so that they contained microchip processers for general purpose in which the games where programmed into cartridges which could be slotted into the console and could be read, this meant that you can have one overall console but lots of different cartridges which contained different games!
Nice little information here for you: Activision was formed in 1979 through disgruntled members of Atari who found that the games they had programmed on their $20K salary was responsible for 60% of the company's $100 million cartridge sale for one year! Good ol' Activision.
Ahhhh the Golden age (1978-1986). Within the Golden Age “Space Invaders” was made by Taito. The game inspired arcade machines to be placed within locations such as the shopping centres, resturants, convienance stores and more! Video gaming had started to become and mainstream hobby throughout the world! The total sales of arcade video game machines in North America increased significantly in such an amout that during this period it went from $50 million (1978) to $900 million (1981) which North Americas revenue reaching nearly $1 billion in quarters. In the end the surpassing annual gross revenue of pop music and hollywood films combined to make up the total amount that video games were making! That's a lot of money!
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| IT'S A PILLOW!!!! |
Within the 1970s-early 1980s PC Video games were being introduced. With the PC rapidly evolving home users were able to programme new games in which the could play within the comfort of their own home. Classic games such as Space Invaders was now being played on PC by printing the games source code which allowed them to type in the code for themselves. People even started to sell games through mailing, floppy disks, casette tapes, and ROM cartridges!
Another little bit of information here: Electronic Arts or known as EA arrived on scene in the 1980s.
In 1983 after the video game crash it was lifted by Nintendos release of it 8-bit console as Nintentdo Entertainment System (NES). It had Super Mario Bros. And instantly became a success. Within the new consoles the gamepad or joypad invaded and destroyed the joysticks, paddles, and keypads as the default game controller included with the new system.
Then with a bit of luck out came the “Legend of Zelda” series and in the same year “Dragon Quest”. However Japan started to struggled with new games and decided to finally make the “Final Fantasy” series which now is the most successful RPG ever! In 1987 appeared a stelthy “Metal Gear” Series!
SO within a nut shell and little bit of a crash in between, I'd say video games are still going! There's always something for everyone no matter what ages, sex, race. There is anything and everything. If your a true gamer you emerge yourself into the game. The classics need to be aprreaciated more! The classics are what my Dad grew up on and from there I grew on what are my classics and further past that all the way back to “Pong”. How can “Pong” not be boring to play?!
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