I wasn’t around during the nineteen eighties, but from what I can see and read, this was the best decade to live in for video games. You only have to look at old TV adverts on the internet, or even watching old TV shows or films from the nineteen eighties (typically teen ones) to know it was truly the golden area.
Film ‘The Wizard’ (1989) about three children who travel to compete in a video game tournament.
Games such as Pac-Man, Mario, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Defender, Frogger, Joust and Moon Patrol were popping up all at the same time, Japan and Nintendo were also on the rise. One of the great things about this age is it did not only provide the world with all these amazing addictive games to play but inspired people to make games, simply because the technology was advancing and we had all these different job roles in the industry now ranging from programmer, to pixel artists to music roles to with companies flying high and practically competing against each other for who can make the next big game.
From what I’ve learned the world entered an new age of gaming, the graphics got better, the game play improved and people constantly asked the question “what’s behind the next door?!” ‘Cause no one could wait. One of the biggest developments of this time was the fact that the games were not just ‘coin hog’ machines, because they were being developed to play at home on your TV set, something making it more entertaining, a way of sharing with friends and family and not spending every coin you have at the arcade. It definitely shows the rate, at which the technology is getting better, but I think it also shows how at the times companies were making so much money that they could afford to make home consoles and market them as well; of course it’ll bring them even more money and ways to improve... right?
In the U.S.A, nineteen eighty four they was many vide game companies at the time, the second generation was over and they was ready to release the third generation with the Odyssey3 and Atari 7800 however the companies that had started up to make the new games for these consoles were rushed and not cared about too much, I think they were just thinking all about the money and that they may have thought ‘whatever we throw on the market now, everyone will buy’ so they wanted to make the games for Christmas releases etc, but because everyone was expecting better behind the next door, no-body wanted to buy them when they found out how poor they was, the next Pac-Man game would only sell just over half of the cartridges they had manufactured. Lots of companies went bust because of this and Atari workers left to set up their own company ‘Activision’.
Later on the Nintendo would go on to release its ‘Entertainment System’ in nineteen eighty five, a major hit in the U.S.A and puts the boom back into video games with many of its historical titles still remembered today. Lots of games around this time were based on board games such as dungeons and dragons around this time and this was the time for elf’s, wizards and magic which started up a whole range of games even still to the present day. A lot of different game genres were presented in this age such as: Adventure, fighting, maze, racing, sport, side scrolling, platform and adventure platform something not seen before, making a whole new revolution of companies wanting to make these types of games.
Castlevania (NES) 1986.
From all of this what I think is significant is how the games have gone from being as simple as Pong, to now being a bit more complicated but definitely more challenging and entertaining, they way they have done this is through the use of the technology they have because this time they don’t have to make a game for a machine they could now create a separate piece of software for the console instead of making machine after machine in arcades were everyone wants to play, now people could just buy their consoles and play at home, it’s as if it was an age of solving problems, but they have only solved so many of them and there is bigger and better problems out there to solve, but no one could wait to see what was in store next. Gaming was on the rise and the expectation of greater things to come, and because people’s expectations were so high when they made E.T (based on the film) for the next generation of consoles, nobody wanted it because it was simply shit and didn’t for fill the tick list everyone had in their minds because they hurried it.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600) 1982, One of the first known bad video games.
I think the crash of 1983 was a big lesson to learn in the industry, it told companies to think about the quality that makes a good video game rather than the quantity of what they produce, because what I think is different from the start of this golden decade to the end is the quality, just looking at the graphical elements they’ve produced is one notable thing, the things that the games can do and calculate now shows how the programming is advancing, the music they’ve added and the different styles of art they was producing. They were working things out, solving problems and producing things we never thought would have before, like in nineteen eighty-nine Nintendo released its ‘Power Glove’, a glove to put on the users hand and play a game with!
Nintendo's Power Glove 1989.
But above all they were very different and showed that the entertainment a game provides is from how good it works and plays.
1990's
1990's
In the Nineteen nineties we started to evolve into a whole new way of playing video games, it was the PlayStation that changed a lot of things. We now could play 3D games, everything went to 64 bit, and even Nintendo named their new console the Nintendo 64. There was many 3D games before the PlayStation was created but the systems they were programmed for couldn’t handle the textures and models you could create for the PlayStation. Sony had made such a huge hit with the PlayStation and some might consider it to be the next biggest step up from other 3D games such as 3D Monster Maze, Wolfenstein 3D, Battle Zone, Hovertank 3D and Doom.
I sort of think of it as a time when the graphics on the likes of the Nintendo Entertainment System couldn’t really get any better within the limitations of the consoles that were out then. So along came a new one... the PlayStation more or less bringing the best graphical interface ever seen to date (for a 3D at least) but even games in 2D had a much cleaner, crisper, clear quality to them. Years later we saw a whole library of games upon us, so many that no one could possibly own them all (right?). Nintendo released the N64 (Nintendo 64) in 1996 and like the PlayStation everything was made out of polygons and textured. As similar as it sounds, it does also show how we’ve gone from 8bit to 16bit to 32 and then 64, they say computer power doubles every 18 months and yes that’s clear that it was doubling, but what was next? (128bit?) It also shows how better the consoles were rapidly becoming as the PlayStation was capable of playing CD’s as well as games, again another and probably the first step on the road to consoles being able to handle many types of media.
From left to right, Hovertank 3D, 3D Monster Maze and Doom.
Nintendo 64 1996 PlayStation 1994
Only 4 years later Sony would then release the PlayStation 2, this console could not only play games with even better graphics than the PS1 and play music CD’s but also could play DVD’s. At around this time the DVD was very new thing and it could store films on them and display them in a much higher quality than that of the VHS video cassette player thus eventually making the VHS now obsolete. However like the VHS at the time of it, it was extremely expensive and the DVD/Player also found the problem of that nobody wanted to buy it simply because it again was to expensive. I think personally Sony wanted to be the first to do something creative and new to add into their new PS2 console so people would want to buy it more, as if it was a marketing scheme and to also show off what it could do and what other consoles could not. They then found more marketing through making add-ons such as the DVD remote control for the PS2, so if you wanted to watch DVD’s then you had to buy the remote (but really what’s wrong with just using the controller instead?!). I think Sony are based on making as much profit as possible, however they aren’t afraid to invest and try to make things that didn’t exist before and with all the work and time it paid off, they did plan to make the original PlayStation in around 1986 and it almost took 10 years!
1998 PlayStation2 (PS2)
Along with all this new technology in video gaming I think the Nineties was all about building on what they all created and played in the 80’s, the computing power by the start of the nineties (according to Moore’s Law) would of been 6-7 times as better than it was at the start of the 80’s so could only go in one direction (turning 2D into 3D) and things getting more realistic cause that was the main difference by the end of this decade. I also think another difference was how far the programming within technology has come, for example PC games would have a whole bunch of options available to you to control teams and armies within them and N64 and PlayStation you was able to press a whole combination of buttons to make something happen such as a combo move in a fighting game or enter passwords and cheats that when entered correctly the game would know what you have just done. As well as this we was now able to program many more options in games, weather it was compatibility of the software and hardware, the game engines that were more advanced, making better game play, producing animations and even audio in games to. At the start of this decade we had a powerful PS1, by the end of the decade we had a PS2 that was something like a 1000 times more powerful than PS1.
No comments:
Post a Comment