Week 3 task: Video Games 1980's-90's

the 1980's was the decade of the computer games industry. Companies began to produce video games just for the commercial market. The early games produced by these companies were replicas of the existing games except technology now enabled them to be created much cheaper and smaller for a mass market.
The 3 main computers developed in the early 80's were:
Commodore 64
Apple II
Atari 800

The 80s was also known at 2the golden age of games". Many games in the 80s contained elements of what is used today. The game Defender, a scrolling shooter game(a shoot 'em up with a scrolling background) was the first game to contain a viewport outside of the players view, this was simply a radar displaying the enemies but it is still used widely today on the same to much bigger scales.
The game "Dungeons of Daggorath was the first to use a "heartbeat" health monitor which is widely adopted in most modern games.
Pole position a racing game from 1982 incorporated a rear view mirror (using pseudo 3D graphics) where the player could view what or who was behind them in a race.

The first "cult" game of the 80's was pacman however which acclaimed world wide popularity and was the game industries first "celebrity"

The 3rd Generation console’s
the first of the 3rd Generation consoles was the early Famicon also known as The Nintendo Entertainment system (NES) which dominated North America with Super Mario bros in the Mid 80s. This undone by the sudden rise in the 3rd generation consoles. The Sega Master system was one of these. The master system dominated the UK market.
The 3rd Generation consoles adopted the gamepad as opposed to the joystick and paddles, and it was on these consoles that many of the modern games consoles’ develop their ideas.
1987 bore the first Final Fantasy, an RPG which has now has over 10 sequels and won numerous awards and become the most successful RPG franchise. 1986 the first Zelda game was released and 1987 saw the first metal gear solid hit the shelves, all introducing a new genre into the gaming community.

The 1990's
If you were to consider the 1980's the decade of the rise and development of the computer game the 90s was surely the 'Hollywood' era where games were given huge budgets and increasing amounts of staff who worked on them. Larger companies were soon to take over the market being able to produce games of better quality and cheaper.
3D was the new format hitting the 90's, and Demo's. Shareware became a very popular way of selling games by giving the user a demo before they buy the game. Doom was one of these to adopt it and soon became one of the great games of the early 90's.
1992 saw the release of Dune II an RTS, not the first in its genre but help set the game mechanics for future blockbusters such as Warcraft and Command and Conquer. Alone in the dark (1992) set the standards for the now very popular survival horror genre.
The 1990's saw maxis develop the first Sims games such as sim city and sim earth.

The fourth generation consoles
These included the megdrive and the Snes and dominated the commercial market introducing games such as Sonic the hedgehog and super Mario to a new level and becoming increasingly popular.


Fifth generation consoles
These sprang up in the late 1990's and included the Sony Playstation, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn.
This also introduced the first commercial CD-Rom based console (possible excluding the Sega CD extension for the megadrive, which indecently was appalling I’m not sure) both the Saturn and playstation adopting this format. The Nintendo 64 stuck with cartridges however which could be considered a bad move because it caused the final fantasy series to move to playstaion. All the 5th Generation consoles wanted to show off their 3D capabilities, the 64 used Mario 64 as its flagship title and became a milestone for 3d gamers.