A Brief History of Video Games, Part II.

In my previous post, I focused on the emergence of games on the computer. I outlined the major innovators and the establishment of the first ‘genres’ in the 60’s and 70’s. The 80’s and 90’s can be seen as a period of evolution for those genres as well as an evolution in games development and production.

Competition between major companies is now the driving force of innovation. While there is massive potential in the fledgling industry, it is also extremely economically unstable and for every great success there is monumental failure. This ‘boom-bust’ cycle is a defining characteristic of the games industry.

As you can see if you watch some early console advertisements, this was a time of confusion as company’s try to establish a direction for this new cultural medium. Video games are still firmly grounded in the realm of ‘toy’. In 1977, due largely to an overproduction of hardware; the American games market faces its first major crisis and the centre of innovation shifts to Japan.

In 1978, Taito released Space Invaders. The arcade game took both the Japanese and western markets by storm. Already a huge success, the release of the game for the Atari 2600 in 1980 quadrupled the struggling consoles sales and Space Invaders became the first ‘killer app’.

Space Invaders box art.

Space Invaders is ingrained into popular gaming culture to this day. For my dad, Space Invaders is a fond moment of gaming history. Playing the game on a handheld device for the first time was a truly memorable and exciting experience. Its success can be attributed to 2 major innovations. It was the first game to include a form of narrative, inspired by popular science fiction at the time. Additionally, it had no ‘upper limit’. The game continuously got progressively harder, enticing players with the appeal of beating your friend’s high scores.

The maze / obstacle genre was also very successful in the early 80’s. Frogger by Konami and Donkey Kong by Nintendo both released in 1981 and were both hugely influential games. By far the most popular however was Pacman, released in 1980 by Namco. Largely due to its colourful, light hearted aesthetic, Pacman caused gaming’s first true pop-culture explosion. Appearing on merchandise, newspapers and television; Pacman opened up gaming to a wider audience than ever before.

From a design stand point, new ground was being broken in terms of screen usage. Most notably Defender by Williams Electronics and the implementation of horizontal scrolling to move the world when the player reaches the edge of the screen. While all these iconic games of the early 80’s are beautiful examples of innovations in screen usage, Defender is my favourite; the revolutionary scrolling technique synonymous with panning in film.

Defender.

In 1983, the industry faced its second major recession. Much worse than the first, the crash caused a vast number of companies to go bust. In the first half of the decade, turnover fell by over 95%; conversely due to an overproduction of software. The consequences for the industry were vast and resulted in some major economic disasters. The worst of these disasters was the video game E.T. The Extra Terrestrial by Atari. While the game was initially fairly successful, the overproduction was so extensive it netted Atari a loss of $100million. Many retailers returned huge quantities of the cartridges and millions of copies were buried by Atari in a New Mexico landfill.

By 1986, the situation stabilised and Nintendo came out on top. The Famicom, released in 83, met with great success in Japan; largely due to the killer app, Mario Bros. Developed by Shigeru Miyamoto, the developer behind Donkey Kong, Mario became another star of the video game world. In 1985 the Famicom was released in North America as the NES. A year later, Miyamoto developed The Legend of Zelda; a true breakthrough game for the adventure genre on the console.

Nintendo’s success continued to grow exponentially. In 1989 the company broke new ground in the handheld market with the Game Boy. Surprisingly, the killer app for the device did not come directly from Nintendo. Tetris, developed by Alexei Pajitnov (who never received a penny) defined the puzzle genre and Game Boy was the perfect platform. The game had true mass appeal but its success is theorised to be largely due to the satisfaction the player feels creating order out of chaos.

Tetris. In case you're one of the 2 people on the planet who don't know what it looks like.

Thankfully, the reign of Nintendo didn’t last forever. In 1989, Sega released the Mega Drive and kick-started the ‘bit war’. Thanks to the hugely popular Sonic the Hedgehog; the Mega Drive finally outsold the NES in 1991, prompting Nintendo to release the Super NES.

The ensuing bit war is fairly uninteresting however it definitively ended in 1994 with the arrival of Sony’s PlayStation. The 32-bit console crushed Sega’s 32-bit Saturn and Nintendo’s 64-bit; ever creatively named, N64. The PlayStations success was largely due to its use of optical media. While distributing games on a disc made it more vulnerable to piracy, the production cost reduction from cartridges was significant; making the console a much more profitable platform.

While PlayStation was very successful, the PC was the definitive platform for iconic games during this era. Gaming on the PC increased dramatically in popularity due to increasing technical capability and networks with the ability to play multiplayer. Two major innovations in visuals made this platform particularly exciting.

Zaxxon.

The avant-garde arcade game Zaxxon; released by Sega in 1982, was the first game to use isometric perspective to represent a world. This revolutionary technique inspired the ‘god game’ and the titans of the genre: SimCity (Will Wright, 1988), Populous (Peter Molyneux, 1989), and Civilization (Sid Meier, 1990). To give you an idea of the magnitude of these games, at the time of writing this we’re on the sixth SimCity and the fifth Civilization. And Molyneux? He actually branched out and produced many excellent games; most notably the Fable series.

The second major breakthrough was the refinement of the polygon display technique. In 1992, Wolfenstein 3D by id Software refined the method used by Battlezone in 1980 to construct a 3 dimensional game world. Like the vector display technique I highlighted in part I, the visuals of the game are transformations of a mathematical model. The objects that form the world on screen are constructed from polygons around 3 axis: X, Y and Z and positioned using corresponding co-ordinates. To this day, this is the principal method by which we create game worlds.

Wolfenstein 3D.

The success of Wolfenstein spawned 2 quintessential first person shooter series, Doom and Quake. 

This period saw the death of the arcade and the rise of the console; the evolution of key game mechanics and the foundation of the current display techniques. 

Most consequential to a prospective employee of the games industry is its volatile nature that persists even now. Looking at the early days of the industry illustrates the attributes required to be successful in this field: adaptability and originality. Creativity and resourcefulness. 

Grit; the ability to bounce back. 

References:

1.Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Golstein. (2005). The History of the Video Game. In: Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Golstein Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Massachusetts: The MIT Press. p27-44.
2.Alberto Alvisi. (2006). The economics of digital games. In: Rutter, J and Bryce, J. Understanding Digital Games. London: SAGE. p58-70.
3.Next Generation Staff (April 1998). "What the hell happened?". Next Generation (Imagine Media): 47.
Images for illustrative purposes only, all rights and credit remain with their respective owners.