Gaming Systems- Setup, accessories and systems
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The history of video games began in the 1950s and 1960s as computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations on minicomputers and mainframes. Spacewar! was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student hobbyists in 1962 as one of the first such games on a video display. The first consumer video game hardware was released in the early 1970s. The first home video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, and the first arcade video games were computer space and pong. After its home console conversions, numerous companies sprang up to capture Pong's success in both the arcade and the home by cloning the game, causing a series of boom and bust cycles due to oversaturation and lack of innovation.
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By the mid-1970s, low-cost programmable microprocessors replaced the digital transistor-transistor logic circuitry of early hardware, and the first Rom cartridge-based home consoles arrived, including the Atari Video Console System(VCS). Coupled with rapid growth in the golden age of video systems, including Space Invaders and Pac-Man, the home console market also flourished. The 1983 video game crash in the United States was characterized by a flood of too many games, often of poor or cloned qualities, and the sector saw competition from inexpensive personal computers and new types of games being developed for them. The crash prompted Japan's video game industry to take leadership of the market, which had only suffered minor impacts from the crash. Nintendo released its Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States in 1985, helping to rebound the failing video games sector. The latter part of the 1980s and early 1990s included video games driven by improvements and standardization in personal computers and the console war competition between Nintendo and Sega as they fought for market share in the United States. The first major handheld video game consoles appeared in the 1990s, led by Nintendo's Game Boy platform.
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In the early 1990s, advancements in microprocessor technology gave rise to real-time 3D polygonal graphic rendering in game consoles, as well as in PCs by way of graphic cards. Optical media via CD-ROMs began to be incorporated into personal computers and consoles, including Sony's fledgling PlayStation console line, pushing Sega out of the console hardware market while diminishing Nintendo's role. By the late 1990s, the Internet also gained widespread consumer use, and video games began incorporating online elements. Microsoft entered the console hardware market in the early 2000s with its Xbox line, fearing that Sony's PlayStation positioned as a game console and entertainment device, would displace personal computers. While Sony and Microsoft continued to develop hardware for comparable top-end console features, Nintendo opted to focus on innovative gameplay. Nintendo developed the Wii with motion-sensing controls, which helped to draw in non-traditional players and helped to resecure Nintendo's position in the industry; Nintendo followed this same model in the release of the Nintendo Switch.
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From the 2000s and into the 2010s, the industry has seen a shift of demographics as mobile gaming on smartphones and tablets displaced handheld consoles, and casual gaming became an increasingly larger sector of the market, as well as a growth in the number of players from China and other areas not traditionally tied to the industry. To take advantage of these shifts, traditional revenue models were supplanted with ongoing revenue stream models such as free-to-play, freemium, and subscription-based games. As triple-A video game production became more costly and risk-averse, opportunities for more experimental and innovative independent gaming grew over the 2000s and 2010s, aided by the popularity of mobile and casual gaming and the ease of digital distribution. Hardware and software technology continues to drive improvement in video games, with support for high-definition video at high framerates and for virtual and augmented reality-based games.
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Early history (1948–1970)
As early as 1950, computer scientists were using electronic machines to construct relatively simple game systems, such as Bertie the Brain in 1950 to play tic tac toe, or Nimrod in 1951 for playing Nim. These systems used either electronic light displays and mainly as demonstration systems at large exhibitions to showcase the power of computers at the time. Another early demonstration was Tennis for Two, a game created by William Higinbotham at Brookhaven Nation Laboratory in 1958 for three-day exhibition, using an analog computer and an oscilloscope for a display.
Spacewar! is considered one of the first recognized video games that enjoyed wider distribution behind a single exhibition system. Developed in 1961 for the PDP-1 mainframe computer at MIT, it allowed two players to simulate a space combat fight on the PDP-1's relatively simplistic monitor. The game's source code was shared with other institutions with a PDP-1 across the country as the MIT students themselves moved about, allowing the game to gain popularity.
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1970s
Mainframe computer games
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In the 1960s, a number of computer games were created for mainframe and minicomputer systems, but these failed to achieve wide distribution due to the continuing scarcity of computer resources, a lack of sufficiently trained programmers interested in crafting entertainment products, and the difficulty in transferring programs between computers in different geographic areas. By the end of the 1970s, however, the situation had changed drastically. The BASIC and C high-level programming languages were widely adopted during the decade, which were more accessible than earlier more technical languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL, opening up computer game creation to a larger base of users. With the advent of time-sharing, which allowed the resources of a single mainframe to be parceled out among multiple users connected to the machine by terminals, computer access was no longer limited to a handful of individuals at an institution, creating more opportunities for students to create their own games. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of the PDP-10, released by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1966, and the portable UNIX operating system, developed at Bell Labs in 1971 and released generally in 1973, created common programming environments across the country that reduced the difficulty of sharing programs between institutions. Finally, the founding of the first magazines dedicated to computing like Creative Computing (1974), the publication of the earliest program compilation books like 101 Basic Computer Games (1973), and the spread of wide-area networks such as the ARPANET allowed programs to be shared more easily across great distances. As a result, many of the mainframe games created by college students in the 1970s influenced subsequent developments in the video game industry in ways that, Spacewar! aside, the games of the 1960s did not.
In the arcade and on home consoles, fast-paced action and real-time gameplay were the norm in genres like racing and target shooting. On the mainframe, however, such games were generally not possible due both to the lack of adequate displays (many computer terminals continued to rely on teletypes rather than monitors well into the 1970s and even most CRT terminals could only render character-based graphics) and insufficient processing power and memory to update game elements in real time. While 1970s mainframes were more powerful than arcade and console hardware of the period, the need to parcel out computing resources to dozens of simultaneous users via time-sharing significantly hampered their abilities. Thus, programmers of mainframe games focused on strategy and puzzle-solving mechanics over pure action. Notable games of the period include the tactical combat game Star Trek (1971) by Mike Mayfield, the hide-and-seek game Hunt the Wumpus (1972) by Gregory Yob, and the strategic war game Empire (1977) by Walter Bright. Perhaps the most significant game of the period was Colossal Cave Adventure (or simply Adventure), created in 1976 by Will Crowther by combining his passion for caving with concepts from the newly released tabletop role-playing game (RPG) Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Expanded by Don Woods in 1977 with an emphasis on the high fantasy of J.R.R Tolkien, Adventure established a new genre based around exploration and inventory-based puzzle solving that made the transition to personal computers in the late 1970s.
While most games were created on hardware of limited graphic ability, one computer able to host more impressive games was the PLATO systems developed at the University of Illinois. Intended as an educational computer, the system connected hundreds of users all over the United States via remote terminals that featured high-quality plasma displays and allowed users to interact with each other in real time. This allowed the system to host an impressive array of graphical and/or multiplayer games, including some of the earliest known computer RPGs, which were primarily derived, like Adventure, from D&D, but unlike that game placed a greater emphasis on combat and character progression than puzzle solving. Starting with top-down dungeon crawls like The Dungeon (1975) and The Game of Dungeons (1975), more commonly referred to today by their filenames, pedit5 and dnd, PLATO RPGs soon transitioned to a first-person perspective with games like Moria (1975), Oubliette (1977), and Avatar (1979), which often allowed multiple players to join forces to battle monsters and complete quests together. Like Adventure, these games ultimately inspired some of the earliest personal computer games.
The first arcade video games and home consoles
The modern video game industry grew out of the concurrent development of the first arcade video game and the first home video game console in the early 1970s in the United States.
The arcade video game industry grew out of the pre-existing arcade game industry, which was previously dominated by electric mechanical games(EM games). Following the arrival of Sega's EM game Periscope (1966), the arcade industry was experiencing a "technological renaissance" driven by "audio-visual" EM novelty games, establishing the arcades as a healthy environment for the introduction of commercial video games in the early 1970s. In the late 1960s, a college student Nolan Bushnell had a part-time job at an arcade where he became familiar with EM games, watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery while learning how it worked and developing his understanding of how the game business operates.
In 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, Ralph Baer came up with an idea for an entertainment device that could be hooked up to a television monitor. Presenting this to his superiors at Sanders and getting their approval, he, along with William Harrison and William Rusch, refined Baer's concept into the "Brown Box" prototype of a home video game console that could play a simple table tennis game. The three patented the technology, and Sanders, not in the commercialization business, sold licenses to the patents to Magnavox to commercialize. With Baer's help, Magnavox developed the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home console, in 1972.
Concurrently, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney had the idea of making a coin-operated system to run Spacewar! By 1971, the two had developed Computer Space with Nutting Associates, the first arcade video game. Bushnell and Dabney struck out on their own and formed Atari. Bushnell, inspired by the table tennis game on the Odyssey, hired Allan Acorn to develop an arcade version of the game, this time using discrete Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL) electronic circuitry. Atari's Pong was released in late 1972 and is considered the first successful arcade video game. It ignited the growth of the arcade game industry in the United States from both established coin-operated game manufacturers like Williams, Chicago Coin, and the Midway subsidiary of Bally Manufacturing, and new startups such as Ramtek and Allied Leisure. Many of these were Pong clones using ball-and-paddle controls, and led to saturation of the market in 1974, forcing arcade game makers to try to innovate new games in 1975. Many of the newer companies created in the wake of Pong failed to innovate on their own and shut down, and by the end of 1975, the arcade market had fallen by about 50% based on new game sale revenues. Further, Magnavox took Atari and several other of these arcade game makers to court over violations of Baer's patents. Bushnell settled the suit for Atari, gaining perpetual rights for the patents for Atari as part of the settlement. Others failed to settle, and Magnavox won around $100 million in damages from these patent infringement suits before the patents expired in 1990.
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Arcade video games caught on quickly in Japan due to partnerships between American and Japanese corporations that kept the Japan companies abreast of technology developments within the United States. The Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company (Namco) partnered with Atari to import Pong into Japan in late 1973. Within the year, Taito and Sega released Pong clones in Japan by mid-1973. Japanese companies began developing novel games and exporting or licensing them through partners in 1974. Among these included Taito's Gun Fight (originally Western Gun in its Japanese release), which was licensed to Midway. Midway's version, released in 1975, was the first arcade video game to use a microprocessor rather than discrete TLL components. This innovation drastically reduced the complexity and time to design of arcade games and the number of physical components required to achieve more advanced gameplay.
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The dedicated console market
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The Magnavox Odyssey never caught on with the public, due largely to the limited functionality of its primitive discrete electronic component technology. By mid-1975, large scale integration (LSI) microchips had become inexpensive enough to be incorporated into a consumer product. In 1975, Magnavox reduced the part count of the Odyssey using a three-chip set created by Texas Instruments and released two new systems that only played ball-and-paddle games, the Magnavox Odyssey 100 and Magnavox Odyssey 200. Atari, meanwhile, entered the consumer market that same year with the single-chip Home Pong system. The next year, General instrument released a "Pong-on-a-chip" LSI and made it available at a low price to any interested company. Toy company Coleco Industries used this chip to create the million-selling Telstar console model series (1976–77).
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These initial home video game consoles were popular, leading to a large influx of companies releasing Pong and other video game clones to satisfy consumer demand. While there were only seven companies that were releasing home consoles in 1975, there were at least 82 by 1977, with more than 160 different models that year alone that were easily documented. A large number of these consoles were created in East Asia, and it is estimated that over 500 Pong-type home console models were made during this period. As with the prior paddle-and-ball saturation in the arcade game field by 1975 due to consumer weariness, dedicated console sales dropped sharply in 1978, disrupted by the introduction of programmable systems and handheld electronic games.
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Just as dedicated consoles were waning in popularity in the West, they briefly surged in popularity in Japan. These TV geemu were often based on licensed designs from the American companies, manufactured by television manufacturers such as Toshiba and Sharp. Notably, Nintendo entered the video game market during this period alongside its current traditional and electronic toy product lines, producing the series of Color TV-Game consoles in partnership with Mitsubishi.
Growth of video game arcades and the golden age
After the ball-and-paddle market saturation in 1975, game developers began looking for new ideas for games, buoyed by the ability to use programmable microprocessors rather than analog components. Taito designer Tomohiro Nishakado, who had developed Gun Fight previously, was inspired by Atari's Breakout to create a shooting-based game, Space Invaders, first released in Japan in 1978. Space Invaders introduced or popularized several important concepts in arcade video games, including play regulated by lives instead of a timer or set score, gaining extra lives through accumulating points, and the tracking of the high score achieved on the machine. It was also the first game to confront the player with waves of targets that shot back at the player and the first to include background music during game play, albeit a simple four-note loop. Space Invaders was an immediate success in Japan, with some arcades created solely for Space Invaders machines. While not quite as popular in the United States, Space Invaders became a hit as Midway, serving as the North American manufacturer, moved over 60,000 cabinets in 1979.
Space Invaders led off what is considered to be the golden age of arcade games which lasted from 1978 to 1982. Several influential and best-selling arcade games were released during this period from Atari, Namco, Taito, Williams, and Nintendo, including Asteroids (1979), Galaxian (1979), Defender (1980), Missile Command (1980), Tempest (1981), and Galaga (1981). Pac-Man, released in 1980, became a popular culture icon, and a new wave of games appeared that focused on identifiable characters and alternate mechanics such as navigating a maze or traversing a series of platforms. Aside from Pac-Man and its sequel, Ms. Pac-Man (1982), the most popular games in this vein during the golden age were Donkey Kong (1981) and Q*bert (1982). Games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Q*bert also introduced the concept of narratives and characters to video games, which led companies to adopt these later as mascots for marketing purposes.
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According to trade publication Vending Times, revenues generated by coin-operated video games on location in the United States jumped from $308 million in 1978 to $968 million in 1979 to $2.8 billion in 1980. As Pac Man ignited an even larger video game craze and attracted more female players to arcades, revenues jumped again to $4.9 billion in 1981. According to trade publication Play Meter, by July 1982, total coin-op collections peaked at $8.9 billion, of which $7.7 billion came from video games. Dedicated video arcade games grew during the golden age, with the number of arcades (locations with at least ten arcade games) more than doubling between July 1981 and July 1983 from over 10,000 to just over 25,000. These figures made arcade games the most popular entertainment medium in the country, far surpassing both pop music (at $4 billion in sales per year) and Hollywood films ($3 billion).
Introduction of cartridge-based home consoles
Development costs of dedicated game hardware for arcade and home consoles based on discrete component circuitry and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) with only limited consumer lifespans drove engineers to find alternatives. Microprocessors had dropped far enough in price by 1975 to make these a viable option for developing programmable consoles that could load in game software from a form of swappable media.
The Fairchild Filming F by Fairchild Camera and Instrument was released in 1976. It is the first home console to use programmable ROM- cartridges - allowing players to swap games - as well as being the first home console to use a microprocessor which reads instructions from the ROM cartridge. Atari and Magnavox followed suit in 1977 and 1978, respectively, with the release of the Atari Video Computer System (VCS, later known as the Atari 2600) and the Magnavox Odyssey 2, both systems also introducing the use of cartridges. As to complete the Atari VCS quickly, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications $28 million, providing the necessary cash infusion to complete the system's design by the end of 1977. The initial market for these new consoles were initially modest as consumers were still wary after the saturation of dedicated home consoles. However, there was still newfound interest in video games, and new players were drawn to the market, such as Mattel Electronics with the Intellivision. In contrast to the dedicated home Pong consoles, programmable cartridge-based consoles had a higher barrier of entry with the costs of research & development and large-scale production, and fewer manufacturers entered the market during this period.
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This new line of consoles had its breakthrough moment when Atari obtained a license from Taito to create the Atari VCS version of the arcade hit Space Invaders, which was released in 1980. Space Invaders quadrupled sales of the Atari VCS, making it the first "killer app" in the video game industry, and the first video game to sell over one million copies and eventually sold over 2.5 million by 1981. Atari's consumer sales almost doubled from $119 million to nearly $204 million in 1980 and then exploded to over $841 million in 1981, while sales across the entire video game industry in the United States rose from $185.7 million in 1979 to just over $1 billion in 1981. Through a combination of conversions of its own arcade games like Missile Command and Asteroids and licensed conversions like Defender, Atari took a commanding lead in the industry, with an estimated 65% market share of the worldwide industry by dollar volume by 1981. Mattel settled into second place with roughly 15%-20% of the market, while Magnavox ran a distant third, and Fairchild exited the market entirely in 1979.
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Another critical development during this period was the emergence of third-party developers. Atari management did not appreciate the special talent required to design and program a game and treated them like typical software engineers of the period, who were not generally credited for their work or given royalties; this led to Warren Robinett secretly programming his name in one of the earliest Easter Eggs into his game Adventure. Atari's policies drove four of the company's programmers, David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead, to resign and form their own company Activision in 1979, using their knowledge of developing for the Atari VCS to make and publish their own games. Atari sued to stop Activision's activities, but the companies settled out of court, with Activision agreeing to pay a portion of their game sales as a license fee to Atari. Another group of Atari and Mattel developers left and formed Imagic in 1981, following Activision's model.
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Atari's dominance of the market was challenged by Coleco's ColecoVision in 1982. As Space Invaders had done for the Atari VCS, Coleco developed a licensed version of Nintendo's arcade hit Donkey Kong as a bundled game with the system. While the Colecovision only had 17% of the hardware market in 1982 compared to the Atari VCS' share of 58%, it outsold Atari's newer console, the Atari 5200.
A few games from this period have been considered milestones in the history of video games, and some of the earliest in popular genres. Robinett's Adventure was inspired from the text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure, and is considered the first graphic adventure game and the first action-adventure game, and first console fantasy game. Activision's Pitfall!, beside being one of the more successful third-party games, also established the foundation of side-scrolling platform games. Utopia for the Intellivision was the first city-building game and considered one of the first real-time strategy games.
Early hobbyist computer games
The fruit of retail development in early video games appeared mainly in video arcades and home consoles, but at the same time, there was a growing market in home computers. Such home computers were initially a hobbyist activity, with minicomputers such as the Altair 8800 and the IMSAI 8080 released in the early 1970s. Groups like the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California envisioned how to create new hardware and software from these minicomputer systems that could eventually reach the home market. Affordable home computers began appearing in the late 1970s with the arrival of the "1977 Trinity": the Commodore PET, the Apple II, and the TRS-80. Most shipped with a variety of pre-made games as well as the BASIC programming language, allowing their owners to program simple games.
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Hobbyist groups for the new computers soon formed and PC game software followed. Soon many of these games—at first clones of mainframe classics such as Star Trek, and then later ports or clones of popular arcade games such as Space Invaders, Frogger, Pac-Man (see Pac-Man clones) and Donkey Kong—were being distributed through a variety of channels, such as printing the game's source code in books (such as David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games), magazines (Electronic Games and Creative Computing), and newsletters, which allowed users to type in the code for themselves.
While hobbyist programming in the United States was seen as a pastime while more players flocked to video game consoles, such "bedroom coders" in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe looked for ways to profit from their work. Programmers distributed their works through the physical mailing and selling of floppy disks, cassette tapes, and ROM cartridges. Possibly the first computer game to be sold commercially was Microchess in 1976 by Peter R. Jennings, who also started possibly the first computer game publishing company, Microware.[45] Soon a small cottage industry was formed, with amateur programmers selling disks in plastic bags put on the shelves of local shops or sent through the mail.
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Mainframe and minicomputer games were still largely developed by students and others during this period using the more powerful languages afforded on these systems. A team of MIT students, Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, were inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure to create the text adventure game Zork across 1977 and 1979, and later formed Infocom to republish it commercially in 1980. The first graphical adventure games from Sierra On-Line such as Mystery House, using simple graphics alongside text, also emerged around the same time. Rogue, the namesake of the roguelike genre, was developed in 1980 by Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy who wanted a way to randomize the gameplay of Colossal Cave Adventure.
First handheld LED/VFD/LCD games
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Handheld electronic games, using all computerized components but typically using LED or VFD lights for display, first emerged in the early 1970s. LCD displays became inexpensive for consumer products by the mid-1970s and replaced LED and VFD in such games, due to their lower power usage and smaller size. Most of these games were limited to a single game due to the simplicity of the display. Companies like Mattel Electronics, Coleco, Entex Industries, Bandai, and Tomy made numerous electronics games over the 1970s and early 1980s.
Coupled with inexpensive microprocessors, handheld electronic games paved the way for the earliest handheld video game systems by the late 1970s. In 1979, Milton Bradley Company released the first handheld system using interchangeable cartridges, Microvision, which used a built-in LCD matrix screen. While the handheld received modest success in its first year of production, the lack of games, screen size and video game crash of 1983 brought about the system's quick demise.
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In 1980, Nintendo released the first of its Game & Watch line, handheld electronic games using LCD screens. Game & Watch spurred dozens of other game and toy companies to make their own portable games, many of which were copies of Game & Watch games or adaptations of popular arcade games. Tiger Electronics borrowed this concept of videogaming with cheap, affordable handhelds and still produces games on this model to the present day.
1980s
The video games industry experienced its first major growing pains in the early 1980s; the lure of the market brought many companies with little experience to try to capitalize on video games, and contributors towards the industry's crash in 1983, decimating the North American market. In the wake of the crash, Japanese companies became the leaders in the industry, and as the industry began to recover, the first major publishing houses appeared, maturing the industry to prevent a similar crash in the future.
Video game crash of 1983
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Activision's success as a third-party developer for the Atari VCS and other home consoles inspired other third-party development firms to emerge in the early 1980s; by 1983, at least 100 different companies claimed to be developing software for the Atari VCS. This had been projected to led to a glut in sales, with only 10% of games producing 75% of sales for 1983 based on 1982 estimates. Further, there were questions on the quality of these games. While some of these firms hired experts in game design and programming to build quality games, most were staffed by novice programmers backed by venture capitalists without experience in the area. As a result, the Atari VCS market became watered down with large quantities of poor quality games. These games did not sell well, and retailers discounted their prices to try to get rid of their inventory. This further impacted sales of high-quality games, since consumers would be drawn to purchase bargain-bin priced games over quality games marked at a regular price.
At the end of 1983, several factors, including a market flooded with poor-quality games and loss of publishing control, the lack of consumer confidence in market leader Atari due to the poor performance of several high-profile games, and home computers emerging as a new and more advanced platform for games at nearly the same cost as video game consoles, caused the North American video game industry to experience a severe downturn. The 1983 crash bankrupted several North American companies that produced consoles and games from late 1983 to early 1984. The $3 billion U.S. market in 1983 dropped to $100 million by 1985, while the global video game market estimated at $42 billion in 1982 fell to $14 billion by 1985. Warner Communications sold off Atari to Jack Tramiel in 1984, while Magnavox and Coleco exited the industry.
The crash had some minor effects on Japanese companies with American partners impacted by the crash, but as most of the Japanese companies involved in video games at this point have long histories, they were able to weather the short-term effects. The crash set the stage for Japan to emerge as the leader in the video game industry for the next several years, particularly with Nintendo's introduction of the rebranded Famicom, the Nintendo Entertainment System, back into the U.S. and other Western regions in 1985, maintaining strict publishing control to avoid the same factors that led to the 1983 crash.
The rise of computer games
Second wave of home computers
Following the success of the Apple II and Commodore PET in the late 1970s, a series of cheaper and incompatible home computers emerged in the early 1980s. This second batch included the VIC-20 and Commodore 64; Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum; NEC PC-8000, PC-6001, PC-88 and PC-98; Sharp X1 and X68000; Fujitsu FM Towns, and Atari 8-bit family, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, Amstrad CPC, and MSX series. Many of these systems found favor in regional markets.
These new systems helped catalyze both the home computer and game markets, by raising awareness of computing and gaming through their competing advertising campaigns. This was most notable in the United Kingdom where the BBC encouraged computer education and backed the development of the BBC Micro with Acorn. Between the BBC Micro, the ZX Spectrum, and the Commodore 64, a new wave of "bedroom coders" emerged in the United Kingdom and started selling their own software for these platforms, alongside those developed by small professional teams. Small publishing and distribution companies such as Acornsoft and Mastertronic were established to help these individuals and teams to create and sell copies of their games. Ubisoft started out as such a distributor in France in the mid-1980s before they branched out into video game development and publishing. In Japan, systems like the MSX and the NEC PC line were popular, and several development houses emerged developing arcade clones and new games for these platforms. These companies included HAL Laboratory, Square, and Enix, which all later became some of the first third-party developers for the Nintendo Famicom after its release in 1983.
Games from this period include the first Ultima by Richard Garriott and the first Wizardry from Sir-Tech, both fundamental role-playing games on the personal computer. The space trading and combat simulation game Elite by David Braben and Ian Bell introduced a number of new graphics and gameplay features, and is considered one of the first open world and sandbox games. Early installments in a number of long-running franchises such as Castlevania, Metal Gear, Bubble Bobble, Gradius, as well as ports of console games and visual novels appeared on Japanese platforms like the PC88, X68000, and MSX.
Games dominated home computers' software libraries. A 1984 compendium of reviews of Atari 8-bit software used 198 pages for games compared to 167 for all others.[64] By that year the computer game market took over from the console market following the crash of that year; computers offered equal ability and, since their simple design allowed games to take complete command of the hardware after power-on, they were nearly as simple to start playing with as consoles.
Later in the 1980s the next wave of personal computers emerged, with the AMiga and Atari ST in 1985 and the Atari ST. Both computers had more advanced graphics and sound capabilities than the prior generation of computers, and made for key platforms for video game development, particularly in the United Kingdom. The bedroom coders had since formed development teams and started producing games for these systems professionally. These included Bullfrog Productions, founded by Peter Molyneux, with the release of Populous (the first such god game), DMA Design with Lemmings, Psygnosis with Shadow of the Beast, and Team17 with Worms.
IBM PC compatible
While the second wave of home computer systems flourished in the early 1980s, they remained as closed hardware systems from each other; while programs written in BASIC or other simple languages could be easily copied over, more advanced programs would require porting to meet the hardware requirements of the target system. Separately, IBM released the first of its IBM Personal Computers (IBM PC) in 1981, shipping with the MS-DOS operating system. The IBM PC was designed with an open architecture to allow new components to be added to it, but IBM intended to maintain control on manufacturing with the proprietary BIOS developed for the system. As IBM struggled to meet demand for its PC, other computer manufacturers such as Compaq worked to reverse engineer the BIOS and created IBM PC compatible computers by 1983. By 1987, IBM PC compatible computers dominated the home and business computer market.
From a video games standpoint, the IBM PC compatible invigorated further game development. A software developer could write to meet IBM PC compatible specifications and not worry about which make or model was being used. While the initial IBM PC supported only monochromatic text games, game developers nevertheless ported mainframe and other simple text games to the PC, such as Infocom with Zork. IBM introduced video display controllers such as the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) (1981), the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) (1984) and the Video Graphics Array (VGA) (1987) that expanded the computer's ability to display color graphics, though even with the VGA, these still lagged behind those of the Amiga. The first dedicated sound cards for IBM PC compatibles were released starting in 1987, which provided digital sound conversion input and output far exceeding the computer's internal speakers, and with Creative Labs' Sound Blaster in 1989, the ability to plug in a game controller or similar device.
In 2008, Sid Meier listed the IBM PC as one of the three most important innovations in the history of video games. The advancement in graphic and sound capabilities of the IBM PC compatible led to several influential games from this period. Numerous games that were already made for the earlier home computers were later ported to IBM PC compatible system to take advantage of the larger consumer base, including the Wizardry and Ultima series, with future installments released for the IBM PC. Sierra's on line first graphical adventure games launched with the King's Quest series. The first SimCity game by Maxis was released in 1989.
The Apple Macintosh also arrived at this time. In contrast to the IBM PC, Apple maintained a more closed system on the Macintosh, creating a system based around a graphical user interface (GUI)-driven operating system. As a result, it did not have the same market share as the IBM PC compatible, but still had a respectable software library including video games, typically ports from other systems.
The first major video game publishers arose during the 1980s, primarily supporting personal computer games on both IBM PC compatible games and the popular earlier systems along with some console games. Among the major publishers formed at this time included Electronic Arts, and Broderbund, while Sierra On-Line expanded its own publishing capabilities for other developers. Activision, still recovering from the financial impacts of the 1983 video game crash, expanded out to include other software properties for the office, rebranding itself as Mediagenic until 1990.
Early online games
Dial-up bulletin board systems were popular in the 1980s, and sometimes used for online gaming. The earliest such systems were in the late 1970s and early 1980s and had a crude plain-text interface. Later systems made use of terminal-control codes (the so-called ANSI art, which included the use of IBM-PC-specific characters not part of an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard) to get a pseudo-graphical interface. Some BBSs offered access to various games which were playable through such an interface, ranging from text adventures to gambling games like blackjack (generally played for "points" rather than real money). On some multiuser BBSs (where more than one person could be online at once), there were games allowing users to interact with one another.
SuperSet Software created Snipes, a text-mode networked computer game in 1983 to test a new IBM Personal Computer–based computer network and demonstrate its abilities. Snipes is officially credited as being the original inspiration for Netware. It is believed to be the first network game ever written for a commercial personal computer and is recognized alongside 1974 game Maze War (a networked multiplayer maze game for several research machines) and Spasim (a 3D multiplayer space simulation for time shared mainframes) as the precursor to multiplayer games such as 1987's MIDI Maze, and Doom in 1993. In 1995, iDoom (later Kali.net) was created for games that only allowed local network play to connect over the internet. Other services such as Kahn, TEN, Mplayer, and Heat.net soon followed. These services ultimately became obsolete when game producers began including their own online software such as Battle.net, WON and later Steam.
The first user interfaces were plain-text—similar to BBSs—but they operated on large mainframe computers, permitting larger numbers of users to be online at once. By the end of the decade, inline services had fully graphical environments using software specific to each personal computer platform. Popular text-based services included CompuServe, The Source, and Genie, while platform-specific graphical services included PlayNET and Quantum Link for the Commodore 64, AppleLink for the Apple II and Macintosh, and PC Link for the IBM PC—all of which were run by the company which eventually became America Online—and a competing service, Prodigy. Interactive games were a feature of these services, though until 1987 they used text-based displays, not graphics.
Meanwhile, schools and other institutions gained access to ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet, in the mid-1980s. While the ARPANET connections were intended for research purposes, students explored ways to use this connectivity for video games. Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) originally was developed by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex in 1978 as a multiplayer game but limited to the school's mainframe system, but was adapted to use ARPANET when the school gained access to it in 1981, making it the first internet-connected game, and the first such MUD and an early title of massively multiplayer online games.
The home console recovery
8-bit consoles
While the 1983 video game crash devastated the United States market, the Japanese video game sector remained unscathed. That year, Nintendo introduced the Famicom (short for Family Computer), while newcomer Sega used its arcade game background to design the SG-1000. The Famicom quickly became a commercial success in Japan, with 2.5 million consoles sold by the start of 1985. Nintendo wanted to introduce the system into the weak United States market but recognized the market was still struggling from the 1983 crash and video games still had a negative perception there. Working with its Nintendo of America division, Nintendo rebranded the Famicom as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), giving it the appearance of a video cassette recorder rather than a toy-like device, and launched the system in the United States in 1985 with accessories like R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy) to make the system appear more sophisticated than prior home consoles. The NES revitalized the U.S. video game market, and by 1989, the U.S. market has resurged to $5 billion. Over 35 million NES systems were sold in the U.S. through its lifetime, with nearly 62 million units sold globally.
Besides revitalizing the U.S. market, the Famicom/NES console had a number of other long-standing impacts on the video game industry. Nintendo used the razor and blades model to sell the console at near manufacturing cost while profiting from sales of games. Because games sales were critical to Nintendo, it initially controlled all game production, but at requests from companies like Namco and Hudson Soft, Nintendo allowed for third-party developers to create games for the consoles, but strictly controlled the manufacturing process, limited these companies to five games year, and required a 30% licensing fee per game sale, a figure that has been used throughout console development to the present. Nintendo's control of Famicom games led to a bootleg market of unauthorized games from Asian countries. When the NES launched, Nintendo took the lessons it learned from its own bootleg problems with the Famicom, and from the oversaturation of the U.S. market that led to the 1983 crash, and created the 10NES lockout system for NES games that required a special chip to be present in cartridges to be usable on NES systems. The 10NES helped to curb, though did not eliminate, the bootleg market for NES games. Nintendo of America also created the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" to mark games officially licensed by Nintendo and dissuade consumers from purchasing unlicensed third-party games, a symptom of the 1983 crash. Within the United States, Nintendo of America set up a special telephone help line to provide players with help with more difficult games and launched Nintendo Power magazine to provide tips and tricks as well as news on upcoming Nintendo games.
Sega's SG-1000 did not fare as well against the Famicom in Japan, but the company continued to refine it, releasing Sega Mark III (also known as the Master System) in 1985. Whereas Nintendo had more success in Japan and the United States, Sega's Mark III sold well in Europe, Oceania, and Brazil. Numerous fundamental video game franchises got their start during the Famicom/NES and Mark III/Master System period, mostly out of Japanese development companies. While Mario had already appeared in Donkey Kong and the Game & Watch and arcade game Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., debuting in 1985, established Mario as Nintendo's mascot as well as the first of the Super Mario franchise. Sega also introduced its first mascot characters, the Opa-Opa ship from Fantasy Zone in 1986 and later replaced by Alex Kidd via Alex Kidd in Miracle World in 1986, though neither gained the popular recognition that Mario had obtained.[88] Other key Nintendo franchises were born out of the games The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, both released in 1986. The formulative center of turn-based computer role-playing games were launched with Dragon Quest (1986) from Chunsoft and Enix, Final Fantasy (1987) from Square, and Phantasy Star (1987) from Sega. Capcom's Mega Man (1987), and Konami's Castlevania (1986) and Metal Gear (1987) also have ongoing franchises, with Metal Gear also considered to be the first mainstream stealth game.
With Nintendo's dominance, Japan became the epicenter of the video game market, as many of the former American manufacturers had exited the market by the end of the 1980s. At the same time, software developers from the home computer side recognized the strength of the consoles, and companies like Epyx, Electronic Arts, and LucasArts began devoting their attention to developing console games By 1989 the market for cartridge-based console games was more than $2 billion, while that for disk-based computer games was less than $300 million.
16-bit consoles
NEC released its PC Engine in 1987 in Japan, rebranded as the TurboGrafx-16 in North America. While the CPU was still an 8-bit system, the TurboGrafx-16 used a 16-bit graphics adapter, and NEC chose to heavily rely on marketing the system as a "16 bit" system to differentiate it from the 8-bit NES. This ploy led to the use of processor bit size as a key factor in marketing video game consoles over the next decade, a period known as the "bit wars".
Sega released its next console, the Mega Drive in Japan in 1988, and rebranded as the Sega Genesis for its North American launch in 1989. Sega wanted to challenge the NES's dominance in the United States with the Genesis, and the initial campaign focused on the 16-bit power of the Genesis over the NES as well as a new line of sports games developed for the console. Failing to make a significant dent in NES' dominance, Sega hired Tom Kalinske to president of Sega of America to run a new campaign. Among Kalinske's changes was a significant price reduction in the console, and the bundling of Sega's newest game Sonic the Hedgehog, featuring Sega's newest mascot of the same name, with the console. Kalinske's changes gave Genesis the edge over the NES by 1991 and led off the start of a console war between Sega and Nintendo. Nintendo's 16-bit console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) struggled on its initial launch in the United States due to the strength of the Genesis. This console war between Sega and Nintendo lasted until 1994 when Sony Computer Entertainment disrupted both companies with the release of the PlayStation.
Among other aspects of the console war between Sega and Nintendo, this period brought a revolution in sports video games. While these games had existed since the first arcade and console games, their limited graphics required gameplay to be highly simplified. When Sega of America first introduced the Genesis to the United States, it had gotten naming rights from high-profile people in the various sports, such as Pat Riley Basketball and Joe Montana Football, but the games still lacked any complexity. Electronic Arts, under Trip Hawkins, were keen to make a more realistic football game for the Genesis which had the computation capabilities for this, but did not want to pay the high licensing fees that Sega were asking for developing on the Genesis. They were able to secure naming rights for John Madden and reverse engineer the Genesis as to be able to produce John Madden Football, one of the first major successful sports games. Electronic Arts subsequently focused heavily on sports games, expanding into other sports like basketball, hockey and golf.
SNK's Neo-Geo was the most costly console by a wide margin when released in 1990. The Neo-Geo used similar hardware as SNK's arcade machines, giving its games a quality better than other 16-bit consoles, but the system was commercially non-viable. The Neo-Geo was notably the first home console with support for memory cards, allowing players to save their progress in a game, not only at home but also shared with compatible Neo-Geo arcade games.
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