A history of computer games part two: 1980s - 1990s

In 1978 Tatio released Space Invaders which is accredited as an initiator of the golden age of video games. Its success inspired many other manufactures to create new titles (often clones of already popular games), one of them was legendary Pac-Man. Video gaming was established as a mainstream hobby, arcade machines could have been found on every corner and revenue generated by them was enormous. Video games' golden age lasted up to 1986.  

Another important thing that occurred in 80' was severe video game crash. I would call it an irony of fate as it was, in a way, caused by success of games: they became more and more popular, manufactures saw the potential profit in games industry so they quickly produced lots of low quality, poorly designed games. That made customers lose their confidence, so they stopped buying them and that led to bankruptcy of several video games companies. 

Among most significant of those cheesy games were movie-inspired E.T. and Pac-Man version for the Atari 2600 console. Atari rushed them to be released for the holiday season and expected to be bestsellers. In the reality, they turned out to be financial flops, and now they are believed to be responsible for Atari bankruptcy. Also, E.T. is considered to be one of the worst video games ever.

The video game industry was revitalized in 1985 by Nintendo. Their new console Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) became huge success instantly, mostly because of a quick recognition of the Italian-plumber-eating-mushrooms-and-saving-princess-game Super Mario Bros. NES was the first third-generation video game console and was characterized by 8-bit graphic and gamepad in place of joystick.

Another worth to mention fact about 80's is the spring of new game genres: action-adventure, role-playing video games, beat 'em up, real-time strategy, survival horror just to name a few. Game franchises such as The Legend of Zelda, Prince of Persia, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter were initiated at the time and nowadays, they are still significant and popular. In addition, the release of Game Boy in 1989 made handheld gaming more popular. 

One of the most important developments in games' history of 90's was introduction of 3d graphic, which made them a bit closer to what we know them as today. 3d technology gave rise to some genres such as first-person shooter and real-time strategy. Multi-User Dungeons (MUD) games gained popularity in 90's as well. Typically, they were text-based computer equivalents of Dungeons & Dragons kind of games and can be called the ancestors of MMORPG games, such as World of Warcraft. 

The interesting thing about gaming in early 90's was shareware distribution - people could have, for small amount of money, bought and tried trial versions of games before purchasing them. At first, they were sold on floppy discs but as games became more advanced and space consuming, they were replaced by free CD demos distributed with magazines and over the Internet. 

 

 People started to prefer enjoying games on comfy sofas at homes over stuffy bars and crowded shopping centres. In that way, home consoles became more common and little by little started displacing arcade games. One of new consoles was Sega's Mega Drive which at a fast rate, thanks to releasing Sonic the Hedgehog game, it gained mainstream popularity. Sonic quickly became as popular as Nintendo's Mario did. Three years later, in 1994, Sony introduced to the world their 32-bit, fifth-generation video game console - PlayStation. 

The last thing about late 90's I want to mention in this post is the introduction of mobile gaming. I believe it's quite significant as nowadays it's the most common form of gaming. The first played on phone game was 1998 Nokia's Snake.