In the previous week, I looked at what gaming was like in the 1970?s, and while that was full of fresh platforms and monster hits, things didn?t really start to gain traction until the gaming revolution that was the 80?s. One of the contributing factors that acted as the star shoved into the mouth of the plumber during the era was the advent of a drastically improved home console, which favoured accessibility and an excellent catalogue of games. There was also the ?Golden Age? of arcade games, which brought us gaming giants such as Donkey Kong and Pac-Man, rocketing gaming into the mainstream.
The arcade industry flourished in the early 80?s, racking up profits of around $5 billion (that?s holding the world to ransom kind-of-money), and over the next couple of years the amount of arcades doubled. The biggest hitter of the time was the aforementioned Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. Pac-Man was Namco?s flagship title and was an instant hit, and can be considered as the epitome of an ?arcade game.? It was a social force to be reckoned with, and tons of merchandise flew of the racks. They even made a TV series around the damn thing that ran from 1982-1984, in which they saddled Pac-Man with Mrs. Pac- Man and little Pac-Man Jr. The team introduced a new antagonist who controlled the ghosts and had a hankering for the precious power-pellets. Presumably, the series ended when the pressure of juggling a wife and child, along with the constant hijinks and ingestion of pellets, led Pac-Man to take his own life after eating a cherry and devouring his family.
Little less than a year after the release of Pac-Man, we had Donkey Kong gracing the arcade monoliths. This was our first true glimpse at the platforming genre. Donkey Kong was a last-ditch effort to break the American market and it succeeded with aplomb. It?s mental to look back on the game and notice just how many instrumental figures it produced. It didn?t just give us Donkey Kong and Mario, multi-billion dollar grossing gaming icons, but also Shigeru Miyamoto, the mastermind behind Nintendo?s domination and revival. We?d see this form of ?tightrope? game design resonate through all console generations and developers, and is/was synonymous with the angst-filled powerhouse of the Final Fantasy series.
Other insanely popular games at the time were Tetris, Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda, several of which I?ll get to later.
We also had the video game trend impacting Hollywood and the music industry. The cult classic Tron hit cinemas, and was one of the first major Hollywood movies to employ computer graphics. And who could forget the orchestral masterpiece Pac-Man Fever climbing through the billboard charts.
Gaming permeated mainstream media coverage as well. America demoed Wired In, which gave us a humorous (that?s subjective) look at the 80?s video game trend. If nothing else, it allowed us to see Bill Murray run for his life after seeing the Wired In logo fly through space and slap the audience in the face. There?s also Lily Tomlin doing a bit of comedic schtick wherein she discusses her addiction to Pac-Man in something resembling a therapy session that a meth-head might be forced into after they hijacked an ice-cream truck crashed it into an orphanage.
Pac-Man. Not even once.
Across the pond, viewers were treated to the BBC?s tech show Micro Live. While it lacked the comedic aesthetic of Wired In, it did have an excellent 8-bit soundtrack playing over an owl drunkenly flapping around a glass factory. The studio design was intriguing too, as it wasn?t so much a set as it was a rendering of a carpeted nuclear holocaust bunker with a few TVs and PCs thrown down for entertainment.
The YouTube clip gives us friendly-uncle-archetype Fred Harris showing us around the WIMP (Windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface of the new (old) Commodore. Many us may have never heard of WIMP, as it?s fallen out of common parlance, and we?d be most familiar with the term GUI, or graphical user interface.
We?re treated to a little tour of the pixelated time machine, and it?s strange to see how (as a viewer) we?re taken through basic operations and technical information such as opening different windows and having multiple programs running. Back in the early 80?s this demo would have acted as a mind grenade launched through your CRT TV to blow what you thought was possible straight over your living room walls. ?So much so that the explanations are so ingrained in the current generations brain, that the explanations seem like the presenters are trying to educate an otherworldly alien or a chimp that?s just been clubbed around the head.
It wasn?t all tech shows, Pac-Man, strippers and class-A drugs, as soon into the 80?s, the video game crash hit. An industry that generated around $3 billion dollars one year, amassed only a pitiful $100 million the next. The main problem was what is known in economic terms as ?market saturation?, simply put, the sheer amount of consoles and games that flooded the market caused the consoles and games to plummet in price. We also had the abysmal game that was E.T the Extra-Terrestrial, which gained infamy throughout the industry and tarnished its reputation. It was so bad they had to dump it in a landfill in New Mexico and pray that some rift in space-time occurred and erased it from the world?s collective consciousness.
Another prominent factor included competition from the home computing market such as Atari and Commodore units. This offered the user the ability to play games, and do tasks like word-processing and sticking a document on a resilient floppy disk.
A little later along the line, Nintendo released the Family Computer, also known as the Famicom, or better yet, simply the NES or Nintendo Entertainment System. This console is what really put Nintendo, and console gaming on the map. The NES was one of the best selling consoles of all time and helped breathe life back into the industry after the video game crash of 1983. The NES raised the bar for not only its quality of games, but the quality of consoles that it competed with and due in part to the crappy 3rd party games that ruined the industry. Nintendo later introduced its ?Official Nintendo Seal of Quality,? for the American, and later the?European?markets in an attempt to show that??NINTENDO has approved and guaranteed the quality of this product.? However, this still did not stop abysmal games reaching consumers such as Bible Adventures. Nintendo later altered the seal in the 1988 to say ?approved and guaranteed,? and then altered again (1989) to say ?evaluated and approved,? no doubt in an attempt to shield themselves from some of the console?s terrible games. Then, if that was enough, they chose to shave off a couple more words in 2003 to read ?Official Nintendo Seal?
The console wars also hit just after the mid-80?s, and this where SEGA threw down its gauntlet to really drive up the competition.?The NES and the Sega Master System sold extremely well, the former managing around 60 million console sales, leaving the latter in the dust with its sales around the 12 million mark. The two also competed in the handheld market. Nintendo brought out the immensely popular and record breaking Game Boy and SEGA retaliated with the Game Gear. Unfortunately, nothing could compete with the former and it sold around 120 million units worldwide. That?s enough to give every resident of the United Kingdom one for each hand. I remember getting the Game Boy as a present and promptly creamed myself, and then passed out?in that order.
The 80?s were perhaps the pinnacle decade for game development and production, and provided the industry with a flying start. However it may have truly started in the 80?s, but it certainly didn?t stop there, and next week, I?ll take a look at the 90?s, where the scene wasn?t all Space Jam, Spice Girls and?Nintendo 64.
Source: http://www.gamingsurvival.com/2012/03/23/retrospective-gaming-in-the-1980s/
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