Planet Sillicon

Decades of gaming – 80’s

By blog on Jan. 14, 2010.

Continuing my series on gaming through the last forty year, now onto the 80’s, a very wonderful time!

The 80’s were a very mixed bag for the gaming industry. From the boom of the 70’s, the very beginning of the 80’s seemed set for gaming to remain a huge phenomenon. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong are remembered very fondly today, and were gaming sensations, and the very first time we saw Mario!

However, in ‘83 and ‘84 the gaming industry in the US blew itself to pieces, because there were so many poor quality games being put out for too many different consoles that gamers just gave in and stopped buying. This was before there were serious hardcore gamers like there are today, and also before there was the kind of information or access to information that we have today. There wasn’t a dozen sites on the net to tell you what to expect with a game, or three different magazines for each console and the PC waiting near the supermarket check out to give you that same info. No, this was when gamers had to figure it out for themselves, mostly.

So, what happened to turn gaming ’round? NINTENDO!!! The Japanese company Nintendo took a chance in ‘85 and shipped the Nintendo Entertainment System – NES – to America with the first Super Mario Bros., and behold, the gaming industry took off again! Two years later saw the very first emergence of Link and Zelda, one of my all time favourite game series.

In ‘88 SEGA released the Master System, which whilst being pretty groovy and actually being more powerful than the NES, but even with a few really good games, it couldn’t compete with the runaway success of Nintendo’s console and handheld.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I’ve just read about Atari’s Swordquest contest, and I have to say, it would be pretty awesome to see something like that run today!