The late 80’s onwards is my main area of interest in gaming history as it’s my era; the time when I got my first console and became enveloped in the digital world. However, in the early 80’s, before I was born, the gaming industry developed some problems as it was around this time that publishers came into practice and are said to make developers roles more difficult by enforcing tight, strict deadlines and limited budgets upon them, which still goes on to this day.
The 80’s were not all bad however, as the low costs set by the publishing houses allowed for more innovative games to be created rather than more clones of existing titles. Genres were born such as; action/adventure, beat ‘em up, scrolling platformers, isometric platformers, real-time strategy, and many, many more.
In 1983 the computer game industry experienced it’s second ‘crash’, much more severe than the one in ‘77’ and is known as “The Crash”. This saw the demise of several companies and the end of what is known as “second gen console gaming”. Part of this problem was due to ‘market saturation’. Between ‘83-‘84 there were so many consoles brought to market with too little innovative and new software to sustain them. Seemingly only consoles suffered in this time where home personal computers thrived as they became affordable and were of more use than console systems as they had multiple purposes.
By the 90’s console gaming was back on track and saw the change to 3D graphics from raster 2D and ensured further game genre development and progressed to mainstream entertainment in the home for many. With this progress bigger budgets were available for game development, meaning bigger and better games, technology developments, bigger development teams and thus the continued cycle of sales and further development.
The 90’s fourth generation of consoles ended with the discontinuation of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1999 and saw the rise of more technologically advanced systems such as the Playstation in 1995.
In short, some of the major gaming developments of the 80’s and 90’s include;
· The shift from 2D to 3D graphics.
· The decline of Arcade gaming and incline of home console systems and PC’s.
· The transition from cartridges to optical media which could hold significantly more data and cheaper to produce, but led to an increase in game piracy.
· The rise of handheld, portable consoles such as; Gameboy and Game Gear.
· Online gaming rose to prominence.
· Publishing houses gradually increased in size, bringing the gaming industry into a corporate business venture.
No comments:
Post a Comment