Looking back at what gaming was like in decades past can create an important perspective on the present. In some cases, it can spark ideas that will help drive the future of gaming. Creating a picture of gaming trends over the past decades can help contextualize the present.
In the case of video games, there’s no better decade to watch than the decade in which the modern gaming hobby began: the 1980s. With the first home consoles capable of creating a truly satisfying replica of the arcade experience in the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System, video games had finally made their way into the home and made their presence known.
10 Pack-In Games Sold Other Video Games
When it was released in 1985, the Nintendo Entertainment System reintroduced video game consoles to North America. The NES was a revolutionary console in many ways, but Nintendo also broke ground with its choice of pack-in games. The safe choice would have been Donkey Konga proven arcade hit that the NES was able to reproduce extremely well, but Nintendo chose instead Super Mario Bros.a brand new title that swept Japan.
The choice was a wise one. The sprawling game made the arcade port pack-ins of their competitors, Atari’s centipede andSegas Wait a second look behind the times. However, modern consoles have generally shunned pack-in games for their base bundles, shipping with demo samplers instead.
9 Games have spawned whole new genres
The 1980s were a time of unparalleled creativity for games. The decade started with simple single-screen platformers like Nintendo’s Donkey Kong and that of Sega flicky as big hits. It ended with the first first-person shooters like MIDI mazewhich was converted to 2000 face ball on the Nintendo Game Boy.
Genres such as puzzle games, Metroidvania platformers and FPS came of age in the 1980s. While later decades have added more and more tools to the video game toolbox, these genres have been the cornerstones of the medium ever since.
8 Video arcades were where it was
There is something to be said for the idea that online gaming is the modern arcade. At the same time, the experience of being with other people in a dimly lit space is unique to that space and time.
Especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, people long for close contact again. While video arcades still exist, the modern focus on redemption games and big cell phone games begs for games that take full advantage of the size and cooling available in an arcade cabinet.
7 Rapid development led to a proliferation of games
Video games in the 1980s were not the multi-million dollar triple-A business of today. Even the biggest and best games developed quickly, typically taking six to nine months to develop.
Rapid development had its drawbacks, leading to the Video Game Crash of 1983. But it also meant that new, high-quality games could come at a rapid pace. Nintendo and Sega tackled different ways to tame the flood. Nintendo’s seal of quality meant that games for the NES had to be fully compatible and not outright crash the console. Sega just released everything themselves.
6 Video game magazines organized the roar of releases for fans
Dozens of outside publishers produced titles for the Nintendo Entertainment System in the late 1980s. Deciding which games were worth playing in the late 1980s would have been almost as daunting a task as it was in 1982. But the gaming public had allies on their side.
Ad-supported but fiercely independent, magazines such as Monthly electronic gaming and GamePro took pride in reviewing everything that came out each month. Even when their reviews contradicted the rule of house organs such as: Atari era and Nintendo powerThese magazines gave fans a glimpse of the ever-changing landscape. At the same time, they were more formal and organized than the constant stream of online reviews that characterize the gaming press today.
5 Creative localizations made for personalized experiences
In the late 1980s, “Teddy Boy” was all the rage in Japan. With elaborate bouffant hairstyles and rebellious clothing, including a lot of black, Teddy Boys were the Japanese equivalent of Rockabilly’s. Many games like Nekketsu Koha Kunio-Kun had to be aggressively localized as the rockabilly craze had largely disappeared in the US by the mid-1980s.
Kunio-Kunthe translation, defectorinspired by the movie the warriorsspawned the spiritual sequel Double dragon, an international mega hit. This trend continued into the early 1990s, with many role-playing games requiring a lot of localization work to be understandable in English. Ted Woolsey, the American head of translation at SquareSoft, became especially famous for his work.
4 Puzzle games were mainstream hits
While puzzle games remain a consistently popular genre in 2022, they are more and more relegated to the doldrums of casual smartphone games and their design space is increasingly dominated by match-3 games.
Though puzzle games have been around since the early days of video games, they got off the ground when Alexey Pajitnov’s instant classic Tetris came to the West in 1986. Its popularity skyrocketed the Nintendo Gameboy when it was named as the western pack-in title in 1989. Super Mario Land.
3 Game Cheat Devices Opened Custom Ways to Play
One of the trends that Nintendo tried to destroy more than anything was the cheat devices. In the form of a stubby cartridge plugged into a video game cartridge, cheat devices were an intriguing game-changing way.
The original cheat device was the CodeMasters Game Genie. This allowed players to alleviate many of the difficulties of NES-era games and reverse the curve in their favor. While this sparked a debate about whether video game cheating was acceptable, many players still did it because the games of that era were simply extremely difficult, often in unfair ways.
2 Game rental was the best way to try out games
It’s easy to think of 80s and 90s game rentals as a relic of a bygone era with modern demos so ubiquitous, but a demo is rarely an accurate picture of the entire game. After the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, video game rentals exploded.
Rental stores bought video games, usually through distributors, but sometimes, especially for very small stores, through retailers. And unlike a modern demo, rental games were literally the whole game. It is conceivable that a player can play the entire game in a rental period, usually three to four days.
1 No established genre boundaries created new ways to play
In the 1980s, especially after the video game crash of 1983, there were no established boundaries around game genres. With video games at the time largely defined by the arcades, as opposed to home video game consoles like the then-emerging Nintendo Entertainment System, there were few of the genre boundaries that are now considered obvious.
Games like Rescue: The Embassy Mission and Zelda II: The Adventures of Link freely changed genres as their designers saw fit, while Super Mario Bros. 2 and Kid Icarus turned the logic of platform games on its head by embracing both vertical and horizontal scrolling. The possibilities were seemingly limitless.
0 Comments