Friday 17 October 2008

Gaming in the 80's

A lot happened in the 80’s concerning the ever growing industry of computer games. It is the decade that saw the dawn of the third generation of gaming but that didn’t come without its downfalls. In 1983, North America suffered huge losses leading to the collapse of several companies. It was named the “crash” of the video game industry, although now it has obviously recovered.

Computer games started to undergo huge advances and in the early 1980’s and the forever famous platformer arrived. One of the earliest platform games was Donkey Kong and it was developed and released in 1981 by Nintendo. The following year came the release of even more winning titles such as Jungle King, Pitfall and Moon Patrol, so as you can see, even in the space of a year the platform genre flourished remarkably.







By the end of the 80’s, famous games such as Super Mario Bros, Pacman, Metroid and Mega Man were available and all of these titles even went on to release sequels. This was the second biggest change in games during the 1980’s because this is when the industry began to produce famous names... well, famous at least to any gamer. But the biggest change, the change that altered the way people played games is where they were brought into the household making them more available to potential fans.




I wrote last time a quick brief about my own gaming history but now I’m going to shed a little more light onto where my interests lie. When I was younger my tastes were quite limited. I became obsessed with the Tomb Raider series when I got my hands on my own Playstation after over a year of playing on my cousins. But having my own PS1 awakened me to other genres. For instance, the first game I opened on Christmas day when I got my Playstation was Resident Evil 2. Perhaps not the most suitable game for a 10 year old but never mind.



So after I grew a fondness for the survival-horror genre, I branched even further. My childhood friend introduced to the awesome Final Fantasy series, starting with FF7. I still love the series now and I’m clearly not the only one since they’re now working hard to release the 13th in the collection. Final Fantasy is the reason why I RPG’S are my favourite genre of all.


I’m going to stop here because I don’t want to give too much away too soon but also because I’ve gone over my word limit. Oops.

Thank you for reading, I’ll update soon.

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