SpawnPoint - Where Game Begins

Ooooh, that's a good fight to start in the forums! All kinds of opinions will rage over what window in time specifically designates video gaming's golden age.

Surely, there has to be a time, right? Is it now? Some will say we're living in it presently, and that the golden age officially started when real-time 3D became standard.

Other old grumps peg it as having ended ridiculously early. It was from 1971 to 1972! When Pong came along, that ruined everything, and it's all been down-hill since!

Even Wikipedia cites the time window as varied depending on whom you ask. Well, since there's so much confusion about the issue, I'll clear it up for you: The Golden Age of Video Games is from about 1978 to about 1995.

*gasp!* from the audience! How did I arrive at such a stunning conclusion? Well, here's how I figure that this is the true time frame, and no other:

* Economics

Computers and microchips were just beginning to be affordable enough to be accessible to the common person right around 1978. This was the year that Taito released Space Invaders. Suddenly, pinball machines were pushed aside and the video games invaded. The gaming industry's first companies soon would timidly push their products out into the market, including Bally/Midway, Magnavox, Nintendo, and Atari.

It seemed a marvel that you could play all this sophisticated technology for a quarter, and what's more, home consoles dropped in the 1970's and 1980's to around $200, while cartridges cost around $10. Meanwhile, new computers were brought into the home at this time, and the various machines today regarded as 'vintage' fell down to a price that at last the middle-to-low class incomes could afford.

By the 1980's, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) helped the spread of games for the home computer. Without a World Wide Web or even what most of us would call a full Internet, home users would dial into a BBS, download the latest freeware or shareware game, and copy it to other computers. By the 1990's, not a week went by when there wasn't some new freebie game making the rounds. Gaming, whether hardware, software, or arcade, would never be this cheap again.

* Novelty

Before this age, computers in the eyes of most people were these infernal mainframes with reels of tape and blinking light panels, and they spit out inscrutable punched cards. They were for math and business and computing your telephone bill, nothing more. They were only to be touched by geeks wearing lab coats.

Movies were the first medium to break that conception. Movies like "Star Wars" (briefly in the scenes showing holographs of Leia and Death Star), "Tron", "The Last Starfighter", and "Young Sherlock Holmes" (the knight character, courtesy of Pixar in 1985) contributed to the public awareness of the capabilities of "these new computer thingies". I think without "Tron" alone, video games wouldn't have spiked into the range of popularity in the time-frame that they did. People just stood gaping in front of the cycle maze scene in Tron going "God, I wish I could play that!" By 1995 (the year "Toy Story" was released), the raw novelty of computer graphics in movies had worn off. But the film and gaming industries together continually pushed graphics to ever-newer innovation. When games with movie tie-ins were made, the customers always asked "Does the game graphics look as good as the movie?" With Atari's ill-fated "E.T.", the answer was a resounding "No!", but by the time of Toy Story, game graphics were catching up to the big screen.

* Ubiquity

Throughout the 1980's, video game arcades were literally everywhere. Kids could not walk to school without passing one. Video game upright cabinets haunted the corners of every convenience store, laundromat, movie lobby, and most restaurants.

When was the last time you passed an arcade that was a stand-alone business to itself? Not often these days. Today, arcades still survive mainly as side attractions to bowling alleys, boardwalks, amusement parks, and the like. But the days of franchised arcades as stand-alone businesses are long gone.

* Creativity

Games in this time period had to gradually, painfully evolve from monochrome raster lines to 8-bit to 16-bit graphics, and finally leading up to full, real-time 3D around 1995. Since the constraints of technology were so tight, game designers were limited to machines that could make a few feeble beeps and light up a few pixels on the screen. Since they couldn't just wow everybody with the immersive environments that we have today, game designers racked their brains to come up with new and interesting game play.

As a result, every game genre we have today was spawned at this point in history. Amongst the genres founded in this period: the maze game, the adventure game, the platform game, the shoot-em-up, the beat-em-up, the space shooter, the role-playing game, the simulator, the strategy game, the puzzle game, and the first-person shooter. Even really quirky ideas got through where they wouldn't have survived - or have even been suggested - today.

Now, gaming scholars have been waiting this far into this essay to adjust their monocle and sniff, "Well, the video game crash of 1983 is right there. How can you miss it?" In fact, let's clear up a common misconception about that 1983 crash.

The crash of 1983 was only bad for the console gaming companies. The market reached saturation, it had been a long time since any innovation had come out, and the consumers burned out. This resulted in many console makers going bankrupt. But pay attention to this point: there were so many games available so cheaply that the public at last had a chance to burn out on them!

And what happened right after the crash? The third generation of gaming began in 1983, and within a few years that third generation brought 16-bit gaming, the Nintendo NES, and the Sega Master System. All the way through this, people still played games. But gaming spread to computers as well as consoles, and when consoles came back, they were made of tougher stuff.

So the crash didn't darken the gaming world at all. A lot of companies took a dive and several others reinvented themselves, that's all! Throughout the whole time, everybody was still gaming and having a blast.

Thank you for your attention this afternoon. Class dismissed!