The game industry in the 1980s

In the 1980s, the games industry gave birth to some of the biggest games companies that are still around today such as Electronic arts. Most of the games created in this time period were simple clones of the popular original arcade games such as pong and space invaders.

Game Innovation

Due to the release of home consoles, the arcade era slowly died down. This was also the start of video game genres such as:

Action-Adventure: Legend of Zelda helped to kick start the action adventure for the 1980s. As you are reading this you probably know what legend of Zelda is and that’s a great example that many well know games and companies started up in this decade.

RPG (Role play game): Dragon slayer 2 was made in 1985 which is considered the first RPG with player stats and quests.

Adventure: Not many people of today know about ZORK but it was a text based game made in 1980. I only know a few old timers that know about this game but never the less it was very popular as it gave the player imagination and allowed them to choose what happens to the player making it very adventurous.

Fighting games: Karate champ (1984) was a one on one 2D fighting game. This influenced game makers Konami to create YIE Ar Kung Fu which eventually developed into Street fighter which was and still is a very successful game that many people still play and talk about.

Platform games: Space panic (1980) this game was credited as the first platform game as it allowed players to climb ladders to reach different floors in the level. Soon after, Donkey Kong made an appearance in 1981 which made players jump over gaps making it the first true platform game.

Racing games: Turbo created in 1981 was the first racing game with a third person view called the rear-view format this was soon made popular and is used in almost every racing game to date.

RTS (real time shooters): Herzog Zwei (1989) was considered to be the very first real time strategy game. This game gave the players an opportunity to plan out strategic out posts making the game tactical.

Gaming computers

Like I said earlier in this post, this was the time of the game consoles! Game consoles such as Commodore VIC-200 and 64, Sinclair ZX80,ZX81 and Zx Spectrum and many more.

The Commodore 64! What a cool name! I wish the modern consoles were called that instead of “Wii”. This console was released to the public in 1982. This console sold loads due to its great graphics and sound for its time, it also allowed the players to use their old controllers with this console. The aggressive marketing of this product made sure that everyone knew about the new exciting console.

Early online gaming.

Dial up bulletin board systems were popular in the 1980s. Superset software created Snipes! To test out their new IBM personal computer based network. It was the first text based game that you could play online with other computers. This software slowly helped out other games later on such as DOOM! A very popular game known to many old timers and computer game geeks. This was one of the first 3D first person shooters to be able to play online. Without this game, there would be none of the newer games such as Call of Duty!

Later in the 1990’s

In the 1990s arcade games were no longer found and so became, the start of the fourth gen consoles! This included consoles such as the mega drive and super NES. If you ask any 90’s baby they will have heard of these and if you ask any of their uncles or dads they would smile! Let’s not forget about the handhelds! Every kid was running around with their Gameboys playing Pokémon and Mario. This is where the first LCD colour displays were released as the Sega game gear.

These were the years where you still see the 32 bit games on the market and you still see these developers expanding in today’s High definition gaming market!