Cyber's Antique Video Games Site
A Brief History of Home Gaming
Early console and home computer games consisted mostly of adaptations of existing arcade games but once they had established themselves as a valid form of home entertainment they began to outgrow their beginnings.
While arcade games generally kept their objectives simple with execution being a matter of skill, to reflect the greater amount of time that could be spent playing on them the games for the home market gradually developed in complexity and realism up to the point where they started recently to have not only more plot than some films but graphics which are of photographic quality.
Some of the games produced for the newer generations of consoles and the latest P.C.s such as Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, The Legend Of Zelda and the most recent Final Fantasy titles are all modern masterpieces which take many hours - or even days! - of skilled play to complete.
However a lot of the newer games are all style with very little fresh content. The beauty of the earlier games is that there was very little style/content trade-off because the hardware at the time was incapable of reproducing much in the way of style so actual content would win out in most cases.
Here is a chronological list of the most significant home consoles along with important releases for each format. Whether you know the names or not, they are all worth looking for via an internet search engine.
1972
The Magnavox Odyssey was the first home console and only
played a version of Pong which predated the arcade version. It spawned a huge number of
imitations.
1977
Atari's VCS/2600 was debuted and gave the newly created home gaming market a real taste of what was possible from this and future systems with a cartridge system that allowed a multitude of games to be played on one console.
Notable releases: Space Invaders, Missile Command, Centipede, Asteroids, Breakout and Adventure
1979
Mattel arrived with the Intellivision which had better graphics than the VCS/2600 and was a serious challenge to Atari's monopoly of the market. They enticed many buyers with the promise of a keyboard accessory which would in effect turn the console into a home computer. This add-on was horrendously delayed, costly and proved to be a disappointment to most Intellivision owners. Despite this their machine was a winner.
Notable releases: Pitfall, Night Stalker, Astrosmash and Major League Baseball
1982
Milton-Bradley's Vectrex was the first (and only) home games system based around vector graphics with an integral monitor. The vector display produced very sharp graphics combined with some incredible 3D effects.
Notable releases: Scramble, Pole Position, Web Wars, Fortress of Narzod, Polar Rescue and Cosmic Chasm
Coleco paved the way for a new generation of machines with their Colecovision which had the best graphics and sound of its time and came packaged with the Donkey Kong game. Coleco also made their system extremely expandable. One accessory they manufactured was an adaptor that enabled Atari VCS carts to be played on the Colecovision giving their console an extra selling point. Needless to say this didn't go down well with Atari!
Notable releases: Fortune Builder, Donkey Kong, Zaxxon and Spy Hunter
1984
Atari's 7800 was a victim to the fallout of the so-called 'great games crash'. While it should have been a valid competitor with Sega and Nintendo's later systems, due to Atari's bad marketing and the lack of game support from 3rd parties it soon became a flop.
Notable releases: Food Fight, Galaga, Ikari Warriors, Tower Toppler, Klax, Rampage, Commando, Double Dragon, Impossible Mission and Ms. Pac-Man
1985
Nintendo who had previously designed arcade games and written titles for the Colecovision made history with their Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom. For the first time a company that produced computer games became the highest grossing force in the whole entertainment industry.
Notable releases: Super Mario Brothers, The Legend Of Zelda, Contra, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Metroid, Toobin', Gauntlet, Duck Hunt, Mega Man and Blaster Master
Sega entered the arena with their Master System which while technically superior to the N.E.S. could not hold its own against the seemingly invincible marketing strategies of Nintendo.
Notable releases - Outrun, Phantasy Star, Sonic The Hedgehog, Pacmania, Micro Machines, Columns, Bubble Bobble, Wonder Boy In Monster World and Prince Of Persia
1988
Atari released the first hand-held colour game platform - the Lynx. It had its own 4096 colour LCD display, multi-player capacity, reversible controls (for left or right handers) with advanced graphics facilities. This was not only the first hand-held but also arguably the best unfortunately due to extremely bad marketing on Atari's part it was a flop.
Notable releases are: Lemmings, California Games, Stun Runner, Shadow Of The Beast, Crystal Mines and Rampart
Nintendo countered the Lynx soon after with their all conquering Game Boy. The Game Boy may have only had a monochrome display but the picture was sharper and your batteries lasted longer, it was not as bulky as other hand-helds and was genuinely 'pocket-sized'. In 1996 Nintendo released an smaller version which was also used less power. A digital camera and printer were brought out as add-ons too. Then in 1998 a colour version was released which could still play all the original Game Boy titles. More recently has come the Game Boy Advance, a 32-bit hand-held.
Notable releases are: Nemesis, Tetris, Pokemon, Super Mario Brothers Deluxe, Perfect Dark, Tonka Raceway, Bomberman MAX, Duke Nukem and Wario Land
From 1989 onwards 16-bit consoles started to be introduced to the market.
The NEC Turbo Grafx-16/PC Engine, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis
and the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) were arguably the best
examples of the format. While they are now considered to be 'retro' and did
produce some phenomenal games they are outside the scope of this article which
is concerned only with the 'Golden Age' of videogames. Refer
to the Links section of this site for help on finding out about these and
other systems not covered here.