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A Brief History of Video Games

The entire history of video games, from their earliest origins all the way up to the end of the seventh generation, in 2013. Emerging from engineering experimentation, the earliest titles such as Tennis for Two, Space War! and Pong helped to establish the roots of the industry. Early arcade classics built on this, with titles like Breakout, Space Invaders, Asteroids and Pac-Man breaking into the mainstream and remaining legendary today. Early PC titles such as Maze War, Zork and Rogue helped define new genres: and while Atari 2600 version of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial might have been disappointing, hobbyist coders continued with aplomb - giving rise to titles like Elite, Exile and Tetris. The video game crash of 1983 dampened the home market, but arcades remained strong: Donkey Kong, Dig-Dug, Pole-Position, Q*Bert and Mario Bros. all successfully sucking quarters from people's pockets. The mid-80s saw the rise of the Nintendo home console, starting with Super Mario Brothers and continuing with games like The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Metroid, Mega-Man, Metal Gear and Final Fantasy. Dragon's Lair use of laserdisc technology gave the arcade unit graphics like none other - but a new wave of 16-bit machines would wow home users, with games such as Dungeon Master, Sim City, Shadow of The Beast and The Secret of Monkey Island. The 1990s saw the 16-bit machines come into their own, with colourful sprites of a scale not seen before: Sonic The Hedgehog, Street Fighter 2, and Lemmings. Strategy games did well in this era, with the first instalment of Sid Meier's Civilization and the XCOM turn-based alien tactics of UFO: Enemy Unknown. Dune 2 saw the dawn of the RTS genre, and Wolfenstein 3D did something similar for first person shooters, and marks id's genre-defining path through Doom and Quake. Myst was a mite more sedate, Tekken was a 3D rival to Street Fighter, Marathon a Macintosh rival to Doom and Star Fox invited barrel rolls aplenty.

English
  • Originally Aired September 16, 2013
  • Runtime 19 minutes
  • Network YouTube
  • Created January 5, 2021 by
    Administrator admin
  • Modified February 25, 2023 by
    PolarGeek admin