Task - Week Two

At the beginning of the 'middle' history of computer games, games split off into several different development areas, such as arcade machines, hand held consoles, university computers and computers for personal use in the home. Games went from a very limited niche at the beginning of this period to widely available at the end of it, and became accessible to everyone as the home computer and the games consoles brought gaming to everyone's front door.

The beginning of this period saw a lot of people jumping on the gaming bandwagon. University students were turning expensive mainframe equipment to their nefarious gaming needs, and shared the fruits of their labour illicitly between themselves. Magazines and books published lines of code that you could input into your home computer system to programme your own games, often classics or arcade games. Early game designers never thought to copyright their game codes, and soon saw them reproduced without their names attached. Disks and cartridges were often physically mailed through the post by amateur programmers, who sometimes sold copies of games in plastic bags before they managed to get them published.

The first consoles had a finite number of games stored in their memory, and no further games could ever be added. The second generation of consoles saw the beginnings of the cartridge system, which instead meant that the game would be stored on a separate memory inside a plastic casing, which slotted into the console to be played. This meant that a much broader selection of games could be played on a single console.

Market competition pushed for better graphics, better colour and sound capability and more flexibility for the consumer. Genres began to appear, and trends came and went with the capabilities of the technology that they relied on. Text based adventures became popular for a time when home computers couldn't handle graphics, but soon fell out of favour as affordable computers caught up with, and surpassed the graphical capabilities of the consoles. Concepts of 3D crept into game art, and also level designs. Platform gaming gave way to full 360 degree movement, and the modern style of 3D games.



The first console I played on was an Sega of some kind, I have no idea which one. It was always referred to as The Sega and it lived in my brothers room. (computer games are for boys, remember.) He always had the FPS games, or the Disney games from well meaning family members. I used to sneak in there to play Sonic the Hedghog, and occasionally the really awful Toy Story game. I always got stuck on the same toy box level, and eventually gave up after fifty gazillion tries.

A couple of years later I was privileged enough to be allowed part ownership of a Nintendo 64, one of the limited edition Pokemon print ones. Yes, I was one of those irritating Pokemon craze children. Again though, this was kept in my brother's room, and I was rarely allowed in there to play on the thing. Mostly I spent my childhood on my yellow Gameboy Colour, which I obtained one Christmas when 'Santa' had to provide fairly for both of us... And my mother could assure herself that she'd provided something girly in the Harvest Moon game.

http://www.jesperjuul.net/thesis/2-historyofthecomputergame.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_and_video_games
http://www.designboom.com/eng/education/pong.html
http://www.pong-story.com/intro.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_Moon_2