The 80's were a huge and interesting time for gamer's and games consoles, this decade gave us all the classic arcade games we still love today, such iconic games include, Pacman (1980), Frogger (1981), Donkey Kong (1981) and Tetris (1985). Home consoles also really took off, with the start of Atari consoles, Sega consoles and the first Nintendo console, but along with the rise of these companies came the demise of many many others.
First on our list of major companies is Atari which started out with the Atari VCS (Atari 2600) in 1977, with 9 release titles, the 2600 was the console to have, and became very popular, they released another 12 games in the next few years and continued to be very successful, until 1980 where the 2600 came into some competition with the Magnavox Oddyssey and the Mattel Intellivion, Atari needed something to ensure they would stay on top of the market. They found there success in the way of Space invaders, which had already been released in Japan in 1978 by Taito and was very successful. It worked and became so popular on the 2600 that people were buying the console just to play space invaders at home. After that Atari released a game called Adventure, which i feel is particularly important because this is the first game to contain an 'Easter egg' by placing an item in a certain place it revealed the programmers name.
In 1982 Coleco came onto the market with there Colecovison, which prompted Atari to come out with the Atari 5200, that year they also introduced ET which became a complete failure as it was over hyped, this lead to the ET landfill of 83, where millions of copies of ET where buried under concrete in a landfill in New Mexico, the company never confirmed they did this, and this year a Canadian company are planning looking to see if they can find remains of the disposed cartriges. ET Games excavation.
The ET failure was one of the major things that put Atari under, another was that after Bushnell left, the company went corporate and a lot of the staff left to make there own games for the 2600, one firm in particular that was created was Activision, and as other firms were making cheaper games, Atari wasn't selling there's, Atari was sold to Commodore in 84, and hasn't really recovered since.
The 1983 great crash stopped the production of games and games consoles dead in its tracks. A lot of companies went under due to the fact there was too many companies on the market at the time, they were all similar and had games for each others consoles, no one know what console to buy, people waited to see which console dominated and when it was clear that no one was going to, it was already too late, companies were already going out of business. Along with games produced by games companies there were also games produced by other companies such as Quaker oats, which were just games with obvious advertisements within. When the crash stared these were the games to go first. The thought that personal computer would take over didn't help console and game sales either, everyone thought that PC's were the future.
The market was revived after loosing most of its value in 2 years. It went from being worth $3 billion to just a mere $1,000,000. The consoles that brought it back were none other than the Japanese Nintendo Entertainment System (NES/Famicom) and SEGA.
Nintendo's first post crash console was the NES which most people considder to be the frist Nintendo console but actually all started with the Color TV-Game 6 which was only released in japan and only had one game 'Light Tennis' It sold well enough to have a sequel, Color TV-Game 15.
One of which was Pokemon in 1997 which i feel is one of the reasons the Gameboy was and still is a popular console to own, i still own a Gameboy colour and an advance just so i can play the original Pokemon's. Many other versions have been produced since, including the Gameboy Light (1998) and Gameboy Colour (1998).
The most popular console of the 90's i think was either the PlayStation, or the Nintendo 64, the PlayStation was the first of the PlayStation series, with a 33.8 Mhz processor, it had a lot less processing power than the rival N64 which had a whopping 93.75 Mhz, despite this the playstation sold over 102 million units worldwide while the Nintendo 64 only sold just short of 33 million. That being said the N64 was around for 4 years less than the PlayStation. Another rival of sony and Nintendo was the SEGA Saturn which was released in 1994 roughly the same time as the others, it wasnt as popular as the other consoles and it only sold 9.5 million worldwide, 6 million of which were in Japan alone.
Playstation brought with it some big game franchises such as Metal gear solid, Tony hawks pro skater and Crash Bandicoot, but non bigger than the widely know N64 classic Super Mario 64, who knew that this release title for the Nintendo would become such a huge part of Nintendo's future. It sold over 11 million copies and is regarded as the best selling N64 title of all time, it was originally meant to be on the SNES but because of the limitations of the console it was delayed and ended up defining the controller of the N64. Super Mario 64 is regarded as one of the most important games of all time.
Reference:
http://atariage.com/2600/
http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/galleries/2010-07-19/top-ten-atari-2600/top-ten-atari-2600_1279580705.png
http://cdn.ph.upi.com/sv/b//i/UPI-8771370436036/2013/1/13704372615964/Atari-landfill-combed-for-old-games-by-film-crew.jpg
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983
http://classicgames.about.com/od/history/a/Atari2600Histor_2.htm
http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111015182034/nintendo/en/images/3/33/Color_TV_Game_6.jpg
http://kotaku.com/5785568/nintendos-first-console-is-one-youve-never-played
http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Color_TV-Game_6
http://www.cyberiapc.com/vgg/nintendo_gameboy.htm
http://www.mariowiki.com/Super_Mario_64
http://slashstryfe.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/super-mario-64-virtual-console-20070131013945074_640w.jpg
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