The end of Gamings honeymoon phase

 The British public information series Protect and Survive, made in the late 1970s during the nuclear threat of the cold war, was voted number 89 in a Channel 4 poll of 100 scariest moments. This was above even Dracula. During the 1980s the cold war was terrifying, and at any time the entire world could of been obliterated in nuclear hellfire. I for one, am not interested in living in the Fallout Universe as a Ghoul.

 And that's what we're here to talk about isn't it? Video games. I already talked about the Magnavox Odyssey and how it shaped the gaming industry (sort of). Truth is the Odyssey started the idea of a cartridge based gaming system, which was then elevated to the level of godhood by the Atari 2600. In the early 80s the Arcades were the homeland of gaming.  Companies all over the world were trying to get in on the Arcade money by making home consoles. Everyone wanted to take the Arcade experience home, and with home consoles like the Atari 2600 that was possible!

 Unfortunately as everyone was trying to get in on taking the home console money, that lead to everyone making their own consoles. So many consoles being made is one of the key reasons for the 1983 Video Game crash, although there were other key factors of course.  One of the most hilarious reasons to me is the E.T. Game. Not only was this game so bad that most copies of the game were dumped in the desert, but it also cost Atari somewhere between 20-25 million dollars in trying to get the rights for the game.

 Out of the ashes came the Nintendo Entertainment System, the all holy NES. This started a key change in the market, where the main video game consoles were American in origin to Japanese, which didn't change back for some time. Now part of the problem with Atari is that almost anyone could make an Atari game and sell it en masse. Many games were literal advertisements, such as the Kool-Aid Man game, made purely to sell a product. Nintendo solved this problem by checking all third party developers and keeping them on a leash. Of course unlicensed games were still made, but Nintendo's efforts are thought to have stopped a second Market crash.

 Another great survivor of the Market Crash was the PC. Gaming as we know today formed from the 80s with the steps made by Nintendo and the new PC gaming industry. Such historic games as Zork and The Legend of Zelda started to form genres that we know and love today! PC's got more and more powerful, media PC's with more powerful screens and speakers made gaming on PC more and more able, eventually leading to games such as ID Softwares Wolfenstein 3D (which may of been made in 1992 but its pretty important), which were revolutionary and brilliant at the time. This generation of games with its monumental lows and highs set the stage for gaming for THE REST OF TIME!