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On the arcade front, the Japanese game industry provided the world with iconic games in the form of Space Invaders (1978) and Pac-Man (1980), introducing what can now be seen as the first ‘golden age' of video games. The consoles were also continuing to bring simple game concepts to the home, while the arcades were slowly but surely pushing the creative boundaries of what could be done creatively. However, the saturation of the console market combined with a series of disappointing high-profile releases (the most popular example being the E.T. (1983) game and a poor version of Pac-Man) created a downward spiral that would bankrupt a large number of game companies during the early 1980s. In addition to this, PCs were becoming more affordable and more versatile, allowing for word processing and other applications to be run as well as games. PCs also meant that games could be copied from cassette or floppy discs. PC game developing is not regulated by manufacturers' licences and thus allows any user with programming skills to contribute, enhancing possibilities of interactivity.
Early games on these machines were adventures that used the premise originally set up by the purely text based ADVENT, but expanded upon it by adding graphics and sound. One of the most prolific early developers was Sierra On-line and their King's Quest (1984-1994) and Space Quest games (1986-1996). After the North-American video game crisis of the 1980s, the US console market was crippled. However, a Japanese game card and toy manufacturer would ring in a new era in the video game business. Nintendo had produced game cards and toys from 1889, but in the early 1970s they acquired the distribution rights to the Magnavox Odyssey in Japan and went on to release their TV-Game 6 and 15 in 1976 and 1977, respectively. In 1981, after Nintendo had to quickly come up with a new game design, Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong, which ‘starred' a plumber character that would forevermore be associated with Nintendo and digital games in general. Until Pac-Man, video games had been devoid of identifiable heroes, but Mario was the first human-like hero that players could control. In 1983 Nintendo went on to release the Famicom in Japan; two years later it made it into the recently cleared video game shelves in the USA as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The NES bundle included Miyamoto's next game Super Mario Brothers (1986), revolutionary in its construction and development. In particular, the game set a distinctive goal, getting from the start to the finish of a level, starting from the left and going to the right and involved a captured princess story, ushering in basic characters and narrative content. Also premiering on the NES, was Miyamoto's long running Zelda series (1986-), which were inspired by a pen-andpaper fantasy role-playing game systems like Dungeons and Dragons (TSR 1976).
The NES also created a new digital game hype that spread to the mainstream and even inspired children's cartoons. It was followed, in 1989, by the hand-held Game Boy allowing for digital gaming to finally move away from the television set at home. Games for the NES were licensed, meaning that Nintendo had to give the go-ahead to any game published for the console as well as asking for a licensing fee from any developer. This meant that video gaming was now a hugely successful global business, with profits overtaking traditional industrial businesses such as car manufacturing. The Japanese company Sega (originally founded in 1940 by Martin Bromely, Irving Bromberg, and James Humpert to provide coin-operated amusements for US servicemen on military bases) finally entered the home console market with its Master System in 1986, unsuccessfully challenging Nintendo on the portable platform market with its Game Gear. Sega had moved to 16-bit in 1989 with the Genesis or Megadrive, which also introduced its own trademark mascot, a blue hedgehog. With the Megadrive, Sega managed to speak to a more mature consumer, the players that had grown up on console and arcade games that found more adult-oriented games which matched their grown-up tastes. In the 1990s PC gaming was mainly focused on areas that the consoles did not seem to cover. So-called ‘point and click' adventure games and the early First Person Shooters made their debut on the PC. The sequel to the Dune adventure game, Dune 2 (1993) invented the contemporary real-time strategy games that Command and Conquer and the Star/Warcraft series popularized.
The openness of the PCs allowed developers to become more creative, fuelled by the development of 3D accelerators (processors dedicated to handling the calculation of graphics) and the ability to upgrade other elements of a PC without having to buy a whole new machine. Foremost among these are the first-person shooter (FPS) titles like Unreal and Halflife which relied heavily on highly defined graphics and high frame rates (30 frames per second and above). Another added advantage of the PC was the relatively early availability of online play. The first online games can be seen in the form of the text-based multi-user-dungeons (MUDs) in which players would adventure (role-playing style) through dungeons programmed in advance - the possibility to join other players in common quests and talk to them in ‘taverns' clearly added to their allure. The FPS phenomenon also spawned a culture of players meeting for LAN parties (local area network) in which they connected their computers to a network and compete in FPS and real-time strategy games. Later, ‘massively multiplayer online role-playing games' (MMORPGs) merely added advanced 3D graphics to this idea. World of Warcraft was particularly able to draw on the popularity of the line of real-time strategy games and combined them with the new popularity of MMORPGs to pierce the mainstream and gain a widespread user base. Not to be overtaken by PCs, home game consoles also continued to develop during the 1990s. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was first released in 1990 and the Atari's Jaguar in 1993. However, it was not until Sony's PlayStation was produced in 1994 that the game console finally became a ubiquitous piece of everyday technology.
Playstation presented a hi-fi component look-a-like console that could play music CDs and featured the (in terms of space) superior CD-ROM technology which allowed for more game content, higher-quality video and CDquality audio. It went on to dominate the market in the years after 1996 with the capability to make game worlds larger and stories more compelling than had been possible before. By 2005, PlayStation and Playstation Portable (PSP) had shipped a combined total of 102.49 million units, becoming the first video game console to reach the 100 million mark. The added processing power and increased storage space that the generations of consoles after Playstation offered have been used to full effect to now create more cinematic, story-driven and realistic-looking games. Final Fantasy VII (1997), Resident Evil and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (1996) are among a plethora of titles that were hugely popular on these consoles. Sony updated to Playstation 2 (PS2) in 2000 and continued its market dominance almost unrivalled until Microsoft entered the business with Xbox a year later. PS2 relied on the same mature content and featured a DVD player which added appeal as the price for DVD players was still relatively high at the time of release. Grand Theft Auto III gave rise to a vast number of so-called ‘sandbox games' which combined elements of driving games, shooters and others in a 3D environment which let the player choose which, if any, goals he wanted to accomplish or just roam an environment interacting with the artificially intelligent occupants of the later.
The dominance of Sony's Playstation brand was finally challenged with the arrival of the Nintendo Wii in 2006, becoming the world's fastest selling console in 2007. What was revolutionary about this product was that unlike existing game consoles (which were based on a controller held with two hands which required buttons to be pushed), its controls were able to sense motion, depth and positioning dictated simply by the acceleration and direction of the controller - arguably producing a more intuitive and realistic gaming experience than was possible before. A direct successor to the Nintendo GameCube, it was aimed at a broader demographic than that of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3), but it was also meant to compete with both as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles. Video games now have the opportunity to change media consumption. The current generation consoles, PS3, Xbox360 and Wii, as well as their hand-held counterparts, are all capable of accessing the Internet and deliver non-game information through a medium that was considered purely a toy in the mid-1980s. For example, the Wii's News Channel delivers headlines on a plethora of subjects from all over the world. PS3 comes with an Internet browser that allows the World Wide Web to be surfed in one's living room.
The PS3, through the Playstation Network, fuelled by Sony's media empire, also adds the opportunity to download film trailers, game content and other multimedia content. It should not take too long before films and video on demand join downloadable games and music. As this very brief history suggests (see Kent 2002 and Wolf 2007 for more details), gaming has come a long way since its early origins with primitive video games like Tic-Tac-Toe, Tennis for Two and Pong. Modern digital gaming now contains a unique synthesis of 3D art, CGI special effects, architecture, artificial intelligence, sound effects, dramatic performances, music and storytelling to create whole new virtual worlds. This is perhaps why gaming is now attracting so much critical attention. Although departments of computer science have been studying the technical aspects of video games for many years, theories that examine games as an artistic medium are now being developed and are increasingly becoming part of the media studies curriculum, both at school and university.