part0007

More than any other companies in the history of electronic gaming, Nintendo, Sega, and later Sony established video games as a lifestyle, a hobby that would endure beyond the “video game craze” of the ’70s. Following the Great Implosion of ’83, as the Age of Atari crumbled, game console and software sales tanked and American industry and retail alike closed the coffin lid on the video game as a viable entertainment format and shoveled on the dirt.

In their heart of hearts, after all, most American retailers and even many executives within the industry itself had always viewed the video game boom as a fad. Throughout the entire mid–’80s, the only place most Americans played electronic games was on computers or at the arcades. And the only games the computers offered were coin-op derivatives or text (and later illustrated and even animated) RPGs and adventure games. For most Americans, video games were now perceived as the carrot-on-the-stick gateway to the computer-in-every-household world that many people thought would take place 20 years before it actually occurred.

But the Japanese never lost faith. Japanese coin-op manufacturers had, in many ways, helped create the second generation American video game boom (i.e., the Age of Atari) with games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man and they saw no diminution of interest among Japanese gamers.

Simultaneously, a phrase was beginning to permeate the world of seven-disk computer games, intolerable delays in loading new content, the incredible range of power among even the same company’s microcomputers as well as a labyrinth of audio and video augmentation boards that made system/software compatibility an issue in every purchase (“I can buy this really cool-looking game, but it’s going to play like crap on my computer. If it plays at all.”). Then there was the question of whether software publishers should be making “games” at all, when they could concentrate their efforts on the more academic-sounding “simulations.”

And all of it took that phrase from a murmur to a command. That phrase was plug ’n’ play.

The old joys of ripping a plastic-encased game board directly out of the box, putting it into your game system and seeing it on the TV suddenly acquired a nostalgic appeal. Moreover, computer gaming was, and remains, a socially isolated experience. Online play has long allowed computer gamers to test their skills against gamers in remote locations, but the key word there was “remote.” People began to remember how much fun it had been to play against their brother, sister, parents, and friends head-to-head in the most comfortable room in the house on a TV screen that was almost certainly larger than your computer monitor.

All of these things converged when Nintendo brought its Nintendo Entertainment System (complete with a dorky robot that was eliminated from the system with appropriate swiftness) and Sega introduced its Sega Master System to America. Video games were once again embraced as part of a lifestyle, as fixed a member of the pop cultural pantheon as pop music, movies, and comic books. There will be good years and bad years, we realized, but the idea of the video game itself as a staple of popular entertainment was here to stay.

The Nintendo/Sega (and later Sony) era revolutionized the concept of what you could do with video games. Elaborate, action-driven adventures joined the video game landscape and the platform and scrolling shooter genres became the dominant categories. After all, the Nintendo/Sega era redefined the nature of gaming by transitioning gamers from a joystick-driven, one or two action button paradigm to the “joypad,” an interface that all but demanded an endless diet of platformers. For the first time, the idea of multiple action buttons (direction was now controlled with the left hand via the directional joypad) and the timing required in pushing them became the driving force behind most games of this period. Movement was largely confined to North-East-South-West commands and the trick was in perfectly timing a jump over a ravine or onto a mushroom.

The Nintendo/Sega (and later Sony) era taught us to once again love video games and, to this day, Nintendo and Sony remain the world’s most successful producers of video game hardware. So take a stroll back through the mid and late ’80s, when a new voice and a new culture took back the right to enjoy video games.

Take it away, Brett...

Bill Kunkel (AKA The Game Doctor) and his partner Arnie Katz “invented” video game journalism in Video magazine in 1978 and then, with Katz and Joyce Worley, created Electronic Games in 1981. Kunkel has designed games, consulted, written numerous game strategy books, and served as an expert witness in much of the industry’s seminal litigation. His memoirs, Confessions of the Game Doctor, were published in 2006, and he’s a regular columnist at J2Games.com.