80's Video Games
April 10th 2008 23:43
The 80’s was the boom time for video gaming.
They’d slowly made their way from Tic-Tac-Toe and Pong super computers into the living rooms of our own homes.
They offered an affordable machine that you could plug into your existing television set and play ‘ports’ of all your favourite arcade games right at home.
But out of the rubble, Nintendo managed to steal the video games crown title for itself.
Suddenly the world went Mario crazy; that little red and grey NES could be seen everywhere.
Man, it was so big they even had a whole movie about playing Nintendo – The Wizard (1989) staring The Wonder Years’ Kevin Savage. Although it was criticized as an advertising ploy by Nintendo, Universal actually paid big bucks for the licensing. And only the 80’s could use the real world unveiling of Mario 3 as a major plot point in a movie.
Other notable NES (or Famicon in Japan) games were Zelda, Duckhunt, Castlevania, Rad Racer, TMNT, Bubble Bobble, Metroid, Ninja Gaiden & Aussie Rules Football (only in Aus of course).
Nintendo kept things interesting by releasing new equipment and accessories (most of which failed). The NES Zapper light gun was ahead of its time, and who could forget the Power Glove.
However, Nintendo came up trumps when they unveiled the 2nd bestselling (1st PS2) piece of video games hardware in history - the Gameboy.
Before Gameboy, handheld gaming was restricted to those little LCD games like Donkey Kong and Pac Man. Now people had an NES in the palm of their hands – well a black & white version anyway.
Sega Master System came in a distant second to the NES. Although arguably superior - California Games, Sonic the Hedgehog, Alex Kidd, Wonderboy and the Game Gear just couldn’t stand up to the marketing genius of Mario and his thugs – a problem that plagues Sega to this day.
Next time we’ll look at P.C., Arcade and more on the Video Games Crash of ’83...
'I love the Power Glove. It's so bad!'
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