Xbox 360
During the late 1970s the calculator was finally allowed pride of place during algebra classes, ‘smoking' candy cigarettes was acceptable behaviour from an eight year old, the traditional Butlins holiday declined and the release of the first true home games consoles appeared.
The Magnavox Odyssey may not be popularly synonymous with the birth of the early 8-bit generation - that particular accolade goes to the Atari 2600 — but no matter what way you look at it, these obsolete boxes are in fact the ancestors of your XBox 360 and PlayStation 3. Hard to believe, isn't it? Those choppy block colour graphics that are supposed to represent people and buildings seem hardly more appealing than a bunch of randomly assembled lego blocks. But for many fans of the era this is the appeal; you need imagination, patience and an appreciation of the hardware limitations in order to enjoy the vast majority of games. It goes without saying that the likes of Pong and Pacman are immense fun regardless of visual representation because back in the day games had to grip you with challenge rather than graphics alone.
With the release of the Fairchild and Radofin 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System (what a mouthful) the public began to accept the transition of bulky, expensive arcade cabinets into their living rooms and bedrooms, resized down to small plastic boxes with nifty handheld controllers and paddle sticks. Atari watched the emerging technology with intense interest and produced their own entry to the market, the Atari 2600. It went on to sell more than 30 million units, sealing its destiny as a legend of the 8 bit era.
Early machines such as the Odyssey already had games pre-programmed into the hardware — usually clones of Pong, simple sports simulations and basic puzzles. Despite there being cartridges to insert, all they really did was to activate a game already stored on the machine. The Fairchild Channel F changed all that with the invention of an innovative plastic-covered computer chip. Instead of game data being stored in the console itself it was instead burned to this ROM chip and inserted into the compatible console. The computer would read the information from the chip and load it, thus the cartridge was born. This storage medium was used on future generations of consoles such as the NES and Sega Mega Drive, right up until the Nintendo 64. Of course cartridges are still used today by the Nintendo DS console, albeit in a far smaller and more complex form than its distant relatives. It just goes to show that even old technology can stand the test of time.
Developers busied themselves by churning out every sort of game scenario possible, from the raging success of arcade conversions such as Asteroids to infamous failures Karate and Star Fox. The surge of releases flooded retailers, bombarding the public with more cartridges than sense and consequently confusing the public. With such a wide choice of titles to choose from, the strain on shelf space was apparent and gamers chose to play it safe and save, rather than pay a premium for a game that might just turn out to be absolute mince. One of the most famous examples is the E.T movie tie-in which Atari gained exclusive rights to (and paid a great deal of money for). Movie-based games are notoriously dire most of the time, but this particular release was so bad that thousands of unsold cartridges were said to be buried in a New Mexico landfill.
And it wasn't just software that got overhauled, copied and cloned by countless coders; consoles started appearing left right and centre as many companies hungered for potential profit from an emerging home entertainment industry.
The build up of disappointing releases and over-saturation of the market took its toll, and in 1983 — retro gaming fans will already have their hankies at the ready — the videogames industry crashed spectacularly. All the small independent developers and publishers and little-known console manufacturers faded away one by one, leaving only the tiniest of indentations on gaming history. Even the big companies such as Atari suffered greatly from the recession, almost going bust during the tough trading conditions. It is worth noting that this event was far more dominant in the US, as the emergence of the personal computer - think Commodore 64 — became a roaring success in the UK. However a number of companies completely abandoned the games industry as bankruptcy claims grew.
So how did the games industry recover from such dire times? Well, that's a whole other story...