Post by Fatal Rewind on Sept 1, 2008 20:52:02 GMT -5
Another part of what was going to be my "entertainment" batch of memories, broken up again...
Before I get into video games, though, there was the puzzle explosion that started with the Rubik's Cube. There would later be Rubik's Revenge (an extra row of cubes!) and the Grenade that I knew of, but I only found out a couple of years ago upon reading about it online that there were tons of other Rubik puzzles as well. 'Course there were the knock-offs too, like an easy pyramid puzzle (don't recall the name of it), the Whip-It, and who knows how many others that you would see from period to period at school (some taken up by teachers in case you weren't careful enough).
Ok, video games! Even though the explosion started in the 70s with Space Invaders, arcades were doing well...good ones offered you 10-12 tokens for a buck, crappy ones only gave you 4-5 (how dare they!). Too many classics to mention for me (you guys can do that if you wish
), but I'll just mention the genres here: raster scan graphics (pretty much everything out there), "wireframe" vector (Star Wars, Star Trek, Asteroids Deluxe, Major Havoc), and the amazing laserdisc that made it look like you were either watching a freakin' cartoon (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace), some kind of sci-fi adventure (Star Rider, Astron Belt, Interstellar), or an airplane ride (M. A. C. H. 3, Firefox scenes taken from the movie, and Cobra Command looked like a cartoon plane ride, combining both aspects of it). Most cost fifty cents per play, expensive to a lot of poor gaming kids back then, and several of them had to be memorized to make it through, not being very fun.
Then the home front was doing well too, having plenty of systems to choose from, as well as computers, since that was an important thing to consider, as the home computer was becoming more and more affordable (it was said back then that "games only" consoles would eventually disappear, which has proven to be untrue, over two decades later), along with tons of software...
...until the gaming crash of '83-84 hit. The market became TOO over-saturated with games and systems, so something had to give. Even though the later, more powerful systems of the Atari 5200 and the Colecovision blew away anything that proceeded them, ironically only the oldest of machines survived, being the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. The home vector machine of the Vectrex only lasted two years. Companies left and right vanished, Activision lost $600 million, Atari was losing millions by the day at one point, and arcades pretty much became near-extinct.
Although video games never were in any danger of totally disappearing (despite many proclaiming them as to being a "fad" back then), this would have been THE time for that to happen, if it ever did. However, Nintendo pretty much saved gaming with their wildly popular NES (and later various Game Boy ensembles). Due to Jack Trammel being in the process of bringing further ruin to Atari, he yanked the Atari 7800 out of mothballs, not bringing much competition to Nintendo, and even though technically superior to the NES, Sega's Master System didn't do much better (although that was here in the States, overseas it did much better). However, blowing everything away was the late 80s entry of Sega not giving up with their Genesis.
So that's a brief overview from me, others might just want to list favorites and all...
Before I get into video games, though, there was the puzzle explosion that started with the Rubik's Cube. There would later be Rubik's Revenge (an extra row of cubes!) and the Grenade that I knew of, but I only found out a couple of years ago upon reading about it online that there were tons of other Rubik puzzles as well. 'Course there were the knock-offs too, like an easy pyramid puzzle (don't recall the name of it), the Whip-It, and who knows how many others that you would see from period to period at school (some taken up by teachers in case you weren't careful enough).
Ok, video games! Even though the explosion started in the 70s with Space Invaders, arcades were doing well...good ones offered you 10-12 tokens for a buck, crappy ones only gave you 4-5 (how dare they!). Too many classics to mention for me (you guys can do that if you wish
), but I'll just mention the genres here: raster scan graphics (pretty much everything out there), "wireframe" vector (Star Wars, Star Trek, Asteroids Deluxe, Major Havoc), and the amazing laserdisc that made it look like you were either watching a freakin' cartoon (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace), some kind of sci-fi adventure (Star Rider, Astron Belt, Interstellar), or an airplane ride (M. A. C. H. 3, Firefox scenes taken from the movie, and Cobra Command looked like a cartoon plane ride, combining both aspects of it). Most cost fifty cents per play, expensive to a lot of poor gaming kids back then, and several of them had to be memorized to make it through, not being very fun.Then the home front was doing well too, having plenty of systems to choose from, as well as computers, since that was an important thing to consider, as the home computer was becoming more and more affordable (it was said back then that "games only" consoles would eventually disappear, which has proven to be untrue, over two decades later), along with tons of software...
...until the gaming crash of '83-84 hit. The market became TOO over-saturated with games and systems, so something had to give. Even though the later, more powerful systems of the Atari 5200 and the Colecovision blew away anything that proceeded them, ironically only the oldest of machines survived, being the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. The home vector machine of the Vectrex only lasted two years. Companies left and right vanished, Activision lost $600 million, Atari was losing millions by the day at one point, and arcades pretty much became near-extinct.
Although video games never were in any danger of totally disappearing (despite many proclaiming them as to being a "fad" back then), this would have been THE time for that to happen, if it ever did. However, Nintendo pretty much saved gaming with their wildly popular NES (and later various Game Boy ensembles). Due to Jack Trammel being in the process of bringing further ruin to Atari, he yanked the Atari 7800 out of mothballs, not bringing much competition to Nintendo, and even though technically superior to the NES, Sega's Master System didn't do much better (although that was here in the States, overseas it did much better). However, blowing everything away was the late 80s entry of Sega not giving up with their Genesis.
So that's a brief overview from me, others might just want to list favorites and all...
