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What Do You Consider to be the Most Significant Event in the History of Gaming
- Thread starter Deleted member 4034
- Start date
The release of the NES.
The introduction of 3D graphics.
The introduction of the analogue stick.
To me these are the three most significant events in gaming.
The introduction of 3D graphics.
The introduction of the analogue stick.
To me these are the three most significant events in gaming.
Personally I think it would have to be either the brown box or Magnavox Odyssey. Bringing games out of the "amusements" world and into the home is probably the one I'd pick. It allowed for more than just diversions. Or maybe save games, making it possible to move toward more immersive game worlds.
As an aside I don't understand the reverence for the NES on this board It reads as the poster of being a certain age and of a certain region.
It's definitely not as historically important as Atari which was the first major home console. Then the crash happened, but even during the apparent dark period between 83 and 85 (or 87 if you prefer) videogames were doing fine on computers and in places not named North America. The C64 alone was selling two to three million units a year during this period. To think it would just go away is absurd and was never a real possibility.
I honestly wonder what you think would have happened if the NES didn't release? The arcade had bounced back by 86 and computers had continued to go strong the whole time. You think people wouldn't have seen the possibilities in the Megadrive in 89 or 90? Or do you think the USA becomes some backwater where games don't get played?
As an aside I don't understand the reverence for the NES on this board It reads as the poster of being a certain age and of a certain region.
It's definitely not as historically important as Atari which was the first major home console. Then the crash happened, but even during the apparent dark period between 83 and 85 (or 87 if you prefer) videogames were doing fine on computers and in places not named North America. The C64 alone was selling two to three million units a year during this period. To think it would just go away is absurd and was never a real possibility.
I honestly wonder what you think would have happened if the NES didn't release? The arcade had bounced back by 86 and computers had continued to go strong the whole time. You think people wouldn't have seen the possibilities in the Megadrive in 89 or 90? Or do you think the USA becomes some backwater where games don't get played?
Wasn't PSVR preceded by the Oculus Rift and HTC Vice? It's not like the latter have been made redundant.
I think without the NES and Super Mario home consoles would have continued to push the same type of arcade gaming that was dominant before it came out. Including joysticks instead of dpads and controllers. A lot of games where you tried to clear a static screen.
Nintendo kind of showed the way to modern console gaming IMO.
I am not sure what gaming looks like with those two.
Sony was the one that saw that market. Nintendo was still wanting to aim their stuff at kids and restrict what people put on their console. That's why the teens and college students gravitated towards Sony and Nintendo got snubbed as kiddy games.
The Internet. It let rest the world really know how shitty gaming culture can be through social and political repercussions.
Should have been first post.
Almost all of what constitutes gaming today was influenced by those early starts. Focus on confrontation. Collaborative aspect in creation. Vanguard tech used for futile purposes. Etc.
So yeah, (video) gaming birth was its most significant event.
(I know it's debatable whether or not Spacewar is the first video game, but you get the point I guess)
The NES seen strictly as a console (read hardware) is mostly irrelevant. It's mostly a by-the-book design of its time.
NES software, on the other hand, is a revolution.
NES games especially Miyamoto ones were among the first games which understood they weren't played in amusements parks anymore but in the living room. All of their game designs stem from that.
I would say Nintendo deciding to enter the console market.
Without that, we would still have gaming today obviously, but it would look completely different.
Without that, we would still have gaming today obviously, but it would look completely different.
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The big ones that come to mind:
- Atari 2600: Brought video games to the mass market in North America
- NES: Saved video games
- Street Fighter II/Mortal Kombat: I don't know man, seems like this needs to be here
- Ultima Online: First MMO
- Mario 64: Y'know
- PC Hardware acceleration: Self-explanatory
- Battlefield 1942: First successful large scale online shooter
- Final Fantasy VII: JRPG floodgates in the West
- Nintendo DS and the mass market: Nintendogs, Brain Age, it was a weird time, seeing non-gamers carrying their DS' around
- Steam: First big online PC games shop and front-end
- Xbox Live: Online service done well on consoles
- Horse Armor: Floodgates
- Wii: Motion controls become a "normal" control method
- Occulus: First real VR (too bad I get sick in that shit)
Pong. It pretty much created the video arcade. If not for that it's possible that computer games might have remained a weird novelty on campuses for another decade. Who knows what we might not have today if the timetable had been different.
I agree with you.
Especially Super Mario Bros. Gaming was so much smaller back then and it was so long ago that most people don't realize what a tsunami like impact that game had on us at the time.
I was already really into gaming before the NES playing on computer, at the arcade and of course on my trusty Atari but playing Mario for the first time blew us all away. I don't think anyone had ever seen anything quite like it. You could probably say the same of later games like Zelda or maybe some other NES games, but Mario was the one that for me kind of opened my eyes.
Credits where its due, those are not my words originally (though I thoroughly agree with them, obviously):
I'm sorry, there are no english pages, so I point to french wikipedia pages:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathieu_Triclot
IIRC, those concepts were mostly developed in this book:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophie_des_jeux_vidéo
Truly fascinating book IMO (I don't know if there is an english translation).
As you mentioned, the big thing people tend to forget is that "back in the day" games were built with arcade cabinets in mind.
Those Miyamoto games, especially the Mario/Zelda duo, were among the first games built taking into account the fact that they would be played in a living room, either on a couch or directly sitting on the floor (as many kids of this time surely fondly remember), with all that implies in terms of playtime and overall "posture".
I mean the truth is that Sony popularized console gaming and was about to bring the same experiences to gamers throughout the world. The NES and even the 16bit consoles in comparison were almost niche in their popularity.
The majority of gamers started gaming way after the NES so its hard for most people to grasp how groundbreaking some of that stuff was.
I am not into it but smartphone gaming is by far the biggest market now they kind of took what Sony did for consoles and expanded it even more.
This isn't true. Like. At. All.
NES games like Mario came out in 1985.
In the same year, Ultima IV and The Bards Tale II were released on the Apple II.
Note the II and IV in the title. Those were sequels to massive titles that long understood they weren't played in "amusement parks".
"Back in the day" games weren't built with "arcade cabinets" in mind, many were created for home audiences.
Great question. I'd say Sony and Nintendo's fallout, leading to the birth of the PlayStation as the dominant brand the last 20+ years,may be the singularly more relevant event in modern gaming. What the NES did for the home market 30 years ago deserves a strong honorable mention, if not equally as important.
I played on PC and I played Ultima before the NES (though I was too young and it was too complex for me as a kid to really finish them) but that was an RPG (though weirdly I didn't think I knew the term until I read it in a magazine years later).
I don't remember anything remotely like it before Super Mario Bros. And I remember a ton of games similar to that on every platform after it.
I also do agree with HBK that MOST games were emulating arcade cabinets. I was there and most games, even on PC, were single screen experiences. You are right that there were games that were not single screen on the PC, but I only remember adventure games and rpgs. None of which granted you a lot of if any control of the character.
You can't credit Super Mario with every advancement. Games like Ultima were really, really, really ahead of their time. As were other adventure games on the PC, where nothing on console came close to them for many years. But you also can't discount how revolutionary Super Mario was when it came out either.
This isn't anywhere close to being true. Look at the games that were being made for pre crash consoles like Mattel's intellivision.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was a proto-rpg with difficulty levels, randomly generated dungeons, a boss, and an ending...in 1982.
It wasn't unique either. That system had a ton of games exclusive to it designed for the console. Microsurgeon, B-17 Bomber, Dracula, Space Spartans, Utopia etc were light years past what was being done with arcades, and were designed with the home console in mind.
Many of the intellivision exclusive games were completely unplayable on any other system, because the controller Mattel designed for that thing was not a joystick, but an 8 way directional disk, with 4 shoulder triggers and ten face buttons. Games shipped with plastic overlays to make the face buttons context sensitive with graphics specific to the game being played.
It was SO busy that the NES controller with only two action buttons was a huge step DOWN.
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I understand that - but is that because they didn't exist, or because you just don't know them? Jump Bug and Pac-Land both predated and influenced mario bros, for example.
I mean, I'm not doubting Mario Bros to be influential. But it wasn't revolutionary, it was iterationary.
Ultima, well, I don't think it was *really* ahead of it's time. It just represents another branch of game development that had been going on for years - with many different variants and representations. Games of its like (like the proto-Ultima Akalabeth) had been around since 1979! I'm just saying this to point out that games as a whole had long since left the "one screen arcade" design behind by 1985 - games that did so had been going strong for over six years by then.
That is not to disparage Zelda or Mario Bros. Again: I REALLY love the original Zelda, it formed my gaming taste to this day (and is why I love La Mulana 2 so much, while finding a lot of other recent games boring). I am just saying that it's not something that formed out of thin air there, and that if Nintendo had never existed, if Miyamoto had become a painter, we'd still have had plenty of non-arcade games. They were already strong at the time.
Most of those games were complex ones made with "computers" in mind. Those games were undoable on consoles for a host of reasons, but those can be summarized as "consoles are not home computers" (even though they obviously are computers at home, heh).
What NES brought was games that were neither built for arcade cabinets, nor desks. They were made for the living room. It's not so much a matter of kids playing than a matter of overall accessibility. You don't need to read a manual to play The Legend of Zelda. I don't remember all those games you quoted, but most of them definitely were hardly playable "right off the bat".
Also some of those games (namely Ultima) while seen today as "ahead of their time" can also be summarized as a computerization of pen and paper RPGs. Not to dismiss their achievement, but there are games like Ultima before it. They're just not video games. There nothing in the game world that resembles Mario or Zelda.
No one is disputing that. Or at least I don't think so.
It's just that Nintendo/Miyamoto were the ones to bring those games to the masses.
The intellivision was a home console made by Mattel in 1979. It wasn't a computer and had many games for kids. As I mentioned, MOST of the games made for it were exclusive to it, made by Mattel's internal programming team. They weren't ports.
It could play 2600 games just fine as well with an adapter (for the original) or without one for later revisions.
Mattel followed it up with the intellivision 2 in 1983 that was cheaper to manufacture to broaden it's appeal and lower the price point. The original debuted in 1979 for $299.
It was aimed EXACTLY at the same audience the 2600 and the NES were. All were playable "off the bat" few needed manuals, all were designed for the living room first, because the INTV was a console designed to be connected to living room televisions. It wasnt a computer.
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I'm sorry I also need to comment on that because I really take issue with how this story is often presented.
The whole history of video-games is that of democratization. Of course there were big steps towards that. Atari VCS 2600. Nintendo Family Computer. And of course Sony's PlayStation. But they were step-stones. The case of NES is a bit peculiar because of the US video game crash but I doubt we'd have a lot less gamers now if Sony didn't stepped in and released the PlayStation.
The whole history of video games is that more people keep getting into it over time, no matter the platform, or dare I even say no matter the form.
There's obviously no number one correct answer to this but here are a few under the radar ones:
- The PS2 launching with a DVD drive
- The Wii launching at $250 with Wii Sports
- Final Fantasy XI going MMO
- GTA deciding to spinoff III into Vice City and San Andreas instead of going for a full numbered sequel that would've taken a lot longer to make
- As someone said before, Morrowind on the Xbox was a big big big deal that people forget about
- Steam required to play Counter-Strike and being bundled in with Half Life 2
- The Orange Box
- Street Fighter IV being a hit
- LPs and Streaming taking off
- The PS2 launching with a DVD drive
- The Wii launching at $250 with Wii Sports
- Final Fantasy XI going MMO
- GTA deciding to spinoff III into Vice City and San Andreas instead of going for a full numbered sequel that would've taken a lot longer to make
- As someone said before, Morrowind on the Xbox was a big big big deal that people forget about
- Steam required to play Counter-Strike and being bundled in with Half Life 2
- The Orange Box
- Street Fighter IV being a hit
- LPs and Streaming taking off
That's not the matter. Those games were mostly either arcade games at heart, or console versions of computer games.
There's nothing resembling Mario or Zelda before them (please don't say Pitfall). Of course they weren't created in a vacuum and if it was not for Miyamoto it would probably have been another dude who made those games (or similar games).
But the history is that Nintendo brought those games to the masses with its 60 million NESes around the world.
