Looking back at how gaming was in decades past can create an important perspective on the present. In some cases, it can bring back ideas that will help drive the future of gaming. Creating a picture of gaming trends in past decades can help contextualize the present.
In the case of video games, there is no better decade to look at than the decade in which the modern gaming hobby got started: The 1980s. With the first home consoles that were capable of rendering a truly satisfying replica of the arcade experience in the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System, video games had finally touched down in the home and were making their presence known.
10 Pack-In Games Sold Other Video Games
When it was released in 1985, the Nintendo Entertainment System reintroduced video game consoles to North America. The NES was a revolutionary console in many ways, but Nintendo also broke ground with its choice of pack-in games. The safe choice would have been Donkey Kong, a proven arcade hit that the NES could render extremely well, but Nintendo instead chose Super Mario Bros., a brand-new title that was sweeping Japan.
The choice was a wise one. The sprawling game made their competitors’ arcade-port pack-ins, Atari’s Centipede and Sega’s Hang-On look behind the times. Modern consoles, however, have generally eschewed pack-in games for their basic bundles, instead shipping them with demo samplers.
9 Games Spawned Whole New Genres
The 1980s were a time of unparalleled creativity for games. The decade began with simple single-screen platformers like Nintendo’s Donkey Kong and Sega’s Flicky as major hits. It ended with the earliest first-person shooters like MIDI Maze, which was converted to Faceball 2000 on the Nintendo Game Boy.
Genres like puzzle games, Metroidvania platformers, and FPS came of age in the 1980s. While later decades added more and more tools to the video game toolbox, these genres have been cornerstones of the medium ever since.
8 Video Arcades Were Where It Was At
There’s something to be said for the idea that online gaming is the modern arcade. At the same time, the experience of being together with other people in a dimly lit space is a unique one to that space and time.
Especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people long for close contact again. Even though video arcades still exist, the modern focus on redemption games and oversized cell phone games is begging for games to be built that take full advantage of the size and cooling available in an arcade cabinet.
7 Rapid Development Led To A Proliferation Of Games
Video games in the 1980s weren’t the multi-million-dollar triple-A affairs of today. Even the biggest and best games were developed in a hurry, typically taking about six to nine months to develop.
Fast development had its drawbacks and led to the Video Game Crash of 1983. But it also meant that new, high-quality games could come at a fast clip. Nintendo and Sega took different tacks in taming the flood. Nintendo’s Seal of Quality meant that games for the NES had to be fully compatible and couldn’t outright crash the console. Sega simply released everything themselves.
6 Video Game Magazines Organized The Roar Of Releases For Fans
Dozens of third-party publishers were producing titles for the Nintendo Entertainment System in the late 1980s. It would have been almost as daunting a task to determine which games were worth playing during the late 1980s as it had been in 1982. But the gaming public had allies on their side.
Advertisement-supported but fiercely independent, magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro prided themselves on reviewing everything that came out every month. Even when their reviews contradicted the line put out by house organs like Atari Age and Nintendo Power, these magazines gave fans a view of the ever-evolving landscape. At the same time, they were more formal and organized than the constant flood of online reviews that characterizes the gaming press today.
5 Creative Localizations Made For Customized Experiences
In the late 1980s, “Teddy Boy” was a fad in Japan. Wearing elaborate bouffant hairstyles and rebellious clothes, including strong use of black, Teddy Boys were the Japanese equivalent of Rockabillies. Many games like Nekketsu Koha Kunio-Kun had to be aggressively localized, as the rockabilly fad had largely subsided in the US by the mid-1980s.
Kunio-Kun’s translation, Renegade, inspired by the movie The Warriors, spawned the spiritual sequel Double Dragon, an international mega-hit. This trend continued into the early 1990s, with many role-playing games needing significant localization work to be comprehensible in English. SquareSoft’s US head of translation Ted Woolsey became particularly famous for his work.
4 Puzzle Games Were Mainstream Hits
While puzzle games remain a consistently popular genre in 2022, they are more and more relegated to the doldrums of smartphone casual games, and their design space is increasingly dominated by match-3 games.
Although puzzle games had been around since the early days of video games, they took off when Alexey Pajitnov’s instant classic Tetris came to the West in 1986. Its popularity rocketed the Nintendo Gameboy to universal acclaim when it was named as the Western pack-in title in 1989, displacing Super Mario Land.
3 Game Cheat Devices Opened Up Customized Ways To Play
One of the trends that Nintendo tried more than anything else to quash was the cheat devices. Taking the form of a stubby cartridge that connected to a video game cartridge, cheat devices were an intriguing way to change the game.
The original cheat device was the CodeMasters Game Genie. With it, players were able to ease many of the difficulties of NES-era games and tip the curve back in their favor. Though this introduced a debate over whether cheating at video games was acceptable, many players still did it because the games of the period were simply extremely difficult, often in unfair ways.
2 Game Rentals Were The Best Way To Try Games Out
It’s easy to look at the 1980s and '90s game rentals as a relic of a bygone era with modern demos being so prevalent, but a demo is very seldom an accurate picture of the whole game. After the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, video game rentals exploded.
Rental shops bought video games, usually through distributors but sometimes, especially for very small shops, through retail. And unlike a modern demo, rental games were literally the entire game. A player could conceivably play the whole game in a rental period, usually three to four days.
1 No Established Genre Boundaries Created New Ways To Play
In the 1980s, especially after the Video Game Crash of 1983, there were no established boundaries around game genres. With video games at the time primarily defined by the arcades, as opposed to home video game consoles like the then-nascent Nintendo Entertainment System, there were few of the genre boundaries that are now considered obvious.
Games like Rescue: The Embassy Mission and Zelda II: The Adventures of Link freely changed genres as their designers saw fit, while Super Mario Bros. 2 and Kid Icarus turned platformer logic on its head by embracing vertical as well as horizontal scrolling. The options were seemingly limitless.