Video Games

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Stephen Keane

When the basic "electronic tennis" game, Pong, first appeared in American bars in 1972 it created a sensation that has only since been replicated by the 1990s Karaoke boom in Japan. In relative terms, of course, Pong was as fun and innovative in the 1970s as any video game now, but the basic principles of video gaming have always, in any case, remained the same--score the points, beat the enemy, come back for more. The term "video game" could only really be applied when Atari and Nintendo introduced game consoles into the home throughout the 1970s; the idea being that you would slot your Pong cartridges into the console and play the games through your television set--hence video rather than computer games. But the term has come to cover the main aspect of the medium, playing sight-and-sound games through any convenient screen.

In some sense, the arcade boom that began in 1978 took the group appeal out of video gaming. School children were still taking part in a mass fad, perhaps, but they were also cutting themselves off from others, with the distinction that while Pong required a human opponent, battling against pixellated aliens just pitched the player against the machine. Of course, after the release of George Lucas's blockbuster movie Star Wars in 1977, battling aliens became the rage in the first popular coin-operated machines, such as Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Galaxians. Breakout may have introduced a puzzle element and Pac Man offered a maze race, but video games have essentially always been based on the same principle: "your" pixels blasting, avoiding, or racing against "their" pixels. Technological developments, however, have made the experience of playing these games more visually and aurally realistic, to such an extent that you will not notice that you are only rearranging pixels.

With the introduction of Donkey Kong in 1981, there was an attempt to make a "story" as attractive as the "action." Hence the player now had a character to portray, in this case that of a boy rescuing a princess from an ape monster, as opposed to the previous standard of the player as "thing"--a tennis racquet, a spaceship, or a pac man. It is because of this sort of narrative appeal that Nintendo was able dominate the console market throughout the 1980s. Their 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), released in 1983, took away the market from the Atari 2600, even managing to compete with the personal computer boom--in fact, it is estimated that, by 1990, a third of American homes owned Nintendo consoles. Part of the success of Nintendo in the 1980s was not only their 8-bit monopoly but also the blanket marketing of their games. Again, part of the "humanizing" factor was to bring in a character as appealing as Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald, hence the introduction of Mario, the cute Italian-American plumber who would go on to save the world in as many imaginative variations on the platform game formula as possible. First appearing in the Mario Bros. coin-op in 1983, the NES Super Mario Bros. became the "greatest video game" of its generation in 1984, only to be surpassed by Super Mario 3 in 1988.

Following advances in video gaming is just a matter of tracing developments in the game consoles themselves (bearing in mind that, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, arcade machines and personal computers were also advancing the cause). When Sega introduced their 16-bit Mega Drive in 1989, Nintendo was caught off-guard in the "next generation" of console wars. Sega began the 1990s with the christening of a new hero, Sonic the Hedgehog, but Nintendo released their own 16-bit machine, the Super NES in 1990 and was able to win ground with the "greatest video game" of this next generation, Super Mario World. Such were the advances in technology, however, that the mid-1990s came to be characterized by the 32-bit wars, Nintendo seemingly missing out in 1994 when Sega introduced their Saturn and Sony entered the market with the Playstation. And it is the Playstation which came to dominate the market in America, Japan, and Europe, making games "trendy," fun, violent, and often intelligent enough to appeal to "children" of all ages, from three to 33.

For every quick-fire arcade variant, the Playstation also managed to follow the PC (Personal Computer) route into adventure gaming; and altogether combining both speed and strategy with "filmic" production values. Between 1994 and 1998, titles like Doom and Wipeout 2097 became instant classics, and for the growing number of Playstation fans, the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy series became ways of life. Although missing out on the 32-bit market, Nintendo headed the next "next generation" war with their Nintendo 64 in 1996. With 64-bits to play with, Nintendo's flagship title, Super Mario 64, took Mario out of the 2-dimensional platform world and into a whole new 3-dimensional environment. That games were becoming more like movies was demonstrated by one of the most successful film tie-ins ever, the intelligent and action-packed James Bond spy simulation, Goldeneye (1997); and that Nintendo could corner the same adult market as the Playstation was demonstrated by the glorious prehistoric gore of Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (1998).