The History of Gaming Part 2!(week 3)

OK , last week I talked about the first few decades of gaming. In this blog entry I'm going to talk about the "middle ages", this includes the 1980's to 1990's.

1980's: a Japanese company called "Namco" release "Puck-Man" soon retitled to "Pac-Man". Pac Man became a huge hit and is still a classic even to this day, it was renamed to Pac man because Namco feared that American consumers may renamed/nickname the title to something offensive. A year later in 1981 Nintendo release Donkey Kong, another classic even till this day. However Nintendo seem to beat the dead horse and I'm surprised no donkey Kong titles have been released for the Wii yet, but we shall wait and see. Another Milestone of this decade is Microsoft's flight simulator, they too join the "arms race". '85 Tetris is released, therefore reaching another milestone of gaming history in this decade. 1986 saw the release of the NES by Nintendo, this i believe is the start of a new page of gaming history. Consoles become a common item in the house hold.

1990's: Things start to get interesting in the gaming world and different companies battle it out to become the leading producer of consoles. Sega release their Genesis console and Nintendo release the Super NES. The gaming community is starting to become a serious income for some countries (i.e. Japan). '91 sees the release of many classic titles such as Street Fighter 2 and Civilizations. '92 sees the epic release of Mortal Combat, this game sets the record straight for future fighting platforms. Mortal Combat soon becomes a house hold name title and it is released as a arcade game and soon to be films. '94 sees the establishment of the ESRB system that rates games making sure that the right people of certain ages can only play games designed for their age group. '95 see the release of CD consoles such as the Sega Saturn and PlayStation. Later on into the decade the gaming industry sees more advances, including the next-gen consoles such as the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. Game consoles become smaller and smaller like the GameBoy. Also with the release of the Dreamcast is the start of online gaming, the Dreamcast is built in with a 56k modem that allows players to play head to head over the Internet.
The start of Internet gaming is the first major milestone in gaming history and opens up more horizons for the Gaming industry.