Tape Dreamcast

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Gaming - A Short History

From its humble yet exciting beginnings in the early 1980’s through to today’s state of the art consoles the video game industry has progressed exponentially and will continue to do so.

In the 1980’s Sinclair and Commodore were the pioneers of the games industry. It was necessary to spend countless hours typing in Basic code out of a magazine to enable a low resolution blob to move around the screen one agonising square after another. Then games started coming on audio cassette tapes. You had to connect your cassette recorder to your computer via a flimsy connector. Also the memory pack was loosely connected to the computer. One gentle breeze in the wrong direction would break the contact and you’d lose everything. You’d spend 20 minutes loading a game into the thing only for the dreaded ‘Syntax Error’ to appear and you’d have to start again. Everything was so slow, so laborious and so delicate yet WE LOVED IT!

We didn’t care that our computers looked like pieces of cheese. We didn’t care that you had to push hard on a lifeless, dead skin type of keyboard for it to register. We even didn’t care that all of the games we played looked like they were made out of LEGO bricks. We were making our own games and that was amazing.

These monsters of computer gaming were soon outdated by far superior models featuring sound, more colours and even a built in cassette recorder! Some even had 64K of RAM. Next came computers with joysticks and some even had disk drives for faster loading times. This also led the way for bigger, better games. The games for these computers were, by comparison, massive improvements in graphic appearance and sound yet they still had loads of playability.

Then the console wars began. Home computers were about to die and be replaced by pure gaming machines. Nintendo and Sega were to introduce various incarnations with ever increasing technical specs. Nintendo were to win the war long term but they didn’t always have it their own way. A couple of bad decisions by Sega and perhaps some over ambitious ideas led to their eventual exit from the console market. A real shame in my opinion as their last console, the Dreamcast, was an excellent machine with some visionary stuff included.

A new contender was to enter the massive console market and was about to change things forever. Sony introduced their Playstation. A CD based console with amazing graphics, a great controller and an excellent library of games which blew the competitors away. This console was to dominate the market until a new contender was released, the Playstation 2! The PS2 (as it was called) featured a DVD drive which increased the capacity of the media games could be stored on thus increasing the size and complexity of games.

Shortly after this, yet another new competitor entered the market. Microsoft launched their Xbox to the world and, after a slow start, proceeded to do very well.

This leads me onto today’s consoles. The market today is dominated by three manufacturers: Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Consoles today are more powerful and advanced than anybody could have dreamed of back in the day of the ZX81 and BBC Micro.

Today gaming has been focused on the multiplayer aspects and in particular, online multiplayer. The ability to connect with people all over the world and play games with them as though they are in the same room as you has liberated the games industry but has also brought with it a new set of issues and dangers.

But what of the future? Well, the possibilities are endless. The technology involved is evolving and developing quicker than ever. The only limit will eventually be our imagination. Exciting times!

Trevor Mayhew

About the Author

Trevor Mayhew is the founder and owner of www.freestuffgiveaway.co.uk. A site dedicated to giving the best, most concise information on the referral method of marketing

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movie of the past year - Toy Story

favorite movie of all time - Lion King

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skaterboarder - Tony Hawk

favorite place to buy clothes - Hot Topic

last album you bought - The Emptiness By Alesana

favorite movie based on books - Twilight

favorite video game - Mario LOL

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