Wednesday, 5 January 2011
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
History Of Video Games - Best of the Best
History Of Video Games
Arcade Classics
The arcade classics; Pac-Man, Asteroids and Space Invaders, are the most iconic of arcade games. That were developed in the late 70’s, 1980,1979 and1978 respectively.
Pac-Man
Pac Man was created by Namco Ltd. In 1980. becoming an immediate success and out performed Asteroids as the best selling game of the time going on to sell over 300,000 units.
Has won 8 Guinness world records in 2008 including first perfect Pac-man game by Billy Mitchell's and most successful coin operated games. It has been referenced numerous times in media, as well as becoming the most iconic video game of the 1980’s and is recognised as the unofficial symbol for video games.
As well as inspiring may life sized recreations involving either real people or robots, the event known as Pac-man Manhattan holds the Guinness world record for largest Pac-Man game ever in 2004.
It is my in my top 10 favourite games of all time being 8th, second if u only count arcade games. Game play is simplistic yet fun and addictive. The random actions of the ghosts makes it feel like they are chasing/hunting u down increasing the game playability.
Game graphics are simple but for the time they were conceived are spot on. Even compared to some of today's games which even given technological advancements have terrible graphics for the systems they are designed for and time they were created in.
Asteroids
Asteroids was an arcade game created by Atari in 1979 and was one of the most popular and influential games of the golden age of arcade games.
Its design was very simple, it was a 2-D vector display arcade game which revolved around the player flying a spaceship in an asteroid field frequented by flying saucers and its objective being to destroy as many asteroids and flying saucers as possible while trying to avoid the saucers counter fire and avoiding crashing into either one.
Asteroids popularity is and was so great that arcade owners had to install bigger coin boxes to hold the amount of coins that customers were spending on the game. And KLOV (Killer List Of Videogames) rated asteroids in the top 100 best video games of all times, and readers of KLOV rated it at the 7TH greatest video game of all time.
Since its conception 1979 it has been re-imagined, cloned, bootlegged and reintroduced as arcade classics for the latest generations of consoles such as; the Xbox 360 and PS3.
It has also been revealed that universal studios has won the rights to produce asteroids as a film, and will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, whom is noted for producing many high budget Hollywood films such as the Transformer trilogy, Shooter, RED and SALT.
Space Invaders
In 1980 after it was released it caused a shortage of 100¥ coins in Japan. It was created by the Taito Corporation in 1978 being one of the earliest videogames (by modern definition)
Space invaders as well as asteroids were two of the first shooter genre games, becoming incredibly popular in Japan, resulting in both speciality arcades opening with nothing but space invaders cabinets in them and the nationwide shortage of 100¥ coins in Japan and the subsequent production increase.
By 2007 it had earned the Taito corporation $500 million in revenue, the 1980 version Atari 2600 version was the first official licensing of an arcade game becoming the very first ‘killer application’ for video game consoles by quadrupling the gaming systems sales
Shigeru Miyamoto considers space invaders a game that revolutionised the gaming industry, as he was never interested in them before playing it. Also several publications ascribe the game with transitioning the industry from a novelty into a global industry also attributing it with shift from bars and arcades to more mainstream locals like restaurants and stores.
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