The rise of the arcade started in the 1970s with the very first arcade game, Computer Space. It was released in 1971 and was the first to be publicly available on the market. To beat the game, you had to fly a rocket in space and destroy multiple flying saucers. It was reported to be too hard to beat in a bar-like setting.
The next game to help shape the arcade era was Pong, which was released in 1972. Pong was the digital version of table tennis and became a hit among audiences due to its simple mastery and easy controls.
The peak of the arcade era lasted from 1978 to 1983 with the release of Space Invaders in both the U.S. and Japan which began the golden age of arcades. Some games that were released during this age were Tetris, Pac-Man, Frogger, Centipede, and Donkey Kong. The release of new games also caused new companies to emerge, such as Nintendo, Sega, and Atari, which paved the way for modern games.
The decline of the arcade era began in the mid-1990s when home consoles became more commonplace. Many people didn’t see the purpose of going to an arcade since home consoles began to mimic the experience of an arcade at home accurately.
The composite era began with Super Mario Bros in 1985. The game is a proper example of what we call a compost game as the player uses platform mechanics to solve action game problems. Composite games tend to keep their gameplay interesting by avoiding the overtaxing of a single group of skills as the player is never using a set of skills for long enough that they get bored of it. We still have composite games, many of which are called “original” even though they are composites of two already established games.
In 2005 and 2006, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Sony’s PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii kicked off the modern age of high-definition gaming. This allowed games to get to a higher pixel count than standard definition which gave the player more visual information about the game and an advantage in overall situational awareness. Toward the end of 2010, video games spread to social media platforms and mobile devices, reaching a more casual gaming audience. NVidia and AMD introduced graphic cards in 2020 with hardware support in real-time which was a major component introduced with Microsoft and Sony’s next consoles. Technological improvement has furthered the ability to display highly detailed textures, allowing for photorealism in rendered video game scenes.
With the advancement of technology, we will always be at a point where we can improve from the latest tech. We might get to a point where computers might not be used as much in the future with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality. In the future Virtual Reality might get to a point where it will be hard to tell the difference between reality and Virtual Reality which might be the result of the higher pixel count and high-definition on the tech they will be using.
