This discussion will suffer in that I was born in 1975. I was too young to experience what it was like when Atari's 2600 was for all intents and purposes the only Video Game System. I was one of the lucky ones, born late enough to have a Christmas of alternatives--in early 1981, my Dad bought Intellivision.
In 1983, with the advent and success of the Apple II, Commodore C-64, and IBM PC, homeowners forgot about Home Video Game Systems. Their PCs outputted better graphics and more complex games than either Atari or Intellivision, and xclusively games-based systems died a quiet death.
Then came The Legend Of Zelda. This was the game that made me stop playing The Bard's Tale II and drove me to beg for NES for Christmas. It was a good Christmas. I got NES, but not Zelda. Do you know how much Zelda cost when it came out? $39.95 In 1987, that was wicked expensive. How was I going to get that much money?
When Intellivision was introduced, Mattel promised the unit would be incredibly expandable, that it, with components, would become a PC. While the company showed great foresight in planning to conquer video gaming and the up-and-coming PC market in one felled swoop, their "components" never materialized and the company collapsed under the weight of the other-worldly promise it had made in an effort to help salesl. In 1981, the Federal Trade Commission ordered that Mattel pay $10,000 every month for as long as these promised components failed to appear. Atari was, obviously, laughing, as their competition, whose marginally superior graphics were by then a deep threat, was sidelined. No longer a simple matter of the "annoying disc control", Intellivision was a lie, and with the Commodore C-64, Mattel was already doomed when the video game crash of 1983 hit.
So what did these systems mean? What did the 2600 represent? In the early days of competition between Atari and Intellivision, the former looked like a toy--basic games, a joystick and one button. Intellivision, believe it or not, looked hi-tech, what with its 12-key numeric pad and sleek disc controller. It was, in both the media and ignorant public's minds, a forward-thinking purchase, which is a sobering thought to be sure.
For about three years, these two machines battled for dominance of the video game market. Intellivision paid in blood or teeth for the exclusive rights to make video games based on the movie Tron, which, in its year of release, was panned worse than later sci-fi flops like Dune. Mattel ate the bid in a big way; 1, the Tron games hardly replicated Disney's fantastic imagery, and 2) Coleco hit the same year.
Colecovision was met in stores with the Atari 5200, designed to compete with the obviously superior graphics Nintendo had captured. If you wanted to play Donkey Kong, you wanted to play it on Colecovision, but the system was really expensive--it's the same now. N64 comes out, it costs an arm and a leg. And like the N64 (its shadowy modern counterpart), Colecovision had problems getting games out. So, with a seriosuly limited number of titles, the comparitively gorgeous graphics of Colecovision appeared on only the wealthiest kids' TV screens (assuming only kids play video games). There was only one kid in my town with a Colecovision system, but I only went over his house once to play it. He wasn't a loser or something twisted like that--I wasn't using the kid for his computer--he was actually more popular than I was. When I got over his house, though, I realized why he never had many friends over. sadly, his father was never around, and his mother was an alcoholic. His brother beat the crap out of him in front of me, and I never went back. As much as I loved Cosmic Avenger (the mega-game), I was too scared to go over his house again. But I got one taste of the mythic Colecovision console, and it ruled. He even had the steering wheel for Hang On...that was unreal--in 1982, at the age of seven, I was driving a computerized car. Colecovision's competition wasn't selling as a cheaper alternative anyway--even with the money from the success of the 2600 model, Atari's 5200 did terribly in stores. Initial response was low, and the next year was the 1983 crash, a year which supply outweighed demand by something like three-hundred percent. Literally.
For that reason, and pretty much that reason alone, not one video game system was released with any financing until 1986, when Nintendo decided that their 8-bit NES were remarkable enough to sell.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The Atari 5200 was dope, and I need to talk about it, because my friend had it and I loved it. The 5200's games looked as good as any coin-ops out there in 1982 and it made us all drool. Pole Position in particular. But owning the 5200 was pretty much the same as owning a Coleco. Psychologically, it meant you were a rich kid or were spoiled, because we all knew you had Atari or Intellivision--if your parents were willing to pay twice as much for a marginally superior system a scant two years (or less) later, you were graced. Now, my Dad was making good bucks back then--why didn't I have one of these coveted systems once our Intellivision (the original 1978 model--a huge black thing with silver bars glued on that always fell off) broke? Because Intellivision, in 1981, released Intellivision II, which was the exact same hardware as I but was half the size and housed in a white casing (which, admittedly, looked wicked futuristic at the time). Also, with INTV II came a host of their promised components (I guess the fines were pretty steep): A piano keyboard, a re-vamped Intellivoice (an unpopular device that they made five or six "talking" games for--a synthesized human voice says relevant things to you during game play). Intellivision also introduced an insane idea: Cable games. For a couple of bucks a month, you could rent this box that allowed you to download from a selection of Intellivision titles every month, provided that you had cable TV. Now, in 1982, I didn't even know what Cable TV was. We had some five-channel thing called Star TV for about seven months before my Dad got sick of locking the thing at night so I wouldn't sneak down to turn on the Adult channel. Actually, he was probably more sick of the same movies looping endlessly. Anyway, I didn't even hear of anyone ever having this cable thing, but I knew it existed because I was in the Intellivision club and the newsletter said it did. This scheme failed because 1) few people had cable, and 2) two kids from New Jersey figured out that if you hooked the downloader box up to your IBM, you could decode the programming script and write your own games. In their ignorance, they presented Mattel with a game they'd created called Bump N' Jump. As I heard it, these same kids went on to form Data East, a company that was wildly successful in the mid-to-late 80s with coin-op and NES hits like Ikari Warriors. They were paid for Bump N' Jump--Mattel bought the game outright for some miniscule initial fee to ensure the kids made nothing off of the sales of the game--and it became Intellivision's biggest seller in 1983. Mattel quietly phased out cable downloading before any further piracies occurred.
But duh, PC makers got lazy. Failing to realize that games were more than half the utility of home owned PCs, and faced with the demand for better and faster machines, the all purpose PC couldn't catch up with the single-product video game system market. Nintendo, already a giant in Japan, released its Nintendo Entertainment System in late 1985, confident that their graphics, vastly superior to PC titles like Captain Goodnight, Wings Of Fury, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, and, obviously, text-adventures, would sell like hotcakes. The NES exploded over Christmas of 1986; the stunning colors and fluid motion in games like Super Mario Brothers (included with the Basic Set) drove kids nuts.
I had an Apple IIc. I got it for my 9th birthday. I was programming in BASIC and ProDos, making databases of all my audio cassettes, and playing games like The Search for the Most Amazing Thing, Zork, and the tiny games that fit four to a floppy disk (the really floppy disks--the big five inch jobs). Choplifter, Robotron 2084, and Mario Bros. Montezuma's Revenge, Aquatron and Wavy Navy; these were the games I spent years mastering. The Zork sequels--all-mind-boggling...anything from Infocom. So when NES came out, it was quite a slap in the face. Everyone stopped playing games on their computers. I had no one to bounce ideas off of in solving games. Everyone wanted to run in one direction and shoot fireballs at mushrooms. I couldn't understand. I mean, the initial Nintendo games sucked...anyone remember Athena? There were so many bugs in that game you could only play it if you were lucky. Remember Elevator Action and Renegade? I couldn't understand why people liked this stupid machine.
My answer was to starve myself. Instead of eating lunch at school, I'd save the two bucks, go marginally hungry, and eat when I got back from school. Now, I'm sure a lot of you did the same at various times in your life, but I completely re-adjusted to this. I did this from the time I was twelve until I graduated from High School. At some point in the mix, my lunch money stash was buying me pitiful dime-bags from this kid in Kingston, but we'll talk about that some other time. Anyway, do the math. Two bucks a day, five days a week = four weeks. A month later, I bought The Legend Of Zelda and spent all day and night playing it. By the time Nintendo Power came out with the map of the game, I had already made one up myself. Total geek, right? I could have easily written their special Zelda issue...
Nintendo took over my computing life, as the Apple IIGS came out and was way too expensive for my family. The Apple IIc, with the exception of the Tandy TRS-80 my aunt gave us in 1980, remains he only home computer system my household has ever seen.
Then magic happened. Local video stores started renting Nintendo games. Between 1988 and 89, my best friend and I beat every game on the market (well, every game that had an ending). Faxanadu is a particularly bright memory of a snow day put to good use. I was the first kid in town to beat Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson's Punch Out! (before he was removed from the game for beating his wife). I was going to enter that stupid Nintendo contest they had, but I was too old by the time it came around--I would have suffered rank humiliation. The kid from my town that did enter (who was younger than me) was an outcast for months afterwards. Remember that movie The Wizard with Fred Savage? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
Video games have matured at the same rate I have, I swear. It's unfortunate to think that as games become more realistic, they will one day pass the mark, will top off at absolutely virtual reality, the game I fantasized about as a kid: The World. You know, the entire planet in game form, where you can do anything, and face the exact same consequences you would ordinarily. You can go to virtual court, virtual jail, kill virtual cops, rob virtual stores and go on virtual cross-country crime sprees. When you die, game over.