For over 50 years, video games have been a significant part of popular culture. Born in the minds of creative engineers, games have grown from mere curiosities into a global industry worth billions of dollars.
For over 50 years, video games have been a significant part of popular culture. Born in the minds of creative engineers, games have grown from mere curiosities into a global industry worth billions of dollars.
I was born in 1976 and I started playing on an Atari 2600 in about 1980. I am constantly amazed at the progress I have witnessed in gaming and the incredibly increases in computing performance in that time.
I'm sure there are plenty for folk here who are of similar age and have also seen this.
I feel like the big advances that we used to get are smaller now, A game 10 years ago still looks good to me and even with the side by side comparisons I sometimes struggle to see the improvements in new tech these days.
Wonder what the next big thing will be![]()
The screenshot is indeed the DOS version but it's not radically different to how the original Amiga (below) and it was released in the same year (but after the initial Amiga launch).Seems to be showing the PC version in the picture
A journalistic exaggeration. While some games could certainly be loaded within a handful of minutes (here's an example of Jetpac taking 4 minutes to load and Robocop taking 8 minutes), there were titles that could easily stretch that to 30 minutes, before the use of fast loaders became commonplace. A lot, though, depended on the quality of the cassette player used, as not all were capable of letting the system achieve its peak baud rate. I can remember my first copy of Football Manager taking around 25 minutes or so.Invalid claim in the article, please fix: The average load time for a game [on Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum] wasn't 20 to 30 minutes - it was approximately 5 minutes. This can be checked by loading a tape file in an emulator of the 8-bit machine on a PC.
Well, there exist ZX Spectrum 48K multi-part games that take up to 30 minutes to progressively load all the levels. ZX Spectrum 128K load times can take up to 15 minutes. Then some 10 years later (year 1992 or so), some ZX Spectrum clones with a floppy drive could load the 48KB in a matter of just a few seconds.A journalistic exaggeration. While some games could certainly be loaded within a handful of minutes (here's an example of Jetpac taking 4 minutes to load and Robocop taking 8 minutes), there were titles that could easily stretch that to 30 minutes, before the use of fast loaders became commonplace. A lot, though, depended on the quality of the cassette player used, as not all were capable of letting the system achieve its peak baud rate. I can remember my first copy of Football Manager taking around 25 minutes or so.
However, it's a fair point, so I'll adjust the copy accordingly.
Everything before Doom bored me
What bothered me most about Wolfenstein was that every wall and door felt six feet thick and the lighting and colors for some reason really turned me off. I have never thought killing a dog was appropriate in any game but I'd kill Nazi's all day longI liked 2D games like Prince of Persia or Scorched Earth even before DOOM appeared.
But one game that I really hated and despised was Wolfenstein. A game with 2.5D graphics that consisted simply of killing Germans and german shepherds. I mean, if there ever existed a prototype for a propaganda game - it was Wolfenstein.
...The Commodore 64 hauled butt at the time. effortlessly more capable for gaming than the other offerings, here in NZ they sold tons of them.The Commodore 64 had a cartridge port, although that computer was mainly used with the extremely slow 1541 floppy drive. It was also the best-selling computer in the world for a considerable period of time.
...The IBM and Atari of the time had nothing on the Amiga. Multitasking and bus mastering spring to mind, but the custom hardware was the precursor for most of our gaming tech used now. I had an Amiga, I had friends with IBM's (WAY too expensive, and pathetically underpowered for the price) and Atari's (just...not as good. was always considered an also ran). If you look at the history of the tech, you can trace most of apples early stuff back to copying the way the Amiga did things.What was more important with the Amiga than the number of bits was that it had powerful support chips. It was the cooperative task delegation of those chips that made the platform what it was. The Apple Lisa had the same 68000 CPU but no sound chip, no color, and no GPU.