One afternoon as I played an original Nintendo game (Metroid to be exact) on a little portable Gameboy SP, I wondered....?
Will my kids think the PSP or Nintendo DS are lame, old, and antiquated. What will be the response when I say I played video games (not even portable) that were measured in bits, not mega-pixels, milli-flops, etc....
Our games did not play movies or have cute "cut-scenes". Some of the first games barley has sound or even text, and yet we loved them and paid top dollar for them.
For all you kids and parents out there, I present to you the last 25 years of gaming (give or take) just to show you new kids just how far our video games have come.
1977 The Video Game revolution begins at home with the Atari 2600.
The Atari 2600 was the true pioneer of the dedicated home video game system. It flaunted 4kbyte games. Avergae game on a PC or Video System is no in the Mega and Gigabytes range. Later games would move to 8kbyte range using a special process of paging ROM files.
Or in lamens terms. You could fit 217,500 Atari 2600 games on CD-ROM, almost 4 times that on a DVD. Ouch!
The 2600 had a modest joystick and a single button. An optional accessory included slider paddles for such masterful games like Pong. Unlike today's digital switches and buttons this machine was mechanical with large toggle switches for power and reset.
Prepare your eyes folks for a look at what we played long before Halo was even a dream.
Here are two screen caps from Defender and Star Wars - The Empire Strikes back. There were no 3D graphics back then or pixel smoothing. We were amazed to have pixels at all.
The Console fetched a modest price of $199.00 when it first came out and included 9 (Yup! 9) games.
While you may laugh at this system it stayed arounf until 1990 (the longest of any system to date) and included several hundred games. With it's 8bit CPU power,
For a few years the Atari 2600 would reign as the only true home video game system until...