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| 8 bit wut? |
Young kids on the internets these days run around putting their
X Box Ones and Playstations Fours on a pedestal screaming at the top of their
lungs the glories of their favorite system and calling those who like other consoles
"Noob". They think they're so entrenched in their "console
wars" talking about which version of Assassin's
Creed 4: Black Flag is slightly better than the other. Ah, these kids. They
don't know what a REAL console war is about. All them fancy gizamadoos and
multiplat games... they're pretty much the same console with a different logo
on the front. That's not a console war. The REAL console wars happened back in
the day, during the 80s and the 90s, when gaming, like a GLORIOUS phoenix, rose
from the ashes of the Great Crash of 1983 to become the large blob of sameness
that it is today. Join me, now. Let me tell you a story. A story of a great
industry that fell, and then rose, and that at war with itself grew
exponentially, until it forgot what it had originally been, to become what it is
today.
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| E.T., the worst videogame ever, and cause of the Great Crash. |
It was 1982 and gaming had been on a rise in American
popular culture. Space Invader and Pong were all the rage. In 1993 the Twin
Galaxies Arcade put together a team of kids that every other kid in the US
hated, because they got to travel around and play videogames and be cool. THEY
were cool gamers. The rest of us? Well, back then playing videogames was a nerd
thing. If you owned an Atari you were a nerd. Then the game industry collapsed.
A horrible thing called E.T. The Videogame was released, and that was the last
straw. People lost interest in an industry oversaturated with crappy products
(yes, back then most games were made of fail and suck), and between E.T., the
Atari port of Pac Man, and that most horrid of things Custer's Revenge, the Trinity
of Sucktitude descended unto the videogame landscape. Those were sucky years to be a gamer. Most
gamers had all the same games - Yar's Revenge, Jungle Hunt, Pitfall, and by and
large they lost interest in most of them.
