Gaming "eras": your opinion?

[Lucas]

What's your most beloved "gaming era", if any?

Inevitably, it might be related to your age at that particular moment: so, beside choosing one from that  angle, what do you consider the most innovative, interesting one?

I think it's also stimulating (well, at least from a "mid-summer lazyness" heat-inducing lazyness point of view :P) to try splitting them somehow. I already wrote a list, but some of them intertwine, as expected.  From what I know, before 1977, gaming hardware and software was pretty sparse, so I think we should start with the rise of Intellivision/Colecovision/VCS (atari 2600).

1976 - 1983: The beginning and the Apex of Atari 8-bit systems
1983 - 1987: Commodore 64/128 rules supreme
1987-1991: Amiga vs Atari ST (and Amstrad and Spectrum)
1988 - 1994: consoles and other, "smaller" gaming devices are born (from Sega Megadrive to the birth of Playstation 1)
1990 - 1995: the "PC" becomes a "true" gaming machine: from Origin's Wing Commander, to Civilization and the golden age of Adventure Games
1996 - 2001: "interlude" era for the PC, rise of console gaming (Playstation 2 and XBox)
2000 - 2007: "modern" PC gaming is born. from Voodoo 1 video cards to Crysis
2007 - today: new business models (birth of "DLCs", gaming devices and "social gaming".

Of course I approximated (err, does it exist as a term? :P) the dates, I'm no historian :P (for example, I think Voodoo Cards vs. Matrox G200 and 400 started before 2000, right? What about the first "consoles" as we intend them today?)

What do you think? Want to have a try at a better classification? (yes, there is no mention of MMOs, because that would mean an entirely different discussion, from BBS gaming, telnet, to MUDs, other sub-genres and the birth of "modern" MMOs with The Realm, M59 and UO)

[Malakili]

2010 - Era of Hats.

[Amaron]

I think you'd have to put down that companies started ignoring non MMO PC gamers for a while there and that we are now seeing some sort of resurgence again thanks to things like Steam.

[ezrast]

I have a huge amount of nostalgia for the SNES era which is very weird given that I wasn't actually old enough to have much of a clue about games beyond Mario and Commander Keen when it was going on.

I also actually really like where gaming is going now with digital distribution allowing small indie studios to coexist with big publishers. It's a brave new world where 1- and 2-person projects can be bona fide hits right along with AAA titles, and it will be interesting to see how the backlash against the increasingly corporatized "traditional" side of the game industry plays out.

[Nebu]

My fondest memories come from Mountain Dew filled evenings playing Intellivision and Atari computer games (like Star Raiders) with friends.  I'm guessing that's around 1979-1980 or so.  The Commodore 64 era (Archon, Mule, etc) is a very close second. 

[Strazos]

90s and early 00s for me - some great SNES/Genesis material, then transitioned to PC. Pretty sure stuff like Fallout and Baldur's Gate sold me on the PC, even before I played EQ.

[Selby]

The mid-late 80's up through the very late 90's and into some part of 2000-2002 was my heyday for computer gaming.  Game companies still made games I wanted to play and play I did!

[Reg]

The first game I ever played seriously was Bard's Tale on the Commodore 64. I had it all mapped out on graph paper and everything.  It's amazing the crap I was willing to put up with in those days.

[Velorath]

Your "interlude/rise of Console gaming" era has a time span that encompasses both Diablo games, Starcraft, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, both Baldur's Gate games, Planescape Torment, Half-Life, Team Fortress, Myth 1 and 2, Quake 1-3, Master of Orion 2, Fallout 1 and 2, Grim Fandango, the first two Thief games, Unreal and Unreal Tournament, Age of Empires 1 and 2, Alpha Centauri, Everquest, Ultima Online, the Sims, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm leaving out.

[Malakili]

Your "interlude/rise of Console gaming" era has a time span that encompasses both Diablo games, Starcraft, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, both Baldur's Gate games, Planescape Torment, Half-Life, Team Fortress, Myth 1 and 2, Quake 1-3, Master of Orion 2, Fallout 1 and 2, Grim Fandango, the first two Thief games, Unreal and Unreal Tournament, Age of Empires 1 and 2, Alpha Centauri, Everquest, Ultima Online, the Sims, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm leaving out.

This also reminds me what I wanted to add earlier but didn't have time to.  I generally think of eras in a game-based way rather than a system based way, especially after say, the mid nineties.

I might be worth compiling a list of important games released year by year if we are serious about this.

[Tale]

1987-1991: Amiga vs Atari ST (and Amstrad and Spectrum)

Amstrad and Spectrum were really players in the Commodore 64 era, not the Amiga and ST era. The C64 competed with the ZX Spectrum and whatever model it was that we just called "an Amstrad".

The 80s were my teenage years.

[UnSub]

I think the true eras of gaming are:

Games I Grew Up With Age: AWESOME AGE!
Games Currently Coming Out Age: SUCK AGE!
Games Coming Out In Future Age: DOOOOOM AGE!

A major issue with gaming is that there are so many ways to come at it - did you start on consoles or PCs? Handhelds or larger? Strategy or platforming? - that classifying these kinds of time periods either requires you go very granular or miss out on lots of titles / genres.

My personal history included lots of time in arcades as well as x286s, x386s, Commodore 64, Amiga 500, several PCs, Xbox, some time on friends NESs, but not a lot of time on handhelds or core Nintendo titles (e.g. the last Mario game I really put time into was Mario 64).

I think the very first gaming 'machine' I had was a Colecovision (or something like that) and I spent a bit of time playing on the Atari 2600 too.

... I seem to have forgotten the original question. 

The Amiga was a kick-ass games machine. It's sad that not as many people remember it - probably because it never really did well in the US versus the PC.

As for the best age: now. You have more options than ever to get games and prices are going down.

[Azazel]

I had great fun in the ages of SFII and it's sequels, Bomberman and Mario Kart on SNES, and then later with Twisted Metal II on PS1.
I also played through the Golden Age of EverQuest with a largish chain-group of friends and family that took us up to the point of raiding and all that jazz, along with Battlefield 1942 and Desert Combat through into BF2.

BUT. I still have my SNES, my arcade joystick made with real arcade parts and the SNES carts. I still have TM2 and my PS1. I still have my EQ accounts and a half-dozen copies of 1942 floating around.


Fact is I don't play any of those old games anymore. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, but those friends and relatives have almost all moved on in one form or another with only a few of us left in the group. I still have those games, and I choose not to play them anymore. I play "modern" games that range from 5-year-old MMOs to 6-year-old RTS' to 2011-release 360 games. For me it'd be the last 10 years, with an emphasis on the last 5 - since I'm still playing those games. Modern games are the ones I'm playing by choice. 

[Ruvaldt]

What about arcades?  They seem to be sorely missing from that list.  I think more people participated in gaming in arcades than on Commodore 64s between '83 and '87, for instance, even though arcades were in decline by '84.  In fact, I'd say '80 to '84 was the golden era of arcade gaming, and a substantial resurgence occurred in the early 90s with the advent of popular fighting games, which ended up driving a considerable portion of the console market during that time and in the mid-90s.

[Margalis]

1976 - 1983: The beginning and the Apex of Atari 8-bit systems
1983 - 1987: Commodore 64/128 rules supreme
1987-1991: Amiga vs Atari ST (and Amstrad and Spectrum)
1988 - 1994: consoles and other, "smaller" gaming devices are born (from Sega Megadrive to the birth of Playstation 1)
1990 - 1995: the "PC" becomes a "true" gaming machine: from Origin's Wing Commander, to Civilization and the golden age of Adventure Games
1996 - 2001: "interlude" era for the PC, rise of console gaming (Playstation 2 and XBox)
2000 - 2007: "modern" PC gaming is born. from Voodoo 1 video cards to Crysis
2007 - today: new business models (birth of "DLCs", gaming devices and "social gaming".

This seems to be in a curious middle ground where it's kind of detailed but leaves out super duper major stuff like the console crash / NES recovery. The NES came out in 1985 in the US.

For consoles I would probably go something like:

Pre-Atari
Atari / Colecovision / Up to console crash
NES - Genesis - SNES
Playstation - Wii Launch
Post Wii Launch

And here's why:

Atari / Coleco / whatever else (there were like a million systems back then!) were all kind of similar in what sorts of games they played.
Then you have the complete market meltdown and the introduction of the NES, which in many ways is still the template for modern console gaming
Playstation introduces the disc-based era, FMV, etc
Post-Wii includes the Wii as well as stuff like widespread adoption of DLC, downloadable games, XBox live, etc. I think around the time the Wii launched is when this gen became different than last gen in significant ways other than graphically, and the Wii is just a good dividing line even though it's not directly related to some of that stuff.

Now Playstation all the way to a few years ago is a huge span but I don't think there were fundamental market or content changes in those years. Not in the same way the NES came in and completely revitalized a dead market.

Also I think it's a little hard to factor PCs and arcade gaming into the same timeline. Especially PC gaming. Due to the nature of PCs there haven't been a lot of huge discrete hardware-level changes. The intro of the 3d card maybe?

[sinij]

We now have technology to do reliable motion capture from just a couple regular cameras placed in the room and all of this can be processed real-time using modern technology. This should be the future, or even present, instead we are stuck with games designed for vacuum lamp-era console hardware and further dumbed-down to work with awful console controllers. To make matters worse publishers discovered that it is even more profitable to design 5$ games for mobile phones and shrinking investment in console market.

Gaming future looks fairly grim from where I stand. You better like Angry Birds-style gameplay, because that all we are going to get for another decade.

[CmdrSlack]

Did you know that you can get Angry Birds on Steam now?

It's true, I checked it out myself.

[Kail]

Also I think it's a little hard to factor PCs and arcade gaming into the same timeline. Especially PC gaming. Due to the nature of PCs there haven't been a lot of huge discrete hardware-level changes. The intro of the 3d card maybe?

Yeah, it's definitely harder to discretize the history of PC gaming.  The launch of Steam (in 2004) and rise of digital distribution in general would probably be a good place to start the "modern" era for PC gaming.  Maybe '92 or '93 (release of Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM respectively) as the dawn of the modern FPS genre.  Otherwise, yeah, the only real major hardware distinctions I'm seeing are the advent of 3D cards in the nineties and maybe the whole cga('81) ega('84) vga('87) svga ('89) progression.

Nowadays you could probably tie PC "eras" into console ones, though, because there's a lot more in terms of shared titles.

[Strazos]

Gaming future looks fairly grim from where I stand. You better like Angry Birds-style gameplay, because that all we are going to get for another decade.

There will always be a good market for "full" games. Take books for instance - sure, tons of trashy love novels sell, but there's still a market for authors who actually want to make something good. Same thing with cars with econoboxes vs higher-end models.

[Sky]

The high tide lifts all boats.

[Ratman_tf]

Platinum Age: Games written on mainframes. Sometimes involving punchcards. Most people didn't have access to them, so It's kind of a restricted set. Still had some influential games, like Space War, and so deserves a reference.

Golden Age: Atari and Intellivision. Colecovision. Hand held portables that used single bulb LED's.

Silver Age: Apple IIe, Commodore 64, the original Macs.

Bronze Age: Nintendo Entertainment System. Notable for being the rebirth of consoles after Atari killed the market.

The 90's: SNES, SEGA. The rise of the PC as a gaming platform, with the introduction of CDs and sound cards. The age of autoexec.bat and config.sys. Mid 90's sees the breaking of Nintendo's dominance with the introduction of the Playstation.

the 00's: Gamecube and the Xbox. Console gaming starts to build up steam towards what we know of it today.

Now: PC is holding on, but consoles are starting to take over some of their functions. Gaming online is the paradigm now.

2015: Apes take over the planet and introduce the Monkeysystem.

[Paelos]

I like today's era honestly. We've had more and more sandbox open world games, good shooters, strong strategy titles, and great independent movements through Steam. The options are so much greater than back in the 90s and the nostalgia factor is what drives most of the love of that era.

[Furiously]

I think games have moved from a "Book" type experience where your mind is filling in a lot of the details, to a movie like experience where you don't get to do that.

[Paelos]

I think games have moved from a "Book" type experience where your mind is filling in a lot of the details, to a movie like experience where you don't get to do that.

I'm not sure I follow. What are some examples of that progression in games that you liked?

[Amaron]

I think he's saying you'd never imagine this in you 16 bit Mass Effect rpg:

[Ghambit]

My fondest memories are on an old Tandy 1000 EX (IBM compatible) rig around 1986.  I was around 8-9 yrs. old I believe.  MS was simply DOS and "Flight Simulator/sopwith camel."  Q-Basic was the closet coder language of choice.

Anyways, Sierra Games and Microprose were king... "kings quest, space quest, LSL, silent service, starflight, f-19, f-16, etc."   5.25's in a bag, secret ink game hints, cust. serv. game help via phone, codewheels, and on and on.  I used to cut lawns and then run to the "computer store" with a few bucks.  Game designers back then were veritable gods of coding; doing so much with so little.

As a 10 yr. old I'd pretty much mastered stealth fighter tactics, submarine warfare, and basic air-air dogfighting to go along with being able to build/upgrade my own IBM-compat. rig.  Games like f-19 came with a 300 page manual and you had to read Jane's.  Real printed maps and keyboard overlays were nearly all you had.

(sigh)  miss it

I do believe there will be a renaissance in gaming very soon.  A return to a more "visceral" experience.  This dumbed-down style of gaming wont last much longer, or at the very least we'll see more meaningful choice.  Part of the problem is visibility though.  There's still quality software out there that goes largely unseen.

[Merusk]

My fav is the "Golden Age".  There was just this huge array of high-quality games of all different genres and mechanics.  It's been sad to watch them all funnel down to a few distinct types as they rush to meet bloated art budgets and cannibalize from each other to a more homogeneous experience.

Indys are bringing some of that old flavor back, I hear, but I just don't have the time to explore them. I go for the games I hear are good experiences or good values when there's none of my favored types available. 

Yet another reason I'm finding I spend more on eating out than games these days. Those tales are getting fewer and fewer.  I blame you all. 

[Ginaz]

I never had a computer when I was younger so most of my video gaming was done in arcades, with an Atari and various Nintendo systems at home.  My all time favourites were Tecmo Bowl and NES Pro Wrestling ( Kin Corn Karn) and the wrestlers had more moves than John Cena ever will.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzfd3rxW9qY&feature=related

[Margalis]

Starman for life!

[UnSub]

Gaming future looks fairly grim from where I stand. You better like Angry Birds-style gameplay, because that all we are going to get for another decade.

So gameplay that is easily understandable, absorbing for what it offers, fun, accessible to a wide audience and available cheaply? The future is indeed grimdark.

I played Worms, Scorched Earth and Lemmings. Angry Birds doesn't strike me as much different from that.

[Merusk]

Hotseat Scorched Earth whiled away many hours between me and my friends freshman year in college.   Oh MIRVs, how painful you were.

[Ratman_tf]

[Morfiend]

I was playing through Singularity, and I realized that there is no way, and no direction indicator. At first it made me confused but after an hour of play I totally didnt miss it, and I felt I have got more out of the maps than any recent FPS game.

[Azazel]

Gaming future looks fairly grim from where I stand. You better like Angry Birds-style gameplay, because that all we are going to get for another decade.

So gameplay that is easily understandable, absorbing for what it offers, fun, accessible to a wide audience and available cheaply? The future is indeed grimdark.

I played Worms, Scorched Earth and Lemmings. Angry Birds doesn't strike me as much different from that.

 

[Velorath]

Starman for life!

King Slender was pretty much cheat mode in that game.  You only had to press one button to do his backbreaker.