9
9.2 Listening
However, by allowing people to play arcade games at home, Atari created a very big market for their products. Other companies also created home consoles, but Atari remained a clear leader. A key point to note here is that Atari developed their games themselves; they didn’t allow other companies access to their platform. This meant that the number of games available on the Atari was much lower than it could otherwise have been. It could be argued that all this showed that the games
industry could grow really quickly by providing games which had more detail and by providing games which could be played in different settings, such as at home. The games also introduced specific characters such as Super Mario, which players could identify with and this was another trend which would grow as platforms supported high-specification graphics. Both of these trends would continue to influence the growth of the games industry. So, we see all of this growth and then, in 1983, there
was a major collapse in the computer games market. It’s true to say that this was an absolute disaster for many of the companies in the industry, particularly for Atari. The games market dropped from selling over a billion dollars’ worth of equipment and games to selling in the low millions of dollars. Partly, this was due to many competing poor-quality consoles, it was also because of the lack of good-quality games on a standard platform. It was also due to the growth in the personal computer market and the increasing availability of affordable personal computers. While many of them were very low-powered and lacked the graphic and sound capabilities of the consoles, they had the advantage that people could write their own games on them. Many of these games were not very successful, but they allowed games developers to make their ideas into something real and sometimes they were successful. Apple were one of the companies who encouraged developers to use their platform and this was certainly a factor in making the Apple II popular as a home computer, as well as a business computer. I should point out that Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple computers, worked for Atari before founding Apple and, in fact, he developed an arcade video game for them, a game called Breakout which was a major success. So, it should be clear that games development was very much a core part of the development of the computer industry from the beginning. One difficulty for players who owned computers
like the Apple II was that if they wanted to play games which had a similar quality to arcade games, the games needed to be developed professionally. As Glancy points out in his 1996 history of video games, many of the new computer companies wanted to provide their users with these high-quality games, but while they had very good computer programmers, they lacked games developers. The result was that they had very good copies of arcade games, often with very high-quality graphics and action, but the games were either very similar to existing games or direct copies. For example, Breakout, the game I mentioned earlier, which Steve Wozniak had written for Atari, was very similar to Pong, which we’ve also talked about earlier. So, in terms of creating exciting gameplay, we can see that, while there is a need for good programmers, there is also a need for games developers. By the mid-1980s, however, there was another major shift back towards growth in the gaming industry. A key
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part of this was the entry of Nintendo into the US games market. Nintendo is interesting for all kinds of reasons, perhaps most of all because they are still an extremely successful games company. Various people have theories about why this is. I think it is because, to quote the expert games developer Conrad Culpepper: ‘Nintendo succeed because their developers make the games they want to make … games that are fun and can be played by virtually anyone’. Nintendo had a huge impact on the computer
games industry when they developed the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the mid-1980s. This 8-bit system became one of the main platforms for home gaming. The 16-bit Super NES system which followed was also a key home gaming platform. However, Nintendo was also very important in
developing mobile gaming. Their most important product was the Game Boy, which was available from 1989 to 2003 and which sold around 120 million units. The Game Boy was not their first successful attempt at mobile computing. Their first attempt was in the early 1980s, with a device called Time Out, later known as Game & Watch. These had a very small monochrome LCD screen, very small amounts of ROM and RAM and button controls. Each device had a specific game and to purchase a new game you had to purchase a new device. From the point of view of the users, these games were an ideal way to pass time when travelling to work. Despite the low- quality graphics, they were very popular and by the time they stopped production in 1990, around 45 million had been sold. The Game Boy was available from 1989 to 2003 and
combined many features from the Game & Watch model with swappable game cartridges. Because players didn’t have to buy new hardware each time they wanted a new game, they were happy to pay more for the platform. This meant that higher specification hardware could be used, so players had a better experience when playing the game. So, the Nintendo experience shows that even when
games are played on platforms which have relatively low- quality graphics, they can be very popular. Increasingly, we find that, given a choice, people will choose platforms with higher specifications and that people are prepared to invest in those higher specifications if they can play a range of games on them. So, when we look at the popularity of games for
dedicated consoles and games for PC, we certainly need to think about the specifications of the platform, but we also need to think about how open the platform is to playing different kinds of games … The rise of the smartphone as a platform and the growth of casual gaming – that is games which people play for a few minutes at a time. One example of this is a phone-based game called FarmVille, where players could create and manage a farm. Even though it had very simple graphics and gameplay, within two months of launch it had around ten million users. Another example is a phone game called Flappy Bird. This also had very simple graphics and gameplay, but at one point, it was the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store. Research has shown that easy access to different games is one of the most important factors in the amount of time spent on casual gaming …
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