Gaming Through The Decades: 1980

Pac-Man

Pac-Man  was first video game franchise in the history of gaming. Everything from Pac-Man board games, to apparel, to an animated TV series showed up. Players of Pac-Man were obsessed enough to come up with the first gaming bug exploits, develop strategies for escaping the ghosts ,and this was the first game to have techniques unique to the game, an example being corning, that allows players to navigate Pac-Man faster than the following ghosts. Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Clyde were smart, and each ghost had a fairly complex and unique behavior, in a loose sense, a personality. Some hid, some attacked directly, some planned where Pac-Man would end up at. This is one of the earliest examples of AI in a game.

Gaming Through The Decades: 1978

Space Invaders

The Space Invaders were iconic (literally) sub 50 pixel sprites that changed almost everything about gaming. The arcade machines that initially used to haunt dubious hangouts quickly made their way to prominent restaurants. The Japanese mint could not release as many 100 yen coins as the Space Invaders cabinets consumed, Which resulted in a shortage of such coins in the economy. The first wave of game programmers to enter the industry came in after using the home version of the game. However, the most important contribution of Space Invaders is a fact that it introduce a high score. The previous high score was saved, and the score became a gaming standard, something that the industry regarded as an essential component of gaming till the turn of the millennium.

Gaming Through The Decades: 1972

PONG

Pong 1972

Pong war created by a fellow named Allan Alcorn, who worked forNolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari. Alcorn had little idea of what a video game was , and the concept were heavily borrowed from games included in the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home gaming console.However, the game was an instant hit, and led to the arcade gaming era, with loads of installation of arcade machines. The original machines are all collector's items, withsome rare variants, including a coffee table version. Complicated rules were added to make the game compelling, which included an acceleration of the ball as the length of the volley increased, and different angles of deflection from different parts of the paddle.

Milestones in Video Gaming

In a sea of gaming platforms, game engines and consoles , it is easy to overlook the fundamental technological advances that have made games such as Assassin's Creed, Crysis or Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 possible.Each new game that comes out has been a long time in the making, more than 12 wasted years of Duke Nukem Forever.This is because each game explores the genre, the gameplay, the AI ,what is possible on the platform , the plot, and many other areas of game development.In this section, we cover the most important milestones of gaming, the key events and releases that changed the gaming landscape forever