Blog #4 ----------- I’m totally not starting this 25 minutes before class starts.

Our era begins in 1980, a leap year that started on a Tuesday. Not entirely important, but that’s what you get when you give a student a morning class the day after a night class.

Pac man was released by Namco in 1980, it was an arcade game first released in japan on May 22^nd. The game was developed mainly by one employee of Namco named Toru Iwatani, who completed it in about a year with a 9 man team. 

Within 2 years, Pac man overtook space invaders in North America and turned into one of the highest grossing arcade games in history, making over a BILLION dollars in quarters after ~10 years, which Wikipedia wants you to know is “more than the highest grossing star wars film”.

Pac man was also the first video game to include cut scenes. I also just remembered that you may have gone over Pac man in class, but I’m not too sure, so I’m just gonna keep going. The game also is said to have opened gaming for female audiences.

1981 brought out Frogger, an arcade game made by Konami and released in Japan on June 5^th, North America on October 23^rd, and Europe on August 6^th. The game was renowned for having the most ways to die, 9 lose conditions in total.

The game inspired and “unofficial sequel” by Saga in 1991 called Rabbit, as well as many other clones, including Crossy Road.  

1983 brought the unofficial and unauthorized game called Ms Pac Man. After 10 more seconds of research, I have come to the realization that Ms Pac man was actually released in 1982. This is the first game that I’ve covered that was actually released in North America before it was released in Japan.

The game was pretty much exactly like Pac man, except you get a little pink bow. The game has 10 other changed, but nothing worth noting other than the fact that this game has more bugs than the original Pac man.

1983 actually had the release of Mario bros, which was the first time Mario's brother Luigi was introduced. The game was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and was released as an arcade game by Nintendo.

The game obviously had many, many follow ups, and I’m pretty sure that there’s a Mario game for every console available. This one version alone sold more than 1.63 million copies just for the NES.

In 1984, Pac-Land was released, which many say was a game ahead of its time. It included parallax scrolling for some background elements, which was not a common thing for many more years until the 16-bit console era.

The game was released on the Commodore 64, the Commodore Amiga, the Atari Lynx, the Atari ST, the TurboGrafx-16, the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, the MSX, and the NES.

The game was also included as a stage in Super Smash Bros for the Wii U.