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.

The 1970’s. The decade that’s considered to be the “Pivot of change”. World views were changing, increases in political awareness, and the growing economic liberty of women, and the first video game!

Just kidding, the first video game was thought to be created in 1958 by a physicist named William Higinbotham, extremely similar to pong. But the 1970’s is when video games started to become popular.

The first release of 1970 was a game called “Highnoon”. I believe we discussed this game in class. 1 year later “The Oregon Trail” was created by Bill Heine- A bunch of guys who wanted to teach school children about how life was in the 19^th century. Nowadays it’s worshiped by GADs.

Another year passed and the game that most people believe is the ‘first video game ever’ was finally released, “Pong”.  Pong was amazing because you no longer had to step foot in the outside world to play tennis. This is (to my understanding) the game that started the popularization of video games.

Within the next 7 years after Pong’s release, many extremely popular and influential games were released, such as Space Race, Spasim (Which I’ll refrain from going into detail about because my presentation is about it), Death Race, Zork, Space Invaders (Which I’ll be going into more detail about), and Asteroids.

Space invaders stands out on that list for many reasons, the main being that it is claimed to have caused a massive coin shortage due to its popularity as an arcade game. Many people believe that to be a myth, but even so, the game was… a ‘game-changer’.

Developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, Space invaders was released in 1978 in Japan. Nishikado is said to have drawn inspiration from popular media, such as star wars, and even had to design custom hardware and development tools. By 1982 the game had made 3.8 Billion dollars.

The game is said to have helped expand the video games into a global industry (as opposed to a novelty one), and is claimed to have brought video games to their “Golden Age”. There have been countless games that gained inspiration from Space Invaders, and the game itself has many recreations on ‘newer’ consoles such as Playstaion.

The last known recreation of the game was seen in 2006, in Taito Legends 2, which is essentially a compilation of older games.

As for today, Space Invaders can be seen everywhere. It has given inspiration to thousands of aspiring artists and game developers. The space ship from the game is used as a logo for the “Electronic Gaming Monthly” Magazine.

The game is also referenced commonly in T.V shows such as “That 70’s Show”, “Scrubs”, and “Robot Chicken”, “Futurama”, and appeared in the movie “Pixels”.

It honestly amazes me that over 30 years after the game’s release, it still has its title as one of the best and most influential games ever created. The fact that one video game can have such a large impact on the world really makes you wonder what potential we have in the gaming industry.