HISTORY OF VIDEO

GAMES

Sega Mega Drive

Released in Australia in 1988-1990The Mega Drive initially competed against the aging 8-bit NES, over which it had superior graphics and sound.

The successor to the Sega Master System with which it has backward compatibility when converter was installed…

wait did I not mention the Master System? My bad it was released in 87 with limited success

Master System Games

Sega Mega Drive

Processor: Motorola 68000 16/32-bit processor @ 7.67 MHz Co-processor: Zilog Z80 8-bit @ 3.58 MHzVideo display processor Yamaha YM7101, Memory: 64K work RAM), 64K video RAM, 8K work RAM (Z80)Display palette: 512 colours (3:3:3 RGB bit)

Onscreen colours: 64 or 183 (shadow/highlight mode)Maximum onscreen sprites: 80 Output: Max 320×480, (PAL and NTSC)

Sega Mega Drive

Mega Drive Ratings

The controversy over games such as Mortal Kombat in the United States forced Sega to create the first content rating system for video games, the Videogame Rating Council.

The rating system allowed Sega to ship games with little to no censorship and gave it a competitive edge when the same game was released by Nintendo. The success of those games eventually forced Nintendo to join its rating system.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Released in 1990. The SNES was a global success, becoming the best-selling console of the 16-bit era despite its relatively late start and the fierce competition it faced in North America and Europe from Sega's Genesis/Mega Drive console. The SNES remained popular well into the 32-bit era, and continues to be popular among fans, collectors, retro gamers, and emulation enthusiasts, some of whom are still making homebrew ROM images.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Processor Ricoh 5A22, @ 21.3 MHzBus: 3.6 MHz

As part of the overall plan for the SNES, the hardware designers made it easy to interface special coprocessor chips to the console.

The Super FX is a RISC CPU designed to perform functions that the main CPU could not feasibly do. The chip was primarily used to create 3D game worlds made with polygons, texture mapping and light source shading.

SNES Games

First of the 32 bit consoles

Atari Jaguar

released in 1993

3DO also released in

1993

Playstation

1994 by March 31, 2005, the PlayStation became the first video game console to sell 100 million units. Its successor, the PlayStation 2, is the best-selling console to date, having reached over 150 million units sold

CPU - R3000A 32bit RISC chip @ 33.8mhz

Primary Memory: 2 Mb

CD-ROM

Output 16.7 million colours

Resolution: 256x224 - 740x480

Sega SaturnReleased by Sega 1995 9.5 million units were sold over it’s life timeDual CPUs

The Saturn had impressive hardware at the time of its release, but its design, with two CPUs and six other processors, made harnessing this power extremely difficult for developers used to conventional programming.

Quadrilaterals

Unlike the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 which used triangles as its basic geometric primitive, the Saturn rendered quadrilaterals. This proved to be a hindrance because most of the industry's standard design tools were based on triangles.

Sega Saturn

Media CD-ROM,

CPU 2 × Hitachi SH-2 32-bit RISC (28.6 MHz)

Dual custom Visual Display Processors for graphics processing

Yamaha, the YMF292 for sound.

Virtual Boy

The Virtual Boy released in 1995 manufactured by Nintendo. It was the first video game console that was supposed to be capable of displaying "true 3D graphics" out of the box, in a form of virtual reality. Nintendo discontinued it the following year.

Nintendo 64

The Nintendo 64 named for its 64-bit central processing unit, it was released in June 1997.It is Nintendo's last home console to use ROM cartridges to store games. Clocked at 93.75 MHz, the N64's was the most powerful console CPU of its

generation.

Dreamcast

1999 (Sega) Despite its short lifespan, the Dreamcast was widely hailed as ahead of its time. The console itself is still held in high regard for pioneering online console gaming; it was the first console to include a built-in modem and Internet support for online play.

HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES

The Games

Maze War

1974

A networked multiplayer maze game for several research machines.

Maze War

Innovations•First-person 3D Perspective.

Perhaps the first first-person shooter.

•Player's position depicted on level map. Representation of a player's position on a playing field map. The combination of a first-person view and a top-down, second-person view has been used in many games since.

•Level editor. A program was written to edit the playing field design.

Maze War

Innovations•Network play. Probably the first game ever to be played between two peer-to-peer computers•Client-server networked play. •Observer mode. In the 1977 version, a graphics terminal could be used by observers to watch the game in progress without participating. •Internet play. Yet another port was probably the first network-aware game which could be played across the modern Internet, in 1986. •Modifying clients in order to cheat at the game.•Encrypting source code to prevent cheating.

Scrolling

Speedrace 1974

Parallax

Moon Patrol 82

Battlezone

1980 the first true three-dimensional game world.

Pac-Man

(1980) was the first game to achieve widespread popularity in mainstream culture and the first game character to be popular in his own right.

Established the maze chase game genre

It demonstrated the potential of characters in

video games,

It opened gaming to female audiences, and

it was gaming's first licensing success

First video game to feature power-ups, and

it is frequently credited as the first game to

feature cut scenes,

Scrolling Shooters

Defender 1980 established the use of side-scrolling in shoot 'em ups.

Scamble 1982 was the first side-scroller with multiple, distinct levels.

Xevious 1982

Donkey Kong

Nintendo 1981 first platform game (with jumping). Donkey Kong is considered to be the earliest video game with a storyline that visually unfolded on screen

1982 Pitfall

1985 Super Mario Bros. From this came the idea that game systems should have

mascots, and those mascots should be involved in the best games.

Karate ChampStreet Fighter II

1984. Establishing and popularizing the one-on-one fighting game genre

1987 Double Dragon is considered to be one of the first successful examples of the genre

1991. The father of the modern fighting game

Tetris

1984.

SimCity1985 Little Computer People

1989 SimCity

2000 The Sims

The Legend of Zelda

1986 helped establish the action-adventure genre. The game was also an early example of open world, nonlinear gameplay

Dungeon Master

1987. Before Dungeon Master, games were either simple and direct (shoot, run & jump) or complex and abstract (solve puzzles, roll characters). Dungeon Master's engine allowed for the game to be complex and direct. It is impossible to overstate how important this elimination of abstraction was for the future of gaming. It directly inspired first-person RPGs like Lands of Lore, Ultima Underworld, and The Elder Scrolls, but indirectly, much of the immersion in many styles of gaming, especially first-person shooters, can be derived from Dungeon Master.

Super Mario Kart

1992. Helping to popularize the simple, fun kart racing genre.

Indianapolis 500

1989. Racing sims were among the first games to realize the benefits of 3D polygonal graphics and collision detection, and Indianapolis 500 laid the groundwork for hardcore racing sims in the future. 1992 – Geoff Crammond’s Formula One Grand Pix

Dude II

1992. It's rare that you can find a single game that spawned an entire genre. Usually the situation is more complex. Not with Dune II, a game whose base-building multi-unit combat set the template for the bulk of real-time strategy games to follow. Warcraft, Command & Conquer, and Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War all spring directly from Dune II.

1995 Command and Conquer While Dune II invented the RTS genre, Command & Conquer refined the formula (alongside the Warcraft series), turning it into a commercial juggernaut.

Doom

1992. Wolfenstein 3D

1993. Doom It helped to solidify the first-person shooter as a tremendously important genre. It helped to create a model of online play, popularizing the term "deathmatch."

Goldeneye

1997. The earliest first-person shooter to succeed on the console, it paved the way for the later popularity of Halo, Call of Duty, and more.

Dance Dance Revolution

PaPappa the Rapper 96

1998. In addition to helping create the rhythm game genre, DDR also gave arcades a new business model as fighting games lost their mass popularity.

Quake

1996. Quake was a monumental step forward in two important areas. Technically, it was a masterpiece, the first fully 3D first-person shooter. Socially, Quake allowed for mass Internet play and comprehensive modding. The Team Fortress mod for the game introduced team-based multiplayer, instead of the chaos of deathmatch, which is now by far the most common form of online multiplayer in action games.