by Wade Manns
Before 1977, videogames were rather boring affairs. Each unit had built-in game software and used dedicated hardware, which meant that each game had to be very simple. The technically-minded among us probably think of the classic arcade game Pong when I talk about these times, and they would be right, but consoles were also in their infancy around this time; the Magnavox Odyssey was an early console that was hamstrung by these limitations.
In 1977, the world of videogaming was changed when the Atari 2600 was released. The 2600 pioneered microprocessor hardware, meaning that software, now on cartridges, could be more flexible in terms of graphics and programming. This was the era of Pitfall!, Star Raiders, Yar’s Revenge, and many unfortunately lackluster arcade translations (or ports). The library of 2600 games, though waning a bit by the time of the Great Video Game Crash of 1983 and ’84, was truly excellent at its peak.
Though the graphics were still quite simple – in Adventure, they expected us to believe that a long-tailed duck chasing a square with an arrow hovering over it was a dragon bearing down on a knight carrying a sword – at least they had color and had the ability to fire our imaginations much more effectively than the discrete circuits (another term for dedicated hardware) of yesteryear. For some arcade translations, though, the graphics were already simple enough that there was no drastic changes made for our favorite wood-paneled (by 1983) box; look at the 2600 port of Berzerk for an example. The control method was as simple as it had always been; a single stick, a single button, and it worked well enough for most games of that time.
The simplistic graphics, but sometimes deep gameplay was enough to pacify many budding gamers of the late 70s and early 80s, but those gamers were incensed and disillusioned when their favorite developers started churning out inferior product at very high quantities; also, many toy stores refused to stock game hardware due to its lack of resemblance to actual toys; this was another of the factors that led to the video game crash. No matter how observers look at it, by that time the videogame industry, barely gotten off its feet, was already dying, and quickly. It received the resuscitation that it needed from the advent of a little console in 1985, called the Nintendo Entertainment System.