[Tv Show] Rise of the Videogame

[Ralfst3r]

New show about... the Rise of the Videogame?!?

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/video-game/video-game.html

Haven't watched it yet, but i thought i might share it anyway.

 

[Deeival]

Sounds interesting - will have to check it out.

 

[Makabi]

looked in the 90's list, saw the lack of anything about adventure games or early first-person shooters and lost interest.

wake up mainstream media, consoles aren't the only things out there!

 

[Deeival]

But consoles in the 90's were what brought games into peoples homes.

Best thing in the first part was them describing what and how Atari ****ed up (messed up, I guess... :/) before the big industry crash in 83 - it was almost like they described EA

 

[Makabi]

meh, my gaming "career" started on the PC, so that's really all I care about.

 

[Gamburd]

I remember about a year ago there was a documentary about Atari on one of the cable news channels; it may have been CNBC (U.S.), and they said Atari eventually filed for bankruptcy, meaning it filed for protection against people it owed money to so it wouldn't have to pay them as much as it originally owed them.

I think this documentary on Discovery Channel may be the same documentary that was show on Canadian television, CBC, this past summer. It sounds similar. In the documentary, it talked about how, in China, there are professional gameplayers who accumulate stuff on games like World of Warcraft, and then sell it to people who don't want / or can't spend hours and hours playing it.

Also, some of these professional players achieve celebrity type status in countries like South Korea.

(O.K., I looked at it, and this sounds a lot different than the shows I saw).

 

[Grobut]

But consoles in the 90's were what brought games into peoples homes.

Yes and no, the origional Nintendo and Sega probably did introduce alot of people to gaming in the begining of the 90's, but the PC dominates the decade, and it is a crime if they intend to show off gaming in the 90's without giving serious air time to the PC games of that time.

The 7'th Guest anyone? Wolf3D? Stunts? Scorched Earth? Duke3D? Quake? Sam and Max hit the road? Monkey island? Lesure suit Larry? i could go on, there is no shortage of important games for the PC durring this time, and for many it marked the beginning of gaming, and more importantly, the beginning of gaming as more than just childs playthings, but something adults could also sit down and enjoy.


Especially here in Denmark, where consoles like the PS1 largely failed due to the prices they demanded for its games (any PS1 game cost more than twice that of a PC game, and unless you lived in Copenhagen, there where no stores that rented them out, you had to buy them), the PC reigned supreme, nobody, but nobody would even considder a PS1 as anything more than a quaint backup for their PC.

 

[Jokerman]

Yes and no, the origional Nintendo and Sega probably did introduce alot of people to gaming in the begining of the 90's, but the PC dominates the decade, and it is a crime if they intend to show off gaming in the 90's without giving serious air time to the PC games of that time.

I think its true for the 80's as well, at least in Israel. At first you could only get an Atari, which my folks- and many other pedagogical parents- considered as a box of junk and wouldnt hear of bringing it home. But when the 8-bit PCs arrived they could live with one cos they thought that at least we would learn basic and make a lot of money as adults.

 

[Grobut]

We had a state of economic depression here durring the 80's (Denmark suffered hard under the oil crisis of the late 70's), nobody had any money, so only a select few would have been able to afford such luxuries, but it cleared up around 1989, so the 90's really mark the beginning for gaming here in Denmark, but still, people where just recovering from the depression, so not many where thrilled about spending it on a kids plaything that only played games..

Hell, the first thing capable of playing games in my family was a Commadore 64 that my parents bought used from Germany, that may not sound extra ordinary, but we bought that thing at a time where the I486 was taking the world by storm, so we got to the C64 party pretty late..

 

[Jokerman]

So your 90's were actually the 80's?? You mean I could.. say.. come to a danish home at 94' and see a Samantha Fox poster in the kids bedroom?

 

[Grobut]

So your 90's were actually the 80's?? You mean I could.. say.. come to a danish home at 94' and see a Samantha Fox poster in the kids bedroom?

Heh, well it didn't extend to social trends, but in many ways it was, because we where a country that just came out of a hard economic time, most people did not have alot of money, having gotten themselves in debt, so new tech was slower to catch on here.
CD's for instance took a while to catch on, VCR's too, not many people had thouse, even colour TV was slow to catch on, hell, i was playing that C64 on a black/White TV for years.

People just dont spend alot of money on luxury entertainment products when they have enough trouble putting food on the table and paying rent.

It wassen't really untill the mid 90's that people where once again ready to buy some new stuff, and freinds of mine started to get PC's, though more often than not they where older PC's, not top of the line, the first Pentium machine i ever sat infront of was in 1997 (i remember because it had G-Police installed, and that was a brand new game at that time), it was a 133 Mhz machine my freind got through his Uncle who worked at a computer store, but ofcourse at this time, it was the 233 Mhz processors that where top of the line.

At that time, i had only just gotten my first I386 machine the year prior, so i was playing the C64 well into 1996 actually.. wow, that even suprices me.. i myself got my first Pentium in 1998, it was a 200 Mhz Packard Bell, and it was such rubbish! man that machine was bad.. and it had an onboard ATI vid card, totally useless since it was the Voodoo all games at that time where made for.