Depending on your age you may or may not remember when video game systems first came out on the market. There was great excitement at being able to control very basic shapes on the screen using simple controllers. Video games caused just as much excitement back then as they did now, it just came in a slightly different form. Games started off with a primitive history, but back then and nobody knew the difference. Being able to control a simple box-shaped tank kept people thrilled for hours, and it was the start of video gaming as we know it today. These days we’ve come a long way and there is no limit to where gaming will head in the future. It’s exciting to think about all of the possibilities and ways various manufacturers will be able to maximize the gaming experience altogether.
Buying video game systems has always been a relatively expensive prospect, and it has been cyclical as well. When video game systems first came on the market people were obviously willing to pay top dollar and that’s exactly what manufacturers charged. It was not cheap to bring one of these new systems into your home by any means, and of course games were similarly expensive as well. Some might argue that the situation is the same today, but there are also those who consider gaming to be quite affordable now. What has changed is that while very few people could afford a game system when they first came out, these days it’s not uncommon for a household to have one or two different systems at the same time.
Home gaming absolutely exploded with the original Nintendo even though Atari made inroads years before that. But most people today remember playing Nintendo for the first time and how exciting it was. For some people, gaming will never be a special again the matter how fancy current systems get. It’s interesting to reflect back on how various companies vied for position and some came and went without much fanfare. For a time there was a heavy rivalry between Nintendo and Sega, and of course there were other systems like the TurboGrafx 16. More systems came and went such as the Genesis, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, and the GameCube. Sometimes it can be hard to keep track of all of these various incarnations because none of them were quite as special as the original Nintendo.
These days most people do their gaming on one of three platforms: the Nintendo Wii, the Xbox, or the PlayStation. There are wonderful features that allow people to interact online and participate with other gamers from across the world. Games have evolved such an exponential rate that it’s difficult to imagine people found the original systems entertaining at all. It will be interesting to see if we reach a saturation point in terms of complexity of various games, or maybe things will just keep getting better and video games will eventually reach lifelike proportions.