How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 76

of course lead to a rapid crash in 1983, but the conventions and styles of
gameplay invented in this time period are still being followed today.
We can start with the arcade, which witnessed a massive boom and
tremendous financial success, reaching annual revenues of eight billion
dollars in quarters in its peak year of 1982. According to Silicon Valley
Fever by Everett Rogers and Judith Larsen, in that year arcades took in
more money than the film and music industries combined. Games such
as Asteroids , Pac-Man , Donkey Kong , and Space Invaders began to show
the world what digital games could really do.
To go in-depth and look at one example, let's talk about Pac-Man .
Plenty has been said about Pac-Man before, but what's really important
for us to note is how original Pac-Man really was. Sure, it's a maze game,
and probably takes its roots from some of those Odyssey and early com-
puter maze games. But the system of being chased by four ghost en-
emies, each with their own unique AI personality, coupled with the vari-
able powers of the power pellets, which temporarily turn the game from
an escape game to a predatory attempt to capture the hapless ghosts, is
great. Further, even though it has a maze-like structure, it's not a maze
in that there isn't a start or finish position. Pac-Man 's levels are about
traversing the entire level. All of this is done, mind you, with no buttons
at all—just a simple four-directional control stick.
It's obvious to most that Pac-Man is a classic, but what's important
for us is that Pac-Man is uniquely a video game. Not only is Pac-Man
original to video games, but it could not have been created using tools
other than computers. It takes advantage of the fact that it is digital.
Most of this credit should also go to the other arcade games of the time
period, which scoured the possibility of digital games and searched for
new possibilities as well.
During this period we also have an explosion in the home-console
market, starting with the Fairchild VES and the Atari VCS/2600, and fol-
lowed by the Intellivision and Colecovision systems. These systems were
different from their predecessors in that they used cartridges for their
games, which ultimately led to a much wider variety of available games
than had been possible before.
One could write a whole book on the Atari 2600 alone. Its large and
influential library of games spanned many genres and styles of play. It
brought many arcade hits such as Space Invaders into the home, but At-
ari also produced some highly unique original games such as Yar 's Re -
venge and one of my personal favorites, Combat . The Atari 2600 is also
well-known for a top-down adventure game called Adventure (no rela-
tion to the text-based game from the first generation of video games).