The 1980’s became the decade where games start to develop rapidly into more complex games. So much so that the games produced started to distinguish themselves into different genres. Terms such as ‘action adventure’ or ‘computer role- playing games’ were being used to describe the variety or games being produced. arcade games became very popular from the late 1970s with the influence of games like space invaders which was a game that became a huge success both in Japan and the west. It inspired other game manufacturers to enter the market, and to become more popular in areas such as shopping centres, shops and restaurants etc. by 1981 in north America the sales of arcade machines went up to $900 million from $50 million in 1978. Games starting appearing in colour, such as the game Pac-man. Pac man was a simple but addictive and visually interesting game which was played by not only men but also women across North America. The game starting attracting a lot more girls into arcades, which greatly boosted Pac-mans popularity. It sold more than 350000 arcade cabinets, which means it took the title of best selling game from previous title holder ‘asteroids.’ pacman still holds the title as being the highest grossing game of all time to this day. In 1983 there was a huge blow to the video game industry in North America with console sales dropping significantly causing bankruptcy within the gaming companies. It was a Japanese company that redeemed the gaming industry with its release of the Nintendo entertainment system or the NES which included a free super Mario game which clinched its success in America. This was the beginning of japans dominance of home video games over America (the sega master system made its impact on Europe, Oceania and Brazil at the time). Nintendo was part of the emergence of ‘3rd generation consoles’ along with the Sega master system which both used 8-bit processers like the previous generation, it was this generation that would be the last to be labelled by their ‘bits’. Consoles like the mega drive/genesis were referred to as 16-bit to help differentiate them from the previous generation of console. Nintendo later took on the handheld gaming industry (with poor attempts from other companies thus far) with its first rendition of the game boy in 1989. This paved the way for Nintendo’s dominance over the handheld gaming industry in the future. One of the game boys more popular games was Tetris. A puzzle game consisting of creating straight rows from falling blocks of various shapes. The creator/programmer of the game was Alexey Pajitnov, hailing from the former Soviet Union (his game being the first to be an export from the USSR to the US). It managed to sell over 33 million copies, not including the sales from the other versions of the game on different consoles. The 80’s produced the first blueprint of the different genres that we know and love today e.g. early shooter games like duck hunt in 1984, or beat ‘em up games like kung fu master in the same year.
