From Pac-Man to Angry Birds: Gaming through the ages
When gaming first burst into our consciousness, it’s safe to say it took the world by storm. The idea of a hobby or pastime was suddenly transformed and people’s idea of playing games took on a whole new meaning. While the traditional board games remained, and have remained, popular; it’s computer games that have become arguably the main pastime throughout the world and to some, a profession.
Arcade games such as Pac-Man were the first to capture the public’s imagination, allowing them to use controls and joysticks to control what was happening in the game to react to what was happening on the screen in front of them, but over the years we have seen some dramatic changes to the gaming industry.
Back in the early 1990s, the concept of network gaming was just that, a concept. It was something that many developers touted to be a possibility in the future – a bit like amphibious cars – but not many actually believed it would happen…not so quickly anyway.
By the middle of the decade, gamers were able to utilize the Internet to reach out to their friends on other machines, playing against them and with them on the same title at the same time. This meant that you no longer had to be sat in the same room, fighting for space at your desktop PC and soon meant that you didn’t even have to be sat in the same room playing console games either.
The web has revolutionized gaming, even if we don’t actually realise it. Online gaming is completely different to console gaming – as the names suggest – but both have taken the good points from each and transformed the way people play their favourite titles on their favourite platforms.
By 2013, we’ve reached a point where even mobile gaming has changed from a concept to a reality, with gamers now able to play just about any type of game on any device, in any location. Titles such as Angry Birds have been downloaded onto millions of devices across the globe, and the updates released by developers for specific times of year or just to provide extra content, mean that they take away the risk of the game being completed and deleted from the device. You can never finish some titles, because developers are constantly working to add extra content to the games, satisfying the insatiable demand for more of the latest and greatest, and meaning gaming is taking on a new identity yet again. The future is, undoubtedly, mobile gaming and we all need to embrace it without forgetting where we’ve come from.