Definitive Years in Gaming History: 1991
In May 1972, the Magnavox Odyssey was launched in the US. The brainchild of visionary electronics engineer Ralph Baer, this inaugural home video game console heralded the digital entertainment era and kick-started the games industry in one fell swoop. During its first forty years, the games business has seen incredible growth, driven by amazing technological advances and bursts of genius that have helped it evolve from a specialised, geeky curiosity into a mass-market, pop-culture entertainment phenomenon. The rate of this growth hasn’t always been consistent, however. While it’s true that the industry has constantly moved forward on a wave of new ideas and innovations, there have also been brief periods of extremely concentrated activity, usually precipitated by specific market conditions, in which the industry has taken significant steps forward in a relatively short space of time. It’s these “burst” periods in gaming history that inspired me to write this article, examining how those momentous and hugely important spells have helped shape the games industry we experience today. So to that end, we kick off with 1991, a year that in many respects represents a temporal watershed between the early days of the games industry and the true beginnings of the modern era. Read more…
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