Home » Articles » History » A brief history of game design

A brief history of game design

Thursday 3 November 2005, last update: Monday 13 March 2006
By Jérôme Cukier

In this series of article, we’ll explore how the gaming paradigm has evolved over the last 30 years, era by era, from the early days of the arcade to the next generation of consoles.

 

There are plenty of excellent web sites on videogame history, exhaustive, accurate and entertaining. So, why another one? Hasn’t everything been told from Nintendo’s playing card business in the 1889 to the oscilloscope-based games in 1958? The rise and fall of Atari? Indeed, this and all the stories about videogaming are well-known, or at least, well-documented. So what is left to be told?

The whole idea of this site is to think about what influenced the videogame design, and if one factor has had a critical effect, it’s the ancient ages of gaming. There’s many reasons to that: first, companies reproduce what worked, and discontinue what didn’t. Simple enough. Second, videogames creators of today were videogames enthousiasts 10, 20 or 30 years ago and some try, consciously or not, to convey how they felt back then, as kids.

So, don’t expect any fantastic untold anecdote on the history of the industry, but let’s all take a close look at the mystical forces that shaped what videogames is today.

In this article:

- 1975-1984: the stone ages
- 1984-1989: a new beginning
- 1990-1994: 16-bit excitement
- 1995-1999: the reign of the PlayStation
- 2000-2005: 4-player battle?
- 2006-?: the future of videogames

Reply to this article 11 messages