Gaming has certainly come an awful long way since the days of Atari’s 2600 system, with many new innovations in how a game is played, not to mention in its visual and audio quality. Back in the 1970′s, with the dawn of the video gaming age, the goal was to offer the most entertaining and innovative games that technology would allow, which is a tradition that is still ongoing to this day, with companies always seeking to get the most out of the latest gaming systems, but games were very different in both looks and game play, than what is the norm today. Many of the biggest early gaming successes were based around a simplistic concept that worked, with games such as Pong being incredibly addictive, but yet it seems so basic by today’s standards.

After the gaming crash of 1983, game makers felt increased pressure to offer something new and unique enough to generate substantial interest. Quite possibly the biggest turning point in gaming to date was the release of Nintendo’s Famicom, or Nintendo Entertainment System as it would be known as within the United States. The Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short, while still being based around an 8-bit chip like the systems before it were, offered a whole new level of game play depth that was thought to be impossible only a short time before. Graphics were considerably sharper than for any previous system, and the variety of games was simply like nothing that had been seen before. By the opinions of most, the NES nearly singlehandedly saved gaming from what had looked to be a swift demise. Read the rest of this entry