The late 1960's through the 1970's was where video gaming got its start. At this point in time, Atari was beginning to dominate the video game world and other companies were soon going to start to challenge Atari.
In 1980, Mattel released its "challenge" for Atari. This system was called the Intellivision. With its release, this started a video gaming "war", if you will, between Atari and Mattel. One thing Mattel and the Intellivision had going for them was that it had better graphics than the Atari 2600. Although it had only been 3 years later since the Atari 2600 came out, technology was expanding very quickly and with that Mattel created what most like to think was a better video gaming console. The Intellivision also was the first video gaming system to use synthesized voices in its video games.
Some of you may be asking yourself, what is the Intellivision and why haven't I heard much about it or why haven't I heard about it at all? To answer this, I'm sure most of you have heard of Atari and its dominance in the video game world, like I previously said. Well soon after the Intellivision was released, 3rd party game developers, such as Coleco and Activision, became really interested in the new technology used in this gaming system. Soon new gaming systems such as the Colecovision, Atari 5200, and the Vectrex were released. These were unlicensed video gaming systems and led to a crash in the video gaming industry in 1983. This led many video gaming companies to go bankrupt. All of this kind of over-shadowed the new Intellivision preventing it from becoming a huge video gaming console.
It wasn't until a few years later in 1985 when the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was released. Nintendo was originally a Japanese playing-card company. The system was known as the Famicom in Japan and when it came to the U.S. in 1985, retailers were very unsure at first about marketing this new video game console after the crash just a couple years earlier. Nintendo's games are what made it so popular. Some of these games consist of Super Mario Bros., Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda. These games are still very popular on new gaming systems of today! Some more games that were developed for the Nintendo by licensed 3rd parties were the Contra, Final Fantasy, Tecmo Super Bowl, RBI Baseball, and Mega Man. The Nintendo Entertainment System broke many sales records after these games were released and this gaming console became the best selling gaming console in history!
At this point, it was the mid 1980's and video gaming just took a huge turn in history. It went from a huge crash in the market to the world's best selling video game system ever. Because of the Nintendo Entertainment System's success in the 1980's, it is still around to this day developing new gaming systems and devices and new games that are still very, very popular to video gamers. Later I will talk about some more of Nintendo's video gaming systems as well as many more that you may be more familiar with.
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