When Did Games on Home Consoles Hit Their Stride? Here's a question I don't think I've ever seen discussed. At what point, from the inception of home consoles up until now, did consoles "hit their stride"? i.e When did they start offering the features and had the capability to be more than just "toys"? And why? For me, it was the 16-bit era with a tiny tail-end of the 8-bit era. Why? Well, for two reasons. The first reason is for much of the 8-bit era and prior, home consoles were trying to imitate the arcade experience. The goal was often to have a home version of whatever arcade game was popular at the time. But home consoles are not arcade machines, there's no reason for their games to be designed to be playable in short bursts and with limited playability. But for whatever this was the goal of many home consoles games, the arcade experience at home. But then late is the NES' life, something happened: battery backup. Now games didn't have to be short experiences with crazy difficulty, they could be long, epic adventures since you progress would be saved, even after the console was turned off. Thanks to that, we had games like The Legend of Zelda, Kirby's Adventure and Metroid (at least, in the Famicom Disk System version). This leads up where we are to today, where games are designed to be entertaining for hours on end and can tell this long, enthralling stories that just wouldn't be possible if games continued making arcade style games. This is partually why I favor the SNES over the Mega Drive, as that console continued to be dedicated to the arcade. The second reason is hardware capability, which is really more of a 16-bit thing. Anyway, for early consoles like the Atari 2600, game visuals and audio were very basic, and due to this the game also had to be simplistic, with human characters often being nothing more than stick figures. Sure, you can make some fun games with these limitations, but in terms of creativity, designers were extremely limited. With the NES, there's a little more hardware umph and you can start to see more detail. You can see that Mario wears overalls and has a mustache. You can see that Goombas have angry little faces. If you were told to draw Bowser, you'd know what to draw, a large turtle creature with spikes on his shell and a big, razer-toothed scowl. But the 16-bit era is where tech really took a leap forward. The more powerful graphics processing capabilities of the SNES not only allowed for more detailed visuals, but other things we'd never seen on heard in home consoles up until that point. There was enough processing power to allow for detail like facial expressions and emotions, which probably helped to make Final Fantasy VI's story all the more powerful. And in terms of audio, now games weren't just limited to beeps, game sounds and music could actually start to sound like things that exist in real life. For example, if you were to perform a cover of the World 1-1 theme, what instruments are you suppose use to be accurate to the original song? While "Witchmakers" from Seiken Densetsu 3 would clearly involve panpipes, upright bass and some kind of music box-like instrument. So what do you guys think? When do you guys think did home consoles hit their stride?
Yeah, but that's only 3 years before the release of the SNES, so that's getting to the end of it's life
I grew up with 8 and 16bit consoles in the house and I love those two generations. But I have to say when cd based games particuarly the ps1 hit the scene all of a sudden gaming was seen (thanks to sony's very clever marketing) as something that mainstream 20 somethings could get into.
It was also 2 years into the nes lifespan in the west, not early but hardly late, just about the time that a console is most successful, after it is established but before the nextgen rumor mongering
I think it was in 1987/88 with the PC Engine for double reason. 1. When the system came out in 1987 it was nearly capable of reproducing 1:1 arcade quality games from that time, if the limited memory allowed it and the programmers were willing to do so (f.e. R-Type). 2. Only a year later it already introduced the world's first CD-ROM for game purposes, years before others even tried, and on top of that also with huge success (in very contrary to most other that wanted to jump on that train as well but failed hard. at least not until the 32-bit age was ringed in with PSX and SS). The CD-ROM media offered so much more space and red book audio which allowed a huge variety in games, graphic as well acoustic wise. that was a huge deal back in 88/89 and even in years to come. Most of us couldn't even imagine how it must be to play on such a device, since we still stuck with NES, SMS, c64 and stuff. FC/NES was still big back then and look how much limited it was compared. there was a huge cap between. Even the MD was released just at the time the PCE already launched its CD-ROM. And the SFC still had to wait over 2 years to even see the sunlight, and then what did we got?
From the start consoles tried to be more (ie: computer/multimedia player). Famicom offered bank/stock services for instance. In the early '90 the multimedia craze was especially high (see 3DO). To this day console are still (expensive) toys IMO. EDIT: But probably I just read wrong the OP.
You have The focus here is less on the hardware itself, but what the hardware can do for the games to make them less short-burst throw-away entertainment.
Then audio and video capabilities have very little to do with it. I'd say storage room and permanent saving functionality are more important. In that regard PC Engine and it's expansions (CD and Tennokoe) have it covered. To be said in those days (until 2000) arcade games (ported to consoles) still had a good presence. If we talk about audio/video capabilities then I would says SNES for the number of colors it could display on screen (to bad it was held down by the cartridge space limitation in its late life), PC Engine for music/sound thanks to the CD addon. For more advanced capabilities (FMV, polygonal graphics, 24bit colors etc.) then I'd choose 3DO which was released in US in 1993 (about 2 years before the PS1).
It would have to be the late 80's having the world being flooded with new consoles from different manufacturers with graphical and technical advancements paving the way for the popularity of some consoles of the 90's.
