The History of Video Games YouTube channel

[dreamkatcha]

He must be insane to attempt such a colossal task, but TheDrisk has so far covered everything from 1951 to the Playstation 2 era. I can't believe I've only just found this as he started the project nearly three years ago.

The main Amiga retrospective can be found in episode 14, but the whole series is very insightful and interesting. The writing would have benefitted from proof-reading, though otherwise it's an extremely entertaining trip down memory lane.

Anyone else watched any of it?

[-Acid-]

I haven't yet but I will have a marathon session at work tomorrow if I like the first one. I sit scanning into photoshop all day so it's split screen work and watching something for 8 hours. I need something new as well I've watched all of the G4 Icons series in the last few days!

[-Acid-]

I'm just up to the Amiga episode now, it's great stuff to watch... first time i've seen one of these history of series from a European/UK perspective and finally it takes notice of 8/16/32 home computers.

[dreamkatcha]

Glad to hear it. I know, who'd-a-thunk computers existed before the NES came along?

Over the years the big names in game coding changed companies so often it's like listening to a list of pre-season football transfers. The density of information makes your head spin.

Thanks for the tip; I've never heard of that G4 show before although I know the channel from listening to Leo Laporte. A lot lighter than DSK's, but features comments from the industry giants who lived it so offers a more rounded perspective. You've got to feel sorry for Howard Scott Warshaw. The flak he must have endured over the years! ...and his only crime was really being too easily swayed by dollar signs and overestimating his abilities.

[-Acid-]

Atari (although I ascociate them with failure due to a multitude of things), cannot be blamed for it all going wrong. True they made some crap and expected it to sell, ET and Pacman mainly, but if you want to point fingers the breakaway and formation of Activision did just as much if not more harm as it opened the doors for shovelware from anyone who wanted to start a company up. Before this there were releases unfit to be called games but things were going along okay. But Atari are to blame for that happening as they would not pay them a fair percentage of what their games were earning. Everything happened for a reason and got us to where we are now, if the 80s crash didn't happen would we be playing the likes of Zelda and Metroid Prime etc these days?

[lifeschool]

The History of Video Games (by TheDrisk) has also been archived at the Internet Archives Free Library site:

http://archive.org/details/DskGuideToVideoHameHistory

You can download the episodes individually from there without having to watch them all on YT. I saw all those shows last year, an excellent resource, and the History part is spot on in so many ways. The Amiga sections are fun and with great respect for the machine (for a change).

As for the 70's and 80's market crashes, well they just made too many terrible games on all formats and flooded the market with them. The 2600 was a culprit and affected the market due to so many people having an Atari. But there were also too many dead machines around at the time which people were still using, and sometimes folks bought one of these (Intelivision, Magnavox, Vectrex) thinking this was the future when in fact they were already in the past. When the C64 came along most of those dinosaurs had died out, leaving gamers with one solid machine with a nice range of decent games. The c64 outsold every other machine by 10 to 1, and dominated the market long after the NES and Master Systems and Amigas appeared in the mid 80's up to '90. Stable and long lasting platforms count for a lot when it comes to market stability.

[Lorfarius]

This is great, really enjoying working my way through