Third Generation Video Games
In 1984, the computer gaming market took over from the console market following the crash of that year; computers offered equal gaming ability and since their simple design allowed games to take complete command of the hardware after power-on, they were nearly as simple to start playing with as consoles.
In 1985, the North American video game console market was revived with Nintendo’s release of its 8-bit console, the Famicom, known outside Asia as Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was bundled with Super Mario Bros. and instantly became a success. The NES dominated the North American market until the rise of the next generation of consoles in the early 1990s. Other markets were not as heavily dominated, allowing other consoles to find an audience like the PC Engine in Japan and the Sega Master System in Europe, Australia and Brazil (though it was sold in North America as well).
In the new consoles, the gamepad took over joysticks, paddles, and keypads as the default game controller included with the system. The gamepad design of an 8 direction Directional-pad (or D-pad for short) with 2 or more action buttons became the standard.
The Dragon Quest series made its debut in 1986 with Dragon Quest, and has created a phenomenon in Japanese culture ever since. Also at this time, the Japanese company SquareSoft was struggling and Hironobu Sakaguchi decided to make their final game, titled Final Fantasy (1987), a role-playing game (RPG) modeled after Dragon Quest, and the Final Fantasy series was born as a result. Final Fantasy saved Squaresoft from bankruptcy, and would later go on to become the most successful RPG franchise. At around the same time, the Legend of Zelda series made its debut on the NES with The Legend of Zelda (1986). Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear series also made its debut with the release of Metal Gear (1987) on the MSX2 computer, giving birth to the stealth-based game genre. Metal Gear was ported to the NES shortly after. In 1989, Capcom released Sweet Home (1989) on the NES, which served as a precursor to the survival horror genre.
In 1988, Nintendo published their first issue of Nintendo Power magazine, becoming what could be considered the first newsletter dedicated to video games, inspiring such magazines as Game Informer and PlayStation Magazine.
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