Eras
Arcades
1971 to 1983. 30 games.
The game began as furniture. A machine stood in a hall, took a coin and gave three lives, so the rules had to be explained in five seconds and the difficulty kept high. By the end of the seventies the same designs moved into home consoles and the first personal computers, where text adventures and dungeons made of text characters grew up alongside the arcade.
Eight bit
1983 to 1991. 42 games.
After the American market crashed in 1983, the industry was put back together by a Japanese console, the Famicom, known here as the NES. A cartridge with a battery made it possible to save progress, and a game stopped being a single run on three lives. In parallel, home computers, from the ZX Spectrum to the Amiga, were raising a school of their own: strategies, simulators and adventures that would have been impossible in an arcade hall.
Sixteen bit
1989 to 1995. 44 games.
Sega and Nintendo split the market, and for the first time the rivalry between two consoles becomes the subject of advertising, schoolyards and magazines. There is enough memory for big worlds, orchestral music and dozens of characters in a single game. At the same time the personal computer gets the first-person view, real-time strategy and 3D graphics, which a few years later would take over everything.
Disc and 3D
1995 to 2000. 45 games.
The compact disc made room for voice, video and an orchestra, and polygons gave depth. Developers learn everything anew: how to place the camera, how to tell the player where they are, how to keep a fight readable when an enemy can come at you from behind. In these same years mass online gaming appears, and the computer club becomes a public place in its own right.
The 2000s
2000 to 2009. 46 games.
Open worlds, cinematic direction and an always-on network connection become the norm. Games split off toward different audiences: some demand a powerful computer and hundreds of hours, others live in the browser, on a console for the whole family or in the first phone with a touchscreen. By the end of the decade digital stores appear, and a small team can once again release a game without a publisher.
Today
2010 to 2026. 50 games.
A game is now made by two hundred people, or by one. Big studios build worlds years in advance, independent authors release things no publisher would ever have signed off on, and the phone becomes the most widespread platform in history. Games are shown in museums and studied at universities.