1990-1999 · 34 entries
Sprites gave way to polygons, cartridges to compact discs, and the living room quietly took the arcade's place.
Competition, more than technology, set the tone of the early 1990s. Two Japanese companies with 16-bit consoles fought over American teenagers, and the challenger's local operation did something the industry had never really tried: it treated a console like a soft drink, with a mascot built for attitude, licensed athletes, and advertising that named its competitor and mocked it. Market share genuinely moved, which taught everyone that marketing was not a cost of doing business but a weapon. Console rivalry became a story that general newspapers and evening news programs could cover, and players started to experience their choice of hardware as a form of identity.
Arcades had one more great decade in them, and it belonged to competition between people rather than against the machine. A fighting game with a full roster of characters and hidden command inputs turned cabinets around to face each other, gave operators their best revenue in years, and created an informal tournament culture that would eventually become a professional sport. The same rooms also got the first look at real-time polygons, because the money and the cooling space that hardware demanded existed in a coin-operated cabinet long before they existed in a living room. For a few years yet, the arcade was still where you went to see the future.
The move into three dimensions reshuffled the whole industry. A consumer electronics company with no history in games entered with straightforward polygon hardware, tools that developers could actually work with, and discs that cost very little to press, and it won the generation. A rival's more complicated architecture punished the studios trying to support it. A third company stayed with cartridges, keeping load times short at the cost of storage, and used its launch software to solve the problem nobody had yet cracked: how a person steers a character through space seen from a camera that moves. Analog sticks and lock-on targeting are answers from these years.
On personal computers the decade ran on a different economy entirely. Small teams gave away a first chapter and asked for money by mail for the rest, which funded ambitious work completely outside the retail system. Games shipped with file formats open enough that players rebuilt them, and modification communities became both a hobby and a hiring pipeline. Graphics accelerator cards began an upgrade cycle that has never stopped, and a unified way for games to reach hardware under Windows ended a long dependence on an older operating system. Dial-up and then broadband turned the machine into a social venue, first for deathmatch and then for worlds that charged monthly rent.
Politics arrived in December 1993, when a Senate subcommittee took up violent content and executives from competing companies blamed one another in public. The industry's answer was a ratings board of its own making, adopted quickly by retailers, and self-regulation has held off federal content law ever since. Elsewhere the decade increasingly looked like mainstream media: a trade show of the industry's own, a puzzle game widely credited with putting disc drives in ordinary households, and a British character who turned up on magazine covers with nothing to do with games. Persistent online worlds, storefront logic and organized competition all left the 1990s as working models.
The 16-bit rivalry professionalized game marketing. Comparative advertising, sports licensing, mascot design and carefully engineered attitude all arrived at once, aimed at teenagers with disposable income. It worked well enough to move real market share, and it permanently changed the budgets. From this point on, the campaign around a major release was planned with the same seriousness as the game itself.
Competitive fighting games gave arcades a final profitable era by changing what the room was for. Instead of paying to face a machine, players paid to face each other, which meant longer visits, side bets, regulars and local reputations. When home hardware caught up and online play arrived, the social function moved indoors and most of the rooms closed within a few years.
Computer games developed a distribution culture that owed nothing to retail. A free first episode funded the rest by mail order, and open data formats let players build levels, weapons and entire new games out of someone else's work. Several of the decade's most influential releases began as modifications, and studios learned to hire from the communities forming around their own tools.
Sega's portable console reused the architecture of its home machine to deliver a lit color display at a time when the market leader was monochrome. It sold in the millions and drained batteries at a famous rate.
Nintendo's 16-bit console reached Japanese stores with custom chips for scaling and rotating graphics and a sound system built with help from Sony. Demand overwhelmed the first shipment, and a restyled version arrived in North America the following year.
A licensed Dungeons & Dragons world ran on a consumer dial-up service, letting subscribers explore and fight together while paying by the hour. It is usually described as the first graphical multiplayer role-playing game sold to the public.
Capcom's sequel gave players eight fighters with genuinely different move sets and a structure that rewarded study. Arcades rearranged their floors around it, and the community that formed became the foundation of organized competitive play.
Sega built a mascot around speed and momentum, then bundled the game with the Genesis in North America. It gave the company a character to set against Mario and turned a respectable console into a genuine contender.
Sid Meier's strategy game handed players a single group of settlers and several thousand years, asking them to manage research, cities, armies and diplomacy. Its interlocking systems and long sessions defined a durable computer genre.
id Software's shareware release used a fast ray-casting engine to put players inside texture-mapped corridors on ordinary computers. Giving the first episode away and selling the rest by mail proved shareware could fund serious development.
Sega's racing game rendered cars and circuits as flat-shaded polygons calculated on the fly, with camera angles players could switch between. It made three-dimensional graphics a paying arcade attraction rather than a laboratory demonstration.
Midway's fighting game used photographed actors and unusually graphic finishing moves. It earned heavily in arcades, sold strongly on home consoles, and became the central exhibit in an American political fight over game content.
Sega AM2 built a fighting game from polygonal figures with weight, footwork and a ring to be pushed out of. It became the reference point for three-dimensional fighting and a showcase for the coming console generation.
Cyan's puzzle game presented a deserted island as pre-rendered still images, with no combat, no enemies and no way to die. Published by Broderbund, it became the decade's best-selling computer game and a standing argument for buying a disc drive.
A United States Senate subcommittee took testimony on violent content in games, with legislators warning that federal regulation would follow if the industry did not act. Executives from competing companies traded blame, and a ratings body was promised.
id Software's shooter combined varied level geometry, networked play against other people, and data files players could replace. Shareware distribution put it on office and campus computers everywhere, and its editable resources created modern modding culture.
Facing the prospect of federal legislation, American publishers organized a single body to assign age and content ratings to games. Retailers adopted it quickly, and industry self-regulation became the standing answer to political pressure.
Sega's new console reached Japan with two main processors and hardware exceptionally strong at two-dimensional work but awkward for polygons. Its complexity discouraged outside developers, and a rushed American release made the position worse.
Sony entered the console business after a disc partnership with Nintendo collapsed, bringing straightforward three-dimensional hardware, inexpensive disc manufacturing and tools developers liked. The machine reached North America and Europe the following September.
The first Electronic Entertainment Expo opened in Los Angeles, giving games a professional trade show instead of a corner of a consumer electronics event. It became the industry's fixed announcement date for more than twenty years.
Microsoft released the first version of DirectX, letting Windows programs reach graphics, sound and input hardware almost directly. It ended the game industry's dependence on MS-DOS and made Windows a coherent target for commercial development.
Boards built on the Voodoo chipset from 3dfx Interactive reached buyers during 1996, moving texture drawing off the main processor and onto dedicated hardware. An accelerated computer suddenly outclassed the new consoles.
Game Freak's Pokemon Red and Green reached Japanese stores on February 27, 1996, roughly seven years into the Game Boy's run. Collecting creatures and trading them over a link cable turned an aging handheld into a phenomenon.
id Software released Quake as shareware on June 22, 1996. Its engine rendered genuinely three-dimensional spaces, and multiplayer over the internet shipped with the game rather than arriving later as an add-on.
Nintendo's 64-bit console reached Japan on June 23, 1996 alongside Super Mario 64. An analog stick and a camera the player could swing solved problems that had defeated earlier attempts at three-dimensional play.
Meridian 59 opened commercially in September 1996, offering a first-person persistent world shared by many players for a fixed monthly charge. It is frequently cited as the first commercial 3D massively multiplayer role-playing game.
Core Design's Tomb Raider appeared in the autumn of 1996, pairing third-person exploration of three-dimensional ruins with Lara Croft. The character escaped the game almost immediately, turning up in advertising, music press and mainstream magazines.
Square released Final Fantasy VII in Japan on January 31, 1997. Spread across three discs, with pre-rendered backgrounds and long cinematic sequences, it became the game that sold the genre to Western audiences.
Rare's adaptation of a James Bond film reached North America on August 25, 1997. Objective-based missions and four-player split-screen deathmatch showed that a shooter could work on a console with a gamepad.
Origin Systems opened Ultima Online on September 24, 1997. Tens of thousands of subscribers shared a fantasy world with housing, crafting, a player-driven economy and few restrictions on attacking one another.
Blizzard released StarCraft on March 31, 1998, with three factions that played nothing alike and matchmaking built into the game. In South Korea it became the foundation of the first large professional gaming scene.
Pokemon Red and Blue went on sale in North America on September 28, 1998, with the Game Boy Color arriving weeks afterward. A nine-year-old handheld line became a mass-market product all over again.
Valve's first game shipped on November 19, 1998. Rather than cutting to separate scenes, it staged its events in front of a player who never left the character's viewpoint, and its released tools produced a generation of modifications.
Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in Japan on November 21, 1998. A targeting system that locked the camera onto an enemy made close combat in three dimensions readable for the first time.
EverQuest opened on March 16, 1999, presenting a fantasy world in first-person 3D and organizing play around groups. Its subscriber numbers exceeded every internal forecast, and its habits shaped online games for years.
The Dreamcast reached American stores on September 9, 1999, nearly a year after its Japanese debut, with a dial-up modem included as standard equipment. Well reviewed and briefly successful, it was Sega's final machine.
The GeForce 256 went on sale on October 11, 1999, marketed as a graphics processing unit because it handled geometry and lighting work the main processor had previously done. The term outlasted the product by decades.
Nearly every convention a modern player takes for granted was settled in this decade: a movable camera behind a character, an analog stick, a monthly subscription to a shared world, an age rating on the box, and a graphics card you expect to replace every few years. The 1990s also began the long decline of the arcade, because the reason to leave the house had moved indoors. What follows is the record of that transfer.
