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Author: Gizensha

Jun 9th 2012 at 4:00:16 PM

Any history of videogames that doesn't detail the differences in the marketplace, and dominant forms of the media, in various parts of the world is missing important contexts. While non-console home gaming didn't really come into being in America until the rise of the IBM clone, college campuses excluded, and has never really taken off in Japan as far as I can tell, gaming in the 80s was predominantly micro computer based in the UK until around the Mega Drive (Genesis over in the US)

Which, of course, allowed the UK to have a reasonably vibrant indie scene as early as the 80s thanks to the so called 'bedroom coders' - The tape deck that you loaded (...Or, sometimes, failed to load) games from had a record button, and that allowed you to distribute software via the predominant storage medium for those devices via computer fairs, magazine orders, getting included on the free software tape that came with all the major magazines in that era, or walking into your local game store and asking if they'd sell your game - They weren't typically franchises back then, so...

(Not sure how it went down in Europe)