Looking back on the years of video game titles, it just occured to me that we never talk about the first and second gen systems, or their games, or any games that came out prior to '85.
I know that a lot of the titles from those systems are just expensive toys that last about 5-20 minutes, but surely there was some groundbreaking/ahead-of-it's-time/lasting titles that came out prior to the NES. Also, I don't want to limit this to just console games. What are some great computer games that came out prior to 1985?
There were great games released before 1985, but they came out in the arcades. Home consoles only received very poor ports of them.
Michael Jenkins
Yar's Revenge Pit Fall Spelunker (if you're into that sort of thing) Frankenstein's Monster Q*bert
Counterpoint the Vectrex. Also depending on if you want to count it as a console or not the C64 was right at the end of the second gen.
Elijah Reed
Controversial opinion. Will more than likely piss most people off. tbh games weren't un until after the Famicom came out. Bosconian on the X68000>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Arcade. It's amazing how much a good soundtrack can make a game infinitely more playable. Yuzo Koshiro is fucking amazing. Bosconian is still a good game regardless. Games just weren't that good until people actually gave a shit about the music they put into them.
Charles Peterson
Nah it's a home computer. But that reminds me, Elite (1984) would just about make the cut-off.
Colton Kelly
they didn't care about music because every arcade in the 80s had hairmetal blasting in every corner at max volume.
Brandon Reed
Pretty much, and even then most still suffered from really bad design principals carried over from pay2win arcade games until 5th gen when that largely stopped being a thing.
I look at gen 1/2 as the Model T of vidya. The black powder rifle of firearms. The recurve bow of archery. The silent films of movies.
I respect them, and I'm glad they existed as stepping stones to better things, but I have no interest in using them today when there are more contemporary offerings that do everything they do, but better.
Tyler Fisher
ITT
Aiden James
Donkey Kang was pretty fun. Pole Position II for the 7800 looks as good as any nes game
