Phenomena

The BBC's Computer Literacy Project set out to teach adults what a microcomputer was and how to program one. Around The Computer Programme (BBC2, January 1982) it built a book, a correspondence course, a referral service, software broadcast over Ceefax and a computer of its own, made by Acorn: the BBC Micro. Choosing Acorn angered Sinclair and others; the series drew about seven million viewers, and later accounts put BBC Micro sales at about 1.5 million.

Blast Processing was Sega of America's slogan for the Genesis in 1992-93. Sega's magazine defined it as displaying one image while loading another, its PR firm could not tell Nintendo Power what it meant, and the developer manual never names it. The man who supplied the word says it came from a DMA trick for the Mega-CD.

From 2012, veterans of Interplay, Black Isle and Troika asked players on Kickstarter to pay for the kind of party-based, isometric computer role-playing game that publishers would no longer fund. Wasteland 2, Project Eternity (Pillars of Eternity), Torment: Tides of Numenera and Divinity: Original Sin raised millions between them, and the revival led, by 2023, to Larian's Baldur's Gate 3.

Between Space Invaders in 1978 and the slump of 1983, coin-operated video games became big business. Time reported in January 1982 that Americans had fed 20 billion quarters, $5 billion, into arcade machines the year before; Pac-Man, Asteroids, Defender and Donkey Kong each sold tens of thousands of cabinets. By mid-1983 the trade was talking about a slump, and in 1984 Gottlieb's successor Mylstar left the business.

Formed in the summer of 1983 by Bug-Byte, New Generation, Quicksilva, Salamander, Silversoft, Softek and Virgin Games, GOSH promised buyers a Customers' Charter: delivery within 28 days, faulty tapes replaced, complaints answered in five working days, and no advertising of games that did not yet exist. It went on to raise a £50,000 fighting fund against pirates and to count the industry shrinking. By May 1988 the press was writing of its demise.

From about 2008 to the mid-2010s, games made by one or two people became hits on download services: Braid and Super Meat Boy on Xbox Live Arcade, Limbo, Spelunky, Minecraft, Thomas Was Alone. Cheap or free tools such as Unity and Game Maker, open storefronts such as Steam Greenlight, and Kickstarter money made it possible, and a documentary, Indie Game: The Movie, made the developers famous. By 2019 more than 200 games a week were coming out on Steam, and the worry had become how anyone would find them.

The Official Nintendo Seal of Quality marked games and products that Nintendo of America had approved. It came out of the licence Nintendo imposed on outside publishers for the NES: Nintendo approved each game, made every cartridge and limited how many games a publisher could release. Nintendo sold the seal to children as a guarantee; unlicensed publishers such as Tengen sold without it.

Pokémon began as a quiet Game Boy release in Japan in February 1996. Within two years the games, the trading cards and the TV cartoon had made it Japan's biggest craze, big enough for a single cartoon episode to send hundreds of children to hospital in December 1997. America followed in 1998–99, with a million-selling card game, a feature film and a Burger King promotion that ended in a recall, and Britain in 1999–2000, where schools banned the cards. Pokémon GO revived it on phones in 2016.

Between Chrono Trigger in 1995 and Final Fantasy X in 2001, Japanese console role-playing games reached a world audience on the PlayStation while American computer role-playing games came back from a slump with Fallout, Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment. The people making them often thought the golden age lay behind them. In 2001 Square reported its first loss and Titus took control of Interplay, and the studios that made the period's best-known games broke up or changed hands over the next few years.

Sega and Nintendo launched their first home consoles in Japan on the same day in July 1983 and competed until Sega left the hardware business in 2001. Nintendo dominated Japan throughout. In America the Genesis made Sega Nintendo's equal in the early 1990s. In Britain and much of Europe Sega's Master System outsold the NES, and the Mega Drive took off when the Super Nintendo arrived in 1992.

Between late 1982 and 1985 the North American home video game market collapsed under too many consoles, too many cartridges and too much unsold stock. Atari lost $539 million in 1983 and was broken up in 1984, and shops gave up on video games until Nintendo's test launch of the NES in 1985.

From 1989 Sega's Genesis took on Nintendo in America with price cuts, sports games, Sonic the Hedgehog and advertising that mocked its rival by name. By the mid-1990s the two were close to level, by both sides' later accounts. Sony's PlayStation then overtook them both, Sega left the hardware business in 2001, and Microsoft joined the fight with the Xbox. Every side quoted its own sales figures, and they rarely agreed.

In early-1980s Britain, a programmer working alone at home could write a game, post it to a publisher and see it in the shops. The magazines called them whizz-kids and young programmers; 'bedroom coder' is a later name. This entry follows the figure through the period press: the teenagers the magazines profiled, the money they were actually paid, and how quickly the publishers moved to teams.

Between 1986 and 1989 the rights to Tetris were sold, resold and sublicensed by a London agent, Robert Maxwell's Mirrorsoft, Spectrum HoloByte, Atari Games and Henk Rogers's Bullet-Proof Software, mostly without the Soviet state's agreement. In Moscow in 1989 the Soviet agency Elorg licensed the handheld rights to Rogers and the console rights to Nintendo, a US court stopped Atari Games' Tengen cartridges, and it took until the mid-2000s for the rights to end up in one place.

In 1983 and 1984 British record companies moved into home computer software. Virgin started Virgin Games, K-tel went to a computer fair with £1 million to spend, Thorn EMI launched Creative Sparks, CBS put a Spectrum game on a Shakin' Stevens album, and two former CBS men opened Ariolasoft for the German Ariola group. Most were out again within a few years; Virgin stayed and grew. They brought the record trade's distribution, packaging and catalogue thinking with them, and the software chart the trade settled on came from Gallup, who also compiled the music charts.