The timeline

Cartridges come home

A console that played swappable cartridges reached a mass audience that autumn, and three ready-made home computers went on sale within months of one another. The arcade’s best trick, a game you could not copy at home, was about to be tested. Meanwhile vector cabinets glowed in bowling alleys, drawing ships as outlines that the beam traced directly onto the glass.

From 1977 on Eracade: Vector Volley.

The rows descend

A shooting game from Japan lined up rows of aliens and marched them downward. As the rows thinned, the survivors moved faster, a side effect of the hardware that the designers had the sense to keep. The lesson stuck: a game can get harder by becoming simpler, and tension can come from subtraction. Queues formed at the cabinets, and the high-score table became a neighbourhood sport.

Drifting rocks and a new kind of company

A vector game of rock-splitting and inertia taught a whole audience how momentum feels, complete with edges that wrapped around. In the same year a group of console programmers left their employer to start the first independent publisher, arguing that the people who made the games deserved a name on the box. Both ideas, craft and credit, outlived the machines. Credit and craft are still the argument.

From 1979 on Eracade: Phosphor Parry, Orbit Tether.

The hunter is hunted

A maze game in which a round yellow character eats dots, and sometimes turns the tables on its pursuers, reached the arcade from Japan. Its four enemies each followed slightly different rules, so the maze felt alive without any real intelligence. It was also among the first games to appeal widely beyond young men, with bright colour, a gentle sound and a clear, friendly idea.

From 1980 on Eracade: Filament Run.

The jump

A cabinet showed a carpenter jumping barrels on a climb through girders, and platform games had their first big hit. Jumping is a surprisingly deep verb, because it commits you to an arc in the air. Elsewhere that summer, a business computer from a large manufacturer arrived with an open design, setting the table for the next two decades of desk-bound games.

From 1981 on Eracade: Tether Drift, Wickmaze.

Bedroom computers

Two affordable colour computers, one with a famous rubber keyboard and an attribute-based display, the other with sprites and a capable sound chip, put programming and play in children’s bedrooms. Tapes loaded for minutes with a screech. A generation learned to type in listings, break them and fix them. Many careers in games trace back to a tape that would not load.

Crash and Famicom

In North America the home market collapsed under a pile of rushed cartridges and unsold stock, and many predicted the end of video games. In Japan a new cartridge console launched that summer with a tidy design and a strict approach to quality. The two stories look like opposites, but they have the same moral: players will leave if they are not respected.

Falling blocks

A programmer in Moscow built a puzzle game from falling four-square shapes to test a new computer. It needed no story, no enemies and almost no graphics, and could be explained in five seconds and mastered never. It would travel across borders by floppy disk and cartridge and eventually become one of the most ported games ever made. It is also a reminder that the best constraints are the ones you invent for yourself.

From 1984 on Eracade: Neon Burrow.

The screen that scrolls

A side-scrolling platform game gave the player a world that unrolled to the right, with secrets under pipes and in blocks. It taught you its rules inside the first minute without a single line of text: a pit, an enemy, a block to hit. Good level design as silent tutorial became a craft in its own right, and designers have copied the method ever since.

From 1985 on Eracade: Blitz Bellhop.

Progress that stays

A cartridge arrived with a small battery inside it, which meant a game could remember where you were after the power was switched off. Adventures that took thirty hours became possible, and so did the idea that a game could be a place you return to. Until then, a game session ended when the machine did. Now it could end on Tuesday and resume on Friday.

From 1986 on Eracade: Skyline Salvage.

VGA and the 256-colour screen

A new display standard for personal computers offered 256 colours chosen from a palette of over a quarter of a million, at a resolution that suited games. For the first time, a PC could show a convincing sunset. Artists learned to build palettes by hand, ordering their colours so that fades and shadows worked, and the word palette acquired a craft meaning.

From 1987 on Eracade: Brickwork Bandit.

The 16-bit console

A new console reached shops in Japan with a faster processor, a wider range of colours and a sound chip with distinctive timbres. Its palette held 512 colours, of which 64 could appear at once, which sounds modest and was liberating. The company pitched the machine on speed, arcade ports and attitude, and a rivalry between living rooms began to take shape.

Four shades of green

A handheld console with a small, unlit screen and four muddy shades of grey-green went on sale and came with a falling-blocks game in the box. It was less capable than rivals with colour and backlight, and it sold in enormous numbers anyway. Battery life, price and a great game outweighed every specification. The fashion for tiny, careful games was set.

Scaling and rotating

A 16-bit console arrived in Japan with a special background mode that could rotate and scale a whole layer in hardware. Tilt it and squash the far edge and a flat map turned into a racetrack. Artists and programmers spent the next four years finding ways to exploit it, from airships to sprawling maps to tracks that seemed to fall away to the horizon.

Six buttons and a crowd

A one-on-one fighting game for the arcade offered eight characters, six attack buttons and special moves entered as joystick motions. It created a ritual: two players, one cabinet, a crowd behind, and a queue of challengers with coins on the edge of the panel. Competitive play stopped being the property of high-score tables and became face-to-face. The living-room console version spread the habit.

Corridors in three dimensions

A first-person shooter used a technique called ray casting to draw walls as vertical strips from a flat map. The world had no real height, no slopes and no rooms stacked on rooms, and it was convincing anyway. The speed was the point. A small team had shown that a personal computer could put the player inside a corridor, and the imitation began almost at once.

From 1992 on Eracade: Gearheart.

Shareware and shipping

A fast, dark first-person shooter was given away for free in its first episode, with the other episodes sold by mail. The method worked beyond anyone’s hopes. It was copied at schools and offices, and the free episode turned into a vast advertisement. Elsewhere, a lonely island-puzzle adventure sold well on a new format, the CD-ROM. Games were getting bigger, and so was the idea of distribution.

From 1993 on Eracade: Gloaming Drift, Pogo Pilgrim.

Discs and polygons

Two disc-based consoles reached the Japanese market within a fortnight of each other, built to draw textured polygons. Their textures swam and wobbled as the camera moved, and their games looked startlingly new. CD media brought recorded music, voice acting and full-motion video, while the cartridge’s compact economy began to look old-fashioned. Sprites stayed alive as a style. Polygons took over as a technology.

From 1994 on Eracade: Tidepool Tactics.

Scripts for the browser

In one frantic fortnight, a scripting language was written for a web browser, and another language was launched with a promise of running anywhere. Pages could now do things: respond to clicks, change themselves, draw. A new operating system added a start button and a game-friendly layer for graphics. Most games from this year do not look like the future, but the tools that would build it had just arrived.

FutureSplash becomes Flash

A small vector animation tool, first released as FutureSplash, was bought and renamed. The result was a plugin and an authoring program that let artists publish animation to the web in files small enough for a modem. The same year brought a console with an analog stick that could be tilted in any direction, and a true-3D shooter. The next decade was being assembled out of parts.

From 1996 on Eracade: Dusk Highway.

Shared worlds

A graphical online world opened to subscribers over dial-up, and thousands of strangers shared a map for the first time. Lag was a constant companion. Players learned to wait, to type with one hand, to chat while a dragon lumbered nearby. It was proof that people would pay a monthly fee for company as much as for content, and an early sign of how much of gaming would be social.

Fifty-six thousand, in theory

A standard for 56k modems was published, promising downloads of up to 56 kilobits a second under ideal conditions, which in practice meant forty-something. It was enough to make a 200-kilobyte web game feel reasonable and a two-megabyte one feel like a commitment. Sites began to show proper loading bars, and the first generation of browser arcades took shape around the limit.

The squeal begins to fade

Cable and DSL connections started to reach ordinary homes, always on and many times faster than any modem. The handshake sound, so familiar that it was practically a national anthem, began its long retreat from daily life. A console shipped with a built-in modem, hinting at online play. Web designers noticed they could use more than fifty kilobytes for a header image.

From 1999 on Eracade: Dialup Dash.

The bubble bursts

The first great boom in internet companies ended in a loud collapse. Many game portals and their sponsors vanished with it, and those that survived learned to run on slender budgets. It was a hard year for companies and a good one for homemade games, which cost almost nothing to make and found audiences through email, bulletin boards and word of mouth.

From 2000 on Eracade: Packet Patrol.

The plugin on every desktop

By now the animation plugin was installed on the great majority of desktop browsers, which meant a game made with it would run for nearly everyone who clicked. A creator with a mouse and a few weeks could reach a larger audience than most boxed games. It was the democratising year of the early web, even if most people did not notice.

From 2001 on Eracade: Floe Flingers, Hotlink Typist.

Consoles go online

A console launched an online service with a single account, a friends list and voice chat, and the phrase playing online shifted from computer-hobbyist talk to living-room habit. The same year, the leading authoring tool for web animation gained improved scripting, and the browser games that followed began to have levels, upgrades and inventory. Scores and achievements, once private to a cabinet, began to follow a person across games.

From 2002 on Eracade: Banner Blaster.

A shop inside the game

A digital store and updater for computer games came out of a tiny bootstrap, and over the next years it became the way many people bought, installed and patched what they played. Physical media began its long decline. Small developers noticed that distribution, once the hardest part of the job, was becoming nearly free. The shop window moved from the high street to the desktop, and the shelf never ran out of space.

Canvas

A browser maker added a drawing surface to its web engine, originally for dashboard widgets: a rectangle onto which a script could paint pixels. Other browsers adopted it. It would take years to mature, but it was the seed of everything the web can do without a plugin. This museum’s exhibits are drawn on it. A vast online role-playing world also opened its doors that November.

A new owner for the plugin

A design software company completed its acquisition of the plugin’s maker, and a video-sharing site went live early in the year. Video, animation and games were suddenly the three things everyone used the web for, and all three were carried by the same plugin. Sponsorship deals for casual games became routine, and the preloader became a billboard. Free games were finding sponsors faster than anyone could count the plays.

Waggle

A console shipped with a wand-shaped controller that sensed motion, and games moved from thumbs to arms. Grandparents played bowling in living rooms. The lesson for designers was that the input device is part of the game. Unusual controls reach unusual audiences, and a simple motion that anyone understands beats a complicated one that only experts enjoy. The wand made a joke of the old rule that serious hardware needs serious controls.

Glass in a pocket

A phone with a large multi-touch screen and no physical keyboard went on sale. It had a browser with real pages, a fast processor and a screen that responded to a fingertip instead of a stylus. Games for it were not yet possible beyond the browser, but everyone who handled one knew a new platform had begun. Browser game portals were thriving that year.

From 2007 on Eracade: Gloss Garden.

The store opens

An app store opened for phones that summer, with a few hundred programs and a promise of worldwide distribution. A single developer could now ship to millions of pockets. Physics toys, match puzzles and drawing games made the jump from the browser and discovered a new audience that did not care where they came from, only whether they were fun in a queue.

From 2008 on Eracade: Crosswind Crags, Ink Courier, Margin Marauders, Tilt Orchard.

Slingshot

A bird-flinging physics game arrived on phones in December, after dozens of earlier projects had been abandoned by its small studio. Its core was a drag-to-aim slingshot and a tower of blocks that collapsed satisfyingly. A single gesture, easy to learn and hard to perfect, became one of the best-selling games of its kind. Dragging back and letting go entered the language.

From 2009 on Eracade: Jellyjoint Jamboree.

A letter about plugins

The maker of the most popular phone published a long public letter explaining why its devices would not run the browser plugin, citing battery life, security, touch input and a preference for open web standards. Supporters and critics argued for months. In hindsight, both camps were partly right. The conversation made developers wonder whether their favourite tool had a future. Plugins would never again feel permanent.

From 2010 on Eracade: Stickfold.

The plugin leaves the phone

In the autumn, the plugin’s owner announced that it would stop developing the mobile browser version and focus on desktop and on tools for building native apps. It was the first major crack. In the same months, an endless-runner game for phones became a hit with a simple swipe-and-tilt control scheme, and a building game was released in full. The second half of the decade would be shaped by that choice.

One thumb

Smartphones became the games device most people owned, and a design vocabulary hardened around it: single-tap controls, flat colours, quick restarts, scores you could say aloud. Free-to-play models started to dominate. The best games of the year were honest about their ambition, one verb and one number, and spread in the oldest way there is, a friend leaning over and saying: try this.

A flap and a pipe

A one-button game about flapping a small bird between green pipes appeared quietly in May. It was harsh, plain and wholly readable, and for months almost nobody noticed. The pattern of the year was deceptively simple controls, a razor-thin margin for error and the instant restart. Developers everywhere took note: the smallest idea, executed without a flinch, can be the biggest.

From 2013 on Eracade: Pendulum Pop, One Thumb Hop.

Browsers get their games back

The bird game exploded early in the year and was withdrawn by its creator at the height of its fame. A little sliding-tile puzzle written as a web page and released as open source spread through the browser by link alone. The web was a place for games again, with no plugin needed. This museum ends here, at the point where the arcade fits in your pocket and in a tab.

From 2014 on Eracade: Tap Tides.