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This was the first console to use a microprocessor, and was able to pause and save games.

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The Fairchild Channel F, short for "Channel Fun", is a video game console, the first to be based on a microprocessor and to use ROM cartridges instead of having games built-in. It was released by Fairchild Camera and Instrument in November 1976 across North America at a retail price of US$169.95 (equivalent to $870 in 2022). It was launched as the "Video Entertainment System", but when Atari released its Video Computer System the next year, Fairchild rebranded their machine as "Channel F" while keeping the Video Entertainment System descriptor.

The Fairchild Channel F achieved only about 350,000 units before Fairchild sold the technology to Zircon International in 1979, trailing well behind the VCS. The system was discontinued in 1983.

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In 1974, Alpex Computer Corporation employees Wallace Kirschner and Lawrence Haskel developed a home video game prototype consisting of a base unit centered on an Intel 8080 microprocessor and interchangeable circuit boards containing ROM chips that could be plugged into the base unit. The duo attempted to interest several television manufacturers in the system, but were unsuccessful. Next, they contacted a buyer at Fairchild, which sent engineer Jerry Lawson to evaluate the system. Lawson was impressed by the system and suggested Fairchild license the technology, which the company did in January 1976.

Lawson worked with industrial designer Nick Talesfore and mechanical engineer Ron Smith to turn the prototype into a viable project. Jerry Lawson replaced the 8080 with Fairchild's own F8 CPU; while Nick Talesfore and Ron Smith were responsible for adapting the prototype's complex keyboard controls into a single control stick, and encasing the ROM circuit boards into plastic cartridges reminiscent of 8-track tapes. Talesfore, providing Industrial Design (ID), and Ron Smith, providing Mechanical Engineering (ME), collaborated on the styling and function of the 8 degrees of freedom hand controller. They were responsible for the design of the hand controllers, console, and video game cartridges. In addition to providing the ID for this system, Talesfore also art directed Tom Kamafugi, the graphic designer who did the original graphic design for the early video cartridges cartons.

The system was also released in Japan (チャンネル F) in October 1977.[citation needed ]

Lawson moved on to form his own company, Video Soft in 1980. Talesfore continued working on the system at Fairchild, and eventually a number of these improvements resulted in the improved System II. The major changes were that the controllers were now removable, using the Atari joystick port connector (not Atari compatible), and their storage was moved to the back of the machine. The sound was now mixed into the RF modulator so you could adjust it on your TV set instead of a fixed volume internal speaker. The internal electronics were also simplified, with two custom logic chips replacing the standard TTL logic chips. This resulted in a much smaller motherboard which allowed for a smaller, simpler and more modern-looking case design.

Some time in 1979, Zircon International bought the rights to the Channel F and released the re-designed console as the Channel F System II to compete with Atari's VCS. Channel F II struggled, managing to only release six new games after the debut before its demise; several of these were developed at Fairchild before they sold the rights.

A number of licensed versions were released in Europe, including the Luxor Video Entertainment System in Sweden, Adman Grandstand Video Entertainment Computer (Channel F II) in the UK, the SABA Videoplay, ITT Telematch Processor and Nordmende Color TelePlay µP from Germany, and the Barco Challenger, Dumont Videoplay and Emerson Videoplay from the Barco/Dumont/Emerson company in Italy and Belgium. Swedish Luxor also released the Channel F II as Luxor Video Entertainment Computer.

The palette of the Channel F

The F8 was very innovative compared to the existing processors and typical integrated circuits of the day. Because chip packaging was not initially available with enough pins, a few pins were used to communicate with other chips in the system. You needed at least two chips to set up an F8 processor system to be able run any code. The savings from using standard pin layout enabled the inclusion of 64 Bytes of internal scratchpad RAM in the CPU. The VES/Channel F, as well as the System II, had one CPU and two storage chips (PSU:s). (A single-chip variant of the F8 was used by the VideoBrain computer system).

The Channel F is able to use one plane of graphics and one of four background colors per line, with three plot colors to choose from (red, green, and blue) that turns white if the background is set to black, at a resolution of 128 × 64, with approximately 104 × 60 pixels visible on the TV screen. This VRAM or framebuffer was "write only" and not usable for anything else. There was only 64 Bytes of scratchpad RAM for general use - half the amount of the later Atari 2600. The Maze game (Videocart-10) and Hangman game (Videocart-18) used 1024 bits of on-cartridge static RAM connected directly to one PSU port - adding to the cost of manufacturing it. The Chess game contained considerably more on-cartridge RAM than that, 2048 Bytes accomplished by using an F8 memory interface circuit to be able to use industry standard ROM and RAM. The F8 processor at the heart of the console is able to produce enough AI to allow for player versus computer matches, a first in console history. All previous machines required a human opponent. Tic-Tac-Toe on Videocart-1 had this feature, it was only for one player against the machine. The same is true for the chess game, which could have very long turn times for the computer as the game progressed, depending on the set difficulty.[citation needed ]

In the original unit, sound is played through an internal speaker, rather than the TV set. However, the System II passed sound to the television through the RF modulator.

The Channel F is also the first video game console to feature a pause function; There is a 'Hold' button on the main unit of the console which allows players to freeze inside the two built-in games and change several game settings in the meantime. Button is controlled through code so it was used for other things in other games.

The controllers are a joystick without a base; the main body is a large handgrip with a triangular "cap" on top, the top being the portion that actually moved for eight-way directional control. It could be used as both a joystick and paddle (twist), and not only could it be pushed down to operate as a fire button, it could be pulled up as well. The model 1 unit contained a small compartment for storing the controllers when moving it or when not in use. The System II featured detachable controllers with two holders at the back to wind the cable around and to store the controller in. Zircon later offered a special controller that featured an action button on the front of the joystick. It was marketed by Zircon as "Channel F Jet-Stick" in a letter sent out to registered owners before Christmas 1982.

One feature, unique to the console, is the 'hold' button, which allows the player to freeze the game, change the time or speed of the game. The hold function is however not universal (like the hardwired reset) as the four buttons are set up in code. The programmer can choose their function/purpose. The text labels explains the button functions in the built-in games (and some of the Videocarts).

Despite the failure of the Channel F, the joystick's design was so popular-Creative Computing called it "outstanding"- that Zircon also released an Atari joystick port-compatible version, the Video Command Joystick, first released without the extra fire button. Before that, only the downwards plunge motion was connected and acted as the fire button; the pull-up and twist actions were not connected to anything.[citation needed ]

CPU microprocessor: Fairchild F8 (8-bit) operating at 1.7897725 MHz (NTSC colorburst/2). PAL gen. 1: 2.0000 MHz, gen. 2: 1.9704910 MHz (double PAL colorburst/9)

RAM: 2 KB VRAM (128 × 64 × 2 bits) for the write only framebuffer (four Mostek MK4027 or MK4015 4Kx1bit DRAMs), plus 64 bytes of scratchpad memory.

Additional SRAM supported via add-in cartridges. Maze and Hangman has 1K x 1 bit, expanded with 3853 SMI Chess has 2048 Bytes.

Resolution: Approximately columns 3-107 and rows 2-62 are visible, depending on TV. (Columns 125 and 126 controls palette per row). Although VRAM could cover 128 × 64 pixels,

Colors: 8 colors (either black/white lines or lines using background grey/blue/green with red, green or blue pixels)

Audio: 120 Hz, 500 Hz and 1 kHz beeps (can be modulated to produce different tones). Quality is quite superior on the System II, versus the original model.

Input: two custom game controllers, hardwired to the console (original release) or removable (Channel F System II)

Output: RF modulated composite video signal, cord hardwired to console in original release, detachable in System II.

Twenty-seven cartridges, termed "Videocarts", were officially released to consumers in the United States during the ownership of Fairchild and Zircon, the first twenty-one of which were released by Fairchild. Several of these cartridges were capable of playing more than one game and were typically priced at $19.95 (equivalent to $91 in 2020). The Videocarts were yellow and approximately the size and overall texture of an 8 track cartridge. They usually featured colorful label artwork. The earlier artwork was created by nationally known artist Tom Kamifuji and art directed by Nick Talesfore.[citation needed ] The console contained two built-in games, Tennis and Hockey, which were both advanced clones. In Hockey, the reflecting bar could be changed to different diagonals by twisting the controller knob and could move all over the playing field. Tennis was much like the original Pong.

A sales brochure from 1978 listed "Keyboard Videocarts" for sale. The three shown were K-1 Casino Poker, K-2 Space Odyssey, and K-3 Pro-Football. These were intended to use the Keyboard accessory. All further brochures, released after Zircon took over Fairchild, never listed this accessory nor anything called a Keyboard Videocart.

There was one cartridge released outside the numbered series, listed as Videocart-51 and simply titled "Demo 1". This Videocart was shown in a single sales brochure released shortly after Zircon acquired the company. It hasn't been seen listed for sale after this single brochure which was sent out in the winter of 1979.

Democart (was briefly available to the general public)

Democart 2

Unreleased carts:

Keyboard Videocart-1: Casino Poker

Keyboard Videocart-2: Space Odyssey

Keyboard Videocart-3: Pro-Football

German electronics manufacturer SABA also released a few compatible carts different from the original carts: translation in Videocart-1 Tic-Tac-Toe to German words, Videocart-3 released with different abbreviations (German), and Videocart-18 changed graphics and has a German word list.

In 2021, a number of new 'Homebrew' games were released on itch.io by retro developer Arlasoft. These included ports of mobile puzzle games Tents & Trees, 2048 and Threes, as well as a port of the classic arcade shooter . These were released on cartridge as Videocart-29.

The Channel F had beaten the Atari VCS to the market, but once the VCS was released, sales of the Channel F fell, attributed to the types of games that were offered. Most of the Channel F titles were slow-paced educational and intellectual games, compared to the action-driven games that launched with the VCS. Even with the redesigned Channel F II in 1978, Fairchild was unable to meet the sales that the VCS and its games were generating. By the time Fairchild sold the technology to Zircon in 1979, around 350,000 total units had been sold.

Ken Uston reviewed 32 games in his book Ken Uston's Guide to Buying and Beating the Home Video Games in 1982, and rated some of the Channel F's titles highly; of these, Alien Invasion and Video Whizball were considered by Uston to be "the finest adult cartridges currently available for the Fairchild Channel F System". The games on a whole, however, rated last on his survey of over 200 games for the Atari, Intellivision, Astrocade and Odyssey consoles, and contemporary games were rated "Average" with future Channel F games rated "below average". Uston rated almost one-half of the Channel F games as "high in interest" and called that "an impressive proportion" and further noted that "Some of the Channel F cartridges are timeless; no matter what technological developments occur, they will continue to be of interest." His overall conclusion was that the games "serve a limited, but useful, purpose" and that the "strength of the Channel F offering is in its excellent educational line for children".

In 1983, after Zircon announced its discontinuation of the Channel F, Video Games reviewed the console. Calling it "the system nobody knows", the magazine described its graphics and sounds as "somewhat primitive by today's standards". It described Space War as "may be the most antiquated game of its type still on the market", and rated the 25 games for the console with an average "interest grade" of three ("not too good") on a scale from one to ten and "skill rating" at an average 4,5 of 10. The magazine stated, however, that Fairchild "managed to create some fascinating games, even by today's standards", calling the poker game Casino Royale (actually Videocart-25, Casino Poker) "the best card game, from blackjack to bridge, made for any TV-game system". It also favorably reviewed Dodge-It ("simple but great"), Robot War ("Berzerk without guns"), and Whizball ("thoroughly original ... hockey with guns"), but concluded that only those interested in nostalgia, video game collecting, or card games would purchase the Channel F in 1983.

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The Fairchild Channel F, short for "Channel Fun", is a video game console, the first to be based on a microprocessor and to use ROM cartridges instead of having games built-in. It was released by Fairchild Camera and Instrument in November 1976 across North America at a retail price of US$169.95 (equivalent to $870 in 2022).

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The first arcade game that was ever made, had an entire console made for it, the arcade machine.

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Space Invaders

Developer(s)
Taito

Publisher(s)

Atari, Inc. (home)

Designer(s)
Tomohiro Nishikado

Series
Space Invaders

Platform(s)

Arcade, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, MSX, handheld, tabletop, watch, calculator,[12] NES,[13] SG-1000,[14] WonderSwan,[15] VG Pocket,[16] mobile,[17] iOS[18]

Release
Arcade

Genre(s)
Shoot 'em up

Mode(s)

Single-player, 2 players alternating

Arcade system
Taito 8080

Space Invaders is a 1978 shoot 'em up arcade game developed by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan, and licensed to the Midway division of Bally for overseas distribution. Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter and set the template for the shoot 'em up genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser to earn as many points as possible.

Designer Nishikado drew inspiration from North American target shooting games like (1976) and (1975), as well as science fiction narratives such as the novel The War of the Worlds (1897), the anime Space Battleship Yamato (1974), and the film (1977). To complete development of the game, he had to design custom hardware and development tools. Upon release, Space Invaders was an immediate commercial success; by 1982, it had grossed $3.8 billion (equivalent to over $13 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2016), with a net profit of $450 million (equivalent to $2 billion adjusted for inflation). This made it the best-selling video game and highest-grossing entertainment product at the time, and the highest-grossing video game of all time.

Space Invaders is considered one of the most influential video games of all time. It ushered in the golden age of arcade video games. It was the inspiration for numerous video games and game designers across different genres, and has been ported and re-released in various forms. The 1980 Atari VCS version quadrupled sales of the VCS, thereby becoming the first killer app for video game consoles. More broadly, the pixelated enemy alien has become a pop culture icon, often representing video games as a whole.

Space Invaders is a fixed shooter in which the player moves a laser cannon horizontally across the bottom of the screen and fires at aliens overhead. The aliens begin as five rows of eleven that move left and right as a group, shifting downward each time they reach a screen edge. The goal is to eliminate all of the aliens by shooting them. While the player has three lives, the game ends immediately if the invaders reach the bottom of the screen. The aliens attempt to destroy the player's cannon by firing projectiles. The laser cannon is partially protected by stationary defense bunkers which are gradually destroyed from the top by the aliens and, if the player fires when beneath one, the bottom gets destroyed.

As aliens are defeated, their movement and the game's music both speed up. Defeating all the aliens brings another wave which starts lower, a loop which can continue endlessly. A special "mystery ship" will occasionally move across the top of the screen and award bonus points if destroyed.

Space Invaders was developed by Japanese designer Tomohiro Nishikado, who spent a year designing the game and developing the necessary hardware to produce it. The game was a response to Atari's arcade game (1976). Nishikado wanted to adapt the same sense of achievement and tension from destroying targets one at a time, combining it with elements of target shooting games. The game uses a similar layout to that of Breakout but with different game mechanics; rather than bounce a ball to attack static objects, players are given the ability to fire projectiles at moving enemies.

Nishikado added several interactive elements that he found lacking in earlier video games, such as the ability for enemies to react to the player's movement and fire back, and a game over triggered by the enemies killing the player (either by getting hit or enemies reaching the bottom of the screen) rather than simply a timer running out. He replaced the timer, typical of arcade games at the time, with descending aliens who effectively served a similar function, where the closer they came, the less time the player had left.

Early enemy designs for the game included tanks, combat planes, and battleships. Nishikado, however, was not satisfied with the enemy movements; technical limitations made it difficult to simulate flying. Humans would have been easier to simulate, but the designer considered shooting them immoral. After the release of the 1974 anime Space Battleship Yamato in Japan, and seeing a magazine feature about (1977), he thought of using a space theme. Nishikado drew inspiration for the aliens from a novel by H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, and created initial bitmap images after the octopus-like aliens. Other alien designs were modeled after squids and crabs. The game was originally titled Space Monsters after a popular song in Japan at the time, "Monster", but was changed to Space Invaders by the designer's superiors.

Nishikado designed his own custom hardware and development tools for the game. The game uses an Intel 8080 central processing unit (CPU), displays raster graphics on a CRT monitor using a bitmapped framebuffer, and uses monaural sound hosted by a combination of analog circuitry and a Texas Instruments SN76477 sound chip. The adoption of a microprocessor was inspired by (1975), Midway's microprocessor adaptation of Nishikado's earlier discrete logic game Western Gun, after the designer was impressed by the improved graphics and smoother animation of Midway's version. Space Invaders also adopted the multi-chip barrel shifter circuit first developed by Midway for Gun Fight, which had been a key part of that game's smoother animation. This circuit allowed the 8080 CPU to shift pictures in the graphics framebuffer faster than it could using only its own native instructions.

Despite the specially developed hardware, Nishikado was unable to program the game as he wanted-the Control Program board was not powerful enough to display the graphics in color or move the enemies faster-and he ended up considering the development of the game's hardware the most difficult part of the whole process. While programming the game, Nishikado discovered that the processor was able to render each frame of the alien's animation graphics faster when there were fewer aliens on the screen. Since the alien's positions updated after each frame, this caused the aliens to move across the screen at an increasing speed as more and more were destroyed. Rather than design a compensation for the speed increase, he decided that it was a feature, not a bug, and kept it as a challenging gameplay mechanism.

Taito released Space Invaders in July 1978. They released both an upright arcade cabinet and a so-called "cocktail-table" cabinet; following its usual practice, Taito named the cocktail version T.T. Space Invaders ("T.T." for "table-top"). Midway released its upright version a few months later and its cocktail version several months after that. The cabinet artwork featured large humanoid monsters not present in the game; Nishikado attributes this to the artist basing the designs on the original title of " Space Monsters", rather than referring to the actual in-game graphics. In the upright cabinets, the game graphics are generated on a hidden CRT monitor and reflected toward the player using a semi-transparent mirror, behind which is mounted a plastic cutout of a moon bolted against a painted starry background. The backdrop is visible through the mirror and thus appears "behind" the graphics. Both Taito's and Midway's first Space Invaders versions had black-and-white graphics with a transparent colored overlay using strips of orange and green cellophane over certain portions of the screen to add color to the image. Later Japanese releases used a rainbow-colored cellophane overlay, and these were eventually followed by versions with a color monitor and an electronically generated color overlay.

Despite its simplicity, the music to Space Invaders was revolutionary for the gaming industry of the time. Video game scholar Andrew Schartmann identifies three aspects of the music that had a significant impact on the development of game music:

1. Whereas video game music prior to Space Invaders was restricted to the extremities (i.e., a short introductory theme with game-over counterpart), the alien-inspired hit featured continuous music - the well-known four-note loop, consisting of the first four notes of the descending D minor natural scale - throughout, uninterrupted by sound effects: "It was thus the first time that sound effects and music were superimposed to form a rich sonic landscape. Not only do players receive feedback related directly to their actions through sound effects; they also receive stimulus in a more subtle, non-interactive fashion through music."

2. The music interacts with on-screen animation to influence the emotions of the player: "That seemingly pedestrian four-note loop might stir us in the most primitive of ways, but that it stirs us at all is worthy of note. By demonstrating that game sound could be more than a simple tune to fill the silence, Space Invaders moved video game music closer to the realm of art."

3. The music for Space Invaders popularized the notion of variability-the idea that music can change in accordance with the ongoing on-screen narrative. The variable in Space Invaders, the tempo, is admittedly simple, but its implications are not to be underestimated. "Over the years, analogous strategies of variation would be applied to pitch, rhythm, dynamics, form, and a host of other parameters, all with the goal of accommodating the nonlinear aspect of video games."

At the deepest of conceptual levels, one would be hard-pressed to find an arcade game as influential to the early history of video game music as Space Invaders. Its role as a harbinger of the fundamental techniques that would come to shape the industry remains more or less unchallenged. And its blockbuster success ensured the adoption of those innovations by the industry at large.

-  Andrew Schartmann, Thought Catalog (2013)

Next Generation editor Neil West also cited the Space Invaders music as an example of great video game art, commenting on how the simple melody's increasing tempo and synchronization with the enemies' movement chills and excites the player.

When Nishikado completed the game, it was initially met with a mixed response from within Taito and among amusement arcade owners. His colleagues praised it, applauding his achievement while queuing up to play, whereas his bosses predicted low sales as games often ended more quickly than other timer-based arcade games at the time. A number of amusement arcade owners initially rejected the game, but some pachinko parlors and bowling alleys adopted it; it quickly caught on, with many parlors and alleys clearing space for more Space Invaders cabinets. In the first few months following its release in Japan, Space Invaders became popular, and specialty video arcades opened with nothing but Space Invaders cabinets.

By the end of 1978, Taito had installed over 100,000 machines and grossed $670 million ($2.8 billion adjusted for inflation) in Japan alone. By June 1979, Taito had manufactured about 200,000-300,000 Space Invaders machines in Japan, with each unit earning an average of ¥10,000 or $46 (equivalent to $172 in 2021) in 100 yen coins per day. However, this was not enough to meet the high demand, leading to Taito increasing production to 25,000-30,000 units per month and raising projections to 400,000 manufactured in Japan by the end of 1979. In order to cope with the demand, Taito licensed the overseas rights to Midway for distribution outside of Japan. By the end of 1979, an estimated 750,000 Space Invaders machines were installed worldwide, including 400,000 in Japan, 85,000 in the United Kingdom, and 60,000 within a year in the United States (where prices ranged from $2,000 to $3,000 for each machine); the game eventually sold 72,000 units in the United States by 1982. By 1979, it had become the arcade game industry's all-time best-seller.

Space Invaders had about 8 million daily players in Japan, with daily revenue peaking at ¥2.6 billion or $12,000,000 (equivalent to $50,000,000 in 2021). Space Invaders machines had grossed more than four billion US quarters ($1 billion at the time, or $4.2 billion adjusted for inflation) by 1979. It remained the top arcade game for three years through 1980. In 1981, several years after its release, it still had weekly earnings of $7.7 million in the United States, second only to . By 1982, it had crossed $2 billion in quarters (equivalent to $8.31 billion adjusted for inflation), with a net profit of $450 million (equivalent to $1.87 billion adjusted for inflation). This made it the best-selling video game and highest-grossing "entertainment product" of its time, with comparisons made to the then highest-grossing film , which had grossed $486 million, with a net profit of $175 million. By 1982, it had grossed $3.8 billion, equivalent to over $13 billion as of 2016. Space Invaders earned Taito profits of over $500,000,000 (equivalent to $2,100,000,000 in 2021).

The 1980 Atari VCS (Atari 2600) version was the first official licensing of an arcade game for consoles and became the first " killer app" for video game consoles after quadrupling the system's sales. It sold over one million units in its first year on sale as a home console game, then over 4.2 million copies by the end of 1981, and over 5.6 million by 1982; it was the best-selling Atari 2600 game up until the Atari version of Pac-Man (1982). Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 had sold 6,091,178 cartridges by 1983, and a further 161,051 between 1986 and 1990, for a total of over 6.25 million cartridges sold by 1990.

Other official conversions were released for the Atari 8-bit computer line and Atari 5200 console, while Taito later released it for the Nintendo Famicom in 1985, but only in Japan. By 1982, versions of Space Invaders were available for handheld electronic game devices, tabletop dedicated consoles, home computers, watches and pocket calculators. The Atari VCS conversion was programmed by Richard Maurer, while the Atari 5200 conversion was programmed by Eric Manghise and animated by Marilyn Churchill.

More than a hundred Space Invaders video game clones were released for various platforms, such as the popular computer games Super Invader (1979) and TI Invaders (1981); the latter was the top-selling game for the TI-99/4A through at least 1982.

As one of the earliest shooting games, Space Invaders set precedents and helped pave the way for future titles and for the shooting genre. Space Invaders popularized a more interactive style of gameplay, with the enemies responding to the player-controlled cannon's movement, and was the first video game to popularize the concept of achieving a high score, being the first to save the player's score. While earlier shooting games allowed the player to shoot at targets, Space Invaders was the first in which multiple enemies could fire back at the player, and in contrast to earlier arcade games which often had a timer, Space Invaders introduced the "concept of going round after round." It was also the first game where players were given multiple lives, had to repel hordes of enemies, could take cover from enemy fire, and use destructible barriers, in addition to being the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple diatonic descending bass notes repeating in a loop, which was dynamic and changed pace during stages, like a heartbeat sound that increases pace as enemies approached.

An urban legend states that Space Invaders' popularity led to a shortage of 100-yen coins in Japan. However, Nishikado himself was skeptical of the story. In actuality, 100- yen coin production was lower in 1978 and 1979 than in previous or subsequent years. Additionally, arcade operators would have emptied their machines and taken the money to the bank, thus keeping the coins in circulation. Reports from those living in Japan at the time indicate "nothing out of the ordinary ... during the height of the Space Invaders invasion".

Space Invaders was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016. Space Invaders cabinets have become collector's items, with the cocktail and cabaret versions being the rarest.

Game developers including Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of the franchises Donkey Kong, , and The Legend of Zelda), Hideo Kojima (), Satoshi Tajiri (), and John Romero and John Carmack (both have cited Space Invaders as their introduction to video games. Miyamoto said Space Invaders had revolutionized the video game industry. According to Alexander Smith, by "allowing targets to attack the player and eliminating the timer, Nishikado created a new paradigm in video games." It also inspired Eugene Jarvis (, Robotron: 2084) to become a video game designer, stating it "laid the groundwork for a whole generation" of video games with the "animated characters, the story, this amazing crescendo of action and climax" and that many games "still rely on the multiple life, progressively difficult level paradigm" of Space Invaders. creator Warren Spector said: " Space Invaders and games like it represent the roots of everything we see today in gaming. It represents the birth of a new art form, one that literally changed the world. Space Invaders is important as an historical artefact, no less than the silent films of the early twentieth century or early printed books."

Edge attributed the shift of games from bars and amusement arcades to more mainstream locations, such as restaurants and department stores, to Space Invaders. Its popularity was such that it was the first game where an arcade machine's owner could make up for the cost of the machine in under one month, or in some places within one week.

Space Invaders helped action games become the dominant genre in arcades and on consoles. Guinness World Records considered Space Invaders one of the most successful arcade shooting games by 2008. In describing it as a "seminal arcade classic", IGN listed it as the number eight "classic shoot 'em up". Space Invaders set the template for the shoot 'em up genre. Its worldwide success created a demand for a wide variety of science fiction games, inspiring the development of arcade games, such as Atari's , Williams Electronics' , and Namco's and , which were modeled after Space Invaders's gameplay and design. This influence could be said to extend to most shooting games released to the present day, including first-person shooters (FPS) such as Wolfenstein, , and Call of Duty. Space Invaders also influenced other genres, including maze games such as Sega/ Gremlin's (1979) which adopted the concept of "going round after round" instead of a timer, and early computer dungeon crawl games such as Dungeons of Daggorath, which used similar heartbeat sounds to indicate player health.

The technology journalist Jason Whittaker credited Space Invaders with ending the video game crash of 1977, caused by clones flooding the market, and beginning the golden age of video arcade games (1978-1980s). According to The Observer, home console versions of Space Invaders were popular and encouraged users to learn to program; many became industry leaders. 1UP.com stated that Space Invaders showed that video games could compete against the major entertainment media at the time: films, music, and television. attributed the launch of the "arcade phenomenon" in North America in part to Space Invaders. Electronic Games said it was the impetus behind video gaming becoming a rapidly growing hobby, and as "the single most popular coin-operated attraction of all time." Game Informer considered it, along with , one of the most popular arcade games; it tapped into popular culture and generated excitement during the golden age of arcades.

In 1995, Flux magazine ranked Space Invaders #1 on their "Top 100 Video Games." In 1996, Next Generation magazine put Space Invaders at number 97 on their list of the "Top 100 Games of All Time", saying that it "provides an elegance and simplicity not found in later games like [1980]." IGN listed it as one of the "Top 10 Most Influential Games" in 2007, citing it as a source of inspiration to video game designers and the impact it had on the shooting genre. ranked it No. 1 on its list of "The ten most influential video games ever" in 2007. 1UP ranked it at No. 3 on its list of "The 60 Most Influential Games of All Time," stating that, in contrast to earlier arcade games which "were attempts to simulate already-existing things," Space Invaders was "the first video game as a video game, instead of merely a playable electronic representation of something else."

In 2008, Guinness World Records listed it as the top-rated arcade game in technical, creative, and cultural impact. Entertainment Weekly named Space Invaders one of the top ten games for the Atari 2600 home console in 2013. In 2018, it was ranked 87th in Video Game Canon's statistical meta-analysis of 48 "top games" lists published between 1995 and 2017. The list aggregator site Playthatgame currently ranks Space Invaders as the 57th top game of all time, game of the year, & game of the 1970s. In 2021, The Guardian listed it as the third greatest video game of the 1970s, just below Galaxian and Asteroids.

Space Invaders has been remade on numerous platforms and spawned many sequels. Re-releases include ported and updated versions of the original arcade game. Ported versions generally feature different graphics and additional gameplay options-for example, moving defense bunkers, zigzag shots, invisible aliens, and two-player cooperative gameplay. Ports on earlier systems like the Atari home consoles featured simplified graphics,[clarification needed ] while later systems such as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and PlayStation featured updated graphics. Later titles include several modes of gameplay and integrate new elements into the original design. For example, Space Invaders Extreme, released on the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable, integrated musical elements into the standard gameplay. A 2008 spin-off for WiiWare, Space Invaders Get Even, allows players to control the aliens instead of the laser cannon in a reversal of roles.

In 1980, Bally-Midway released a pinball version of the game. However, few elements from the original game are included, and the aliens instead resemble the xenomorphs from the film ; Bally-Midway was later sued over the game's resemblance to the designs by H. R. Giger. It became the third highest-grossing pinball machine of 1980 in the United States.

Ports of the game have been met with mixed receptions; the Atari 2600 version was successful, while the Nintendo Entertainment System version was poorly received.

Taito has released several arcade sequels. The first was Space Invaders Part II in 1979; it featured color graphics, an attract mode, new gameplay elements, and added an intermission between gameplay. According to the Killer List of Video Games, this was the first video game to include an intermission. The game also allowed the player with the top score to sign their name on the high score table. This version was released in the United States as Deluxe Space Invaders (also known as Space Invaders Deluxe), but it featured a different graphical color scheme and a lunar-city background. Another arcade sequel, Space Invaders II, was released exclusively in the United States. It was in a cocktail-table format with very fast alien firing and a competitive two-player mode. During the summer of 1985, Return of the Invaders was released with updated color graphics and more complex movements and attack patterns for the aliens. Subsequent arcade sequels included Super Space Invaders '91, Space Invaders DX, and . Each game introduced minor gameplay additions to the original design. Like the original game, several of the arcade sequels have become collector's items, though some are considered rarer. In 2002, Taito released Space Raiders, a third-person shooter reminiscent of Space Invaders.

The game and its related games have been included in video game compilation titles. Space Invaders Anniversary was released in 2003 for the PlayStation 2 and included nine Space Invader variants. A similar title for the PlayStation Portable, Space Invaders Pocket, was released in 2005. Space Invaders, Space Invaders Part II and Return of the Invaders are included in Taito Legends, a compilation of Taito's classic arcade games released in 2005 on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC. Super Space Invaders '91, Space Invaders DX, and Space Invaders '95 were included in Taito Legends 2, a sequel compilation released in 2006. In April 2017, a redemption game by Raw Thrills, Space Invaders Frenzy, was released.

A stand-alone version was released by Super Impulse as part of its Tiny Arcade series, along with the Namco games , , and .

A Space Invaders title for the Atari Jaguar was being worked on by Virtuality Entertainment, which would have featured support for the unreleased Jaguar VR peripheral; however, the project never entered full development beyond reaching pre-production stages, with the only remaining proof of its existence being a game design document.

Many publications and websites use the pixelated alien graphic as an icon for video games in general, including the video game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, technology website Ars Technica, and concert event Video Games Live. There has also been Space Invaders-themed merchandising, including necklaces and puzzles. The trend continues to this day, with handmade sites like Etsy and Pinterest showcasing thousands of handmade items featuring Space Invaders characters.

The game-and references to it-has appeared in numerous facets of popular culture. Soon after the game's release, hundreds of favorable articles and stories about the emerging video game medium as popularized by Space Invaders aired on television and were printed in newspapers and magazines. The Space Invaders Tournament, held by Atari in 1980 and won by Rebecca Heineman, was the first electronic sports (eSports) event, and attracted more than 10,000 participants, establishing video gaming as a mainstream hobby. The Arcade Awards ceremony was created that same year to honor the best video games, with Space Invaders winning the first Game of the Year (GoTY) award. The impact of Space Invaders on the video game industry has been compared to that of The Beatles in the pop music industry. Considered "the first ' blockbuster' video game," Space Invaders became synonymous with video games worldwide for some time.

Within a year of the game's release, the Japanese PTA unsuccessfully attempted to ban the game for allegedly inspiring truancy. In North America, doctors identified a condition called the " Space Invaders elbow" as a complaint, while a physician in The New England Journal of Medicine named a similar ailment the " Space Invaders Wrist". Space Invaders was also the first game to attract political controversy when a 1981 Private Member's Bill known as the "Control of Space Invaders (and other Electronic Games) Bill", drafted by British Labour Member of Parliament (MP) George Foulkes, attempted to allow local councils to restrict the game and those like it by licensing for its " addictive properties" and for causing " deviancy". Conservative MP Michael Brown defended the game as "innocent and harmless pleasure", which he himself had enjoyed that day, and criticized the bill as an example of " Socialist beliefs in restriction and control". A motion to bring the bill before Parliament was defeated by 114 votes to 94 votes; the bill itself was never considered by Parliament. Similarly in the United States, in Westchester County, New York, there was a controversial political debate in 1981 over a resolution to place age restrictions on Space Invaders and other arcade games, following complaints that schoolchildren wasted time and lunch money, and went to school late; the resolution drew national attention.

Musicians have drawn inspiration for their music from Space Invaders. The pioneering Japanese synthpop group Yellow Magic Orchestra reproduced Space Invaders sounds in its 1978 self-titled album and hit single "Computer Game", the latter selling over 400,000 copies in the United States. Other pop songs based on Space Invaders soon followed, including disco records such as "Disco Space Invaders" (1979) by Funny Stuff, and the hit songs " Space Invader" (1980) by The Pretenders, "Space Invaders" (1980) by Uncle Vic, and the Australian hit " Space Invaders" (1979) by Player One (known in the US as 'Playback'), which in turn provided the bassline for Jesse Saunders' "On and On" (1984), the first Chicago house music track. The Clash sampled sound effects from the game on the song "Ivan Meets G.I. Joe" from its 4th studio album, Sandinista!

Video Games Live performed audio from the game as part of a special retro "Classic Arcade Medley" in 2007. In honor of the game's 30th anniversary, Taito produced an album titled Space Invaders 2008. The album was released by Avex Trax and features music inspired by the game. Six songs were originally used in the PSP version of Space Invaders Extreme. Taito's store, Taito Station, also unveiled a Space Invaders-themed music video.

In the 1982 original pilot of the series The Powers of Matthew Star, David Star uses his powers to cheat the game. The game is shown with a colored backdrop of the moon. Multiple television series have aired episodes that either reference or parody the game and its elements; for example, Danger Mouse, That '70s Show, , , Robot Chicken, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Amazing World of Gumball. Elements are prominently featured in the "Raiders of the Lost Arcade" segment of " Anthology of Interest II", an episode of the animated series .

Space Invaders also appears in the films Cherry 2000 (1987), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and (2015) while its Deluxe game made an appearance in Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982). A film adaptation of the game is in the works by Warner Bros. Pictures with Akiva Goldsman producing. On February 13, 2015, Daniel Kunka was set to write the script for the film. On July 12, 2019, Greg Russo was set to write the script for the film, with Goldsman still producing alongside Safehouse Pictures partners Joby Harold and Tory Tunnell.

Various books have been published about Space Invaders, including Space Invaders: An addict's guide to battle tactics, big scores and the best machines (1982) by Martin Amis, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame forms and Contexts (2006) by Geof King and Tanya Krzywinska, and Space Invaders (1980) by Mark Roeder and Julian Wolanski.

In the mid-1990s, the athletics company Puma released a T-shirt with a stamp having references to Space Invaders, i.e. a spaceship aiming at the company's logo (see picture on the right).

In 2006, the game was one of several video game-related media selected to represent Japan as part of a project compiled by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs. That same year, Space Invaders was included in the London Science Museum's Game On exhibition, meant to showcase the various aspects of video game history, development, and culture. (The game is a part of the Barbican Centre's traveling Game On exhibition.)

At the Belluard Bollwerk International 2006 festival in Fribourg, Switzerland, Guillaume Reymond created a three-minute video recreation of a game of Space Invaders as part of the "Gameover" project using humans as pixels. The GH ART exhibit at the 2008 Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, included an art game, Invaders!, based on Space Invaders's gameplay. The creator later asked for the game to be removed from the exhibit following criticism of elements based on the September 11 attacks in the United States.

There is a bridge in Cáceres, Spain, projected by engineers Pedro Plasencia and Hadrián Arias, whose pavement design is based on the game. The laser cannon, some shots, and several figures can be seen on the deck. A French street artist, Invader, made a name for himself by creating mosaic artwork of Space Invader aliens around the world.

In 2014, two Brazilian zoologists described a new species of arachnid as Taito spaceinvaders. Kury & Barros, 2014, inspired by the game, because of the resemblance of a fleck in the dorsal scutum of the animal to a typical alien in the game. The genus is named for the company that produces Space Invaders.

In 2018, Highways England launched a campaign titled "Don't be a Space Invader, Stay Safe, Stay Back" to raise awareness on the dangers of tailgating. People were also able to order free car bumper stickers to raise awareness of the campaign.

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Space Invaders Developer(s) Taito Publisher(s) Atari, Inc. (home) Designer(s) Tomohiro Nishikado Series Space Invaders Platform(s) Arcade, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, MSX, handheld, tabletop, watch, calculator,[12] NES,[13] SG-1000,[14] WonderSwan,[15] VG Pocket,[16] mobile,[17] iOS [18] Release Arcade Genre(s) Shoot 'em up Mode(s) Single-player, 2 players alternating Arcade system Taito 8080 Space Invaders is a 1978 shoot 'em up arcade game developed by Tomohiro Nishikado.

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Pac-Man

Developer(s)
Namco

Publisher(s)

Designer(s)
Toru Iwatani

Programmer(s)

Shigeo Funaki
Shigeichi Ishimura

Artist(s)
Hiroshi Ono[4]

Composer(s)

Shigeichi Ishimura
Toshio Kai

Series
Pac-Man

Platform(s)

Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, MSX, Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, VIC-20, Intellivision, ZX Spectrum, TI-99/4A, IBM PC, Game Boy, Game Gear, Game Boy Color, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Mobile phone, Game Boy Advance, iPod Touch, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS, Android

Release

JP: July 1980[1]

WW: December 1980

Genre(s)
Maze

Mode(s)

Single-player, multiplayer (alternating turns)

Pac-Man, originally called Puck Man in Japan, is a 1980 maze action video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called "Power Pellets" causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points.

Game development began in early 1979, directed by Toru Iwatani with a nine-man team. Iwatani wanted to create a game that could appeal to women as well as men, because most video games of the time had themes of war or sports.[citation needed ] Although the inspiration for the Pac-Man character was the image of a pizza with a slice removed, Iwatani has said he also rounded out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi ( Japanese: ). The in-game characters were made to be cute and colorful to appeal to younger players. The original Japanese title of Puck Man was derived from the titular character's hockey puck-like shape; the title was changed for the North American release to mitigate vandalism.

Pac-Man was a widespread critical and commercial success, leading to several sequels, merchandise, and two television series, as well as a hit single by Buckner & Garcia. The character of Pac-Man is now the mascot and flagship icon of Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game remains one of the highest-grossing and best-selling games, generating more than $14 billion in revenue (as of 2016) and 43 million units in sales combined, and has an enduring commercial and cultural legacy, commonly listed as one of the greatest video games of all time.

Pac-Man is an action maze chase video game; the player controls the eponymous character through an enclosed maze. The objective of the game is to eat all of the dots placed in the maze while avoiding four colored ghosts - Blinky (red), Pinky (pink), Inky (cyan), and Clyde (orange) - that pursue Pac-Man. When Pac-Man eats all of the dots, the player advances to the next level. Levels are indicated by fruit icons at the bottom of the screen. In between levels are short cutscenes featuring Pac-Man and Blinky in humorous, comical situations.

If Pac-Man is caught by a ghost, he will lose a life; the game ends when all lives are lost. Each of the four ghosts has their own unique artificial intelligence (A.I.), or "personality": Blinky gives direct chase to Pac-Man; Pinky and Inky try to position themselves in front of Pac-Man, usually by cornering him; and Clyde will switch between chasing Pac-Man and fleeing from him.

Placed at the four corners of the maze are large flashing "energizers" or "power pellets." Eating these will cause the ghosts to turn blue with a dizzied expression and to reverse direction. Pac-Man can eat blue ghosts for bonus points; when a ghost is eaten, their eyes make their way back to the center box in the maze, where the ghost "regenerates" and resumes their normal activity. Eating multiple blue ghosts in succession increases their point value. After a certain amount of time, blue-colored ghosts will flash white before turning back into their normal form. Eating a certain number of dots in a level will cause a bonus item - usually in the form of a fruit - to appear underneath the center box; the item can be eaten for bonus points. To the sides of the maze are two "warp tunnels", which allow Pac-Man and the ghosts to travel to the opposite side of the screen. Ghosts become slower when entering and exiting these tunnels.

The game increases in difficulty as the player progresses: the ghosts become faster, and the energizers' effect decreases in duration, eventually disappearing entirely. Due to an integer overflow, the 256th level loads improperly, rendering it impossible to complete.

Development

After acquiring the struggling Japanese division of Atari in 1974, video game developer Namco began producing its own video games in-house, as opposed to simply licensing them from other developers and distributing them in Japan. Company president Masaya Nakamura created a small video game development group within the company and ordered them to study several NEC-produced microcomputers to potentially create new games with. One of the first people assigned to this division was a young 24-year-old employee named Toru Iwatani. He created Namco's first video game in 1978, which while unsuccessful helped the company gain a stronger foothold in the quickly-growing video game industry. He also assisted in the production of two sequels, and , both released in 1979.

The Japanese video game industry had surged in popularity with games such as Space Invaders and , which led to the market being flooded with similar titles from other manufacturers in an attempt to cash in on the success. Iwatani felt that arcade games only appealed to men for their crude graphics and violence, and that arcades in general were seen as seedy environments. For his next project, Iwatani chose to create a non-violent, cheerful video game that appealed mostly to women, as he believed that attracting women and couples into arcades would potentially make them appear to be much more family friendly in tone. Iwatani began thinking of things that women liked to do in their time; he decided to center his game around eating, basing this on women liking to eat desserts and other sweets. His game was initially called Pakkuman, based on the Japanese onomatopoeia term "paku paku taberu", referencing the mouth movement of opening and closing in succession.

The game that later became Pac-Man began development in early 1979 and took a year and five months to complete, the longest ever for a video game up to that point. Iwatani enlisted the help of nine other Namco employees to assist in production, including composer Toshio Kai, programmer Shigeo Funaki, and hardware engineer Shigeichi Ishimura. Care was taken to make the game appeal to a "non-violent" audience, particularly women, with its usage of simple gameplay and cute, attractive character designs. When the game was being developed, Namco was underway with designing , which utilized a then-revolutionary RGB color display, allowing sprites to use several colors at once instead of utilizing colored strips of cellophane that was commonplace at the time; this technological accomplishment allowed Iwatani to greatly enhance his game with bright pastel colors, which he felt would help attract players. The idea for energizers was a concept Iwatani borrowed from Popeye the Sailor, a cartoon character that temporarily acquires superhuman strength after eating a can of spinach; it is also believed that Iwatani was also partly inspired by a Japanese children's story about a creature that protected children from monsters by devouring them. Frank Fogleman, the co-founder of Gremlin Industries, believes that the maze-chase gameplay of Pac-Man was inspired by Sega's (1979), a similar arcade game that was popular in Japan.

Iwatani has often claimed that the character of Pac-Man himself was designed after the shape of a pizza with a missing slice while he was at lunch; in a 1986 interview he said that this was only half-truth, and that the Pac-Man character was also based on him rounding out and simplifying the Japanese character "kuchi" ( 口), meaning "mouth". The four ghosts were made to be cute, colorful and appealing, utilizing bright, pastel colors and expressive blue eyes. Iwatani had used this idea before in Cutie Q, which features similar ghost-like characters, and decided to incorporate it into Pac-Man. He was also inspired by the television series Casper the Friendly Ghost and the manga Obake no Q-Taro. Ghosts were chosen as the game's main antagonists due to them being used as villainous characters in animation. The idea for the fruit bonuses was based on graphics displayed on slot machines, which often use symbols such as cherries and bells.

Originally, Namco president Masaya Nakamura had requested that all of the ghosts be red and thus indistinguishable from one another. Iwatani believed that the ghosts should be different colors, and he received unanimous support from his colleagues for this idea. Each of the ghosts were programmed to have their own distinct personalities, so as to keep the game from becoming too boring or impossibly difficult to play. Each ghost's name gives a hint to its strategy for tracking down Pac-Man: Shadow ("Blinky") always chases Pac-Man, Speedy ("Pinky") tries to get ahead of him, Bashful ("Inky") uses a more complicated strategy to zero in on him, and Pokey ("Clyde") alternates between chasing him and running away. (The ghosts' Japanese names, translated into English, are Chaser, Ambusher, Fickle, and Stupid, respectively.) To break up the tension of constantly being pursued, humorous intermissions between Pac-Man and Blinky were added. The sound effects were among the last things added to the game, created by Toshio Kai. In a design session, Iwatani noisily ate fruit and made gurgling noises to describe to Kai how he wanted the eating effect to sound. Upon completion, the game was titled Puck Man, based on the working title and the titular character's distinct hockey puck-like shape.

Location testing for Puck Man began on May 22, 1980 in Shibuya, Tokyo, to a relatively positive fanfare from players. A private showing for the game was done in June, followed by a nationwide release in July. Eyeing the game's success in Japan, Namco initialized plans to bring the game to the international market, particularly the United States. Before showing the game to distributors, Namco America made a number of changes, such as altering the names of the ghosts. The biggest of these was the game's title; executives at Namco were worried that vandals would change the "P" in Puck Man to an "F", forming an obscene name. Masaya Nakamura chose to rename it to Pac-Man, as he felt it was closer to the game's original Japanese title of Pakkuman. In Europe, the game was released under both titles, Pac-Man and Puck Man.

When Namco presented Pac-Man and to potential distributors at the 1980 AMOA tradeshow in November, executives believed that Rally-X would be the best-selling game of that year. According to magazine, both Pac-Man and Rally-X received mild attention at the show. Namco had initially approached Atari to distribute Pac-Man, but Atari refused the offer. Midway Manufacturing subsequently agreed to distribute both Pac-Man and Rally-X in North America, announcing their acquisition of the manufacturing rights on November 22 and releasing them in December.

Pac-Man was ported to a plethora of home video game systems and personal computers; the most infamous of these is the 1982 Atari 2600 conversion, designed by Tod Frye and published by Atari. This version of the game was widely criticized for its inaccurate portrayal of the arcade version and for its peculiar design choices, most notably the flickering effect of the ghosts. However, it was a commercial success, having sold over seven million copies. Atari also released versions for the Intellivision, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, Apple II, IBM PC, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, ZX Spectrum, and the Atari 8-bit family of computers. A port for the Atari 5200 was released in 1983, a version that many have seen as a significant improvement over the Atari 2600 version.

Namco released a version for the Family Computer in 1984 as one of the console's first third-party titles, as well as a port for the MSX computer. The Famicom version was later released in North America for the Nintendo Entertainment System by Tengen, a subsidiary of Atari Games. Tengen also produced an unlicensed version of the game in a black cartridge shell, released during a time where Tengen and Nintendo were in bitter disagreements over the latter's stance on quality control for their consoles; this version was later re-released by Namco as an official title in 1993, featuring a new cartridge label and box. The Famicom version was released for the Famicom Disk System in 1990 as a budget title for the Disk Writer kiosks in retail stores. The same year, Namco released a port of Pac-Man for the Game Boy, which allowed for two-player co-operative play via the Game Link Cable peripheral. A version for the Game Gear was released a year later, which also enabled support for multiplayer. In celebration of the game's 20th anniversary in 1999, Namco re-released the Game Boy version for the Game Boy Color, bundled with and titled Pac-Man: Special Color Edition. The same year, Namco and SNK co-published a port for the Neo Geo Pocket Color, which came with a circular "Cross Ring" that attached to the d-pad to restrict it to four-directional movement.

In 2001, Namco released a port of Pac-Man for various Japanese mobile phones, being one of the company's first mobile game releases. The Famicom version of the game was re-released for the Game Boy Advance in 2004 as part of the Famicom Mini series, released to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Famicom; this version was also released in North America and Europe under the Classic NES Series label. Namco Networks released Pac-Man for BREW mobile devices in 2005. The arcade original was released for the Xbox Live Arcade service in 2006, featuring achievements and online leaderboards. In 2009 a version for iOS devices was published; this release was later rebranded as Pac-Man + Tournaments in 2013, featuring new mazes and leaderboards. The NES version was released for the Wii Virtual Console in 2007. A Roku version was released in 2011, alongside a port of the Game Boy release for the 3DS Virtual Console. Pac-Man was one of four titles released under the Arcade Game Series brand, which was published for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC in 2016. In 2021, according to Nintendo Direct, it was announced that Hamster Corporation would release Pac-Man, along with , for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 as part of their Arcade Archives series, marking the first two Namco games to be included as part of the series.

Pac-Man is included in many Namco compilations, including Namco Museum Vol. 1 (1995), Namco Museum 64 (1999), Namco Museum Battle Collection (2005), Namco Museum DS (2007), Namco Museum Essentials (2009), and Namco Museum Megamix (2010). In 1996, it was re-released for arcades as part of Namco Classic Collection Vol. 2, alongside , and special "Arrangement" remakes of all three titles. Microsoft included Pac-Man in Microsoft Return of Arcade (1995) as a way to help attract video game companies to their Windows 95 operating system. Namco released the game in the third volume of Namco History in Japan in 1998. The 2001 Game Boy Advance compilation Pac-Man Collection compiles Pac-Man, , Pac-Attack and Pac-Man Arrangement onto one cartridge. Pac-Man is also a hidden extra in the arcade game Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga - Class of 1981 (2001). A similar cabinet was released in 2005 that featured Pac-Man as the centerpiece. Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures (1993) and Pac-Man World 2 (2002) have Pac-Man as an unlockable extra. Alongside the Xbox 360 remake Pac-Man Championship Edition, it was ported to the Nintendo 3DS in 2012 as part of Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions. The 2010 Wii game Pac-Man Party and its 2011 3DS remake also include Pac-Man as a bonus game, alongside the arcade versions of and . In 2014, Pac-Man was included in the compilation title Pac-Man Museum for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, alongside several other Pac-Man games. The NES version is one of 30 games included in the NES Classic Edition.

Upon its North American debut at AMOA 1980, the game initially received a mild response. magazine previewed the game and called it "a cute game which appears to grow on players, something which cute games are not prone to do." They said there's "more to the game than at first appears" but criticized the sound as a drawback, saying it's "good for awhile, then becomes annoying." Upon release, the game exceeded expectations with wide critical and commercial success.

Commercial performance

When it was first released in Japan, Pac-Man was initially only a modest success; Namco's own (1979) had quickly outdone the game in popularity, due to the predominately male player base being familiar with its shooting gameplay as opposed to Pac-Man's cute characters and maze-chase theme. Pac-Man eventually became very successful in Japan, where it went on to be Japan's highest-grossing arcade game of 1980 according to the annual Game Machine charts, dethroning Space Invaders (1978) which had topped the annual charts for two years in a row and leading to a shift in the Japanese market away from space shooters towards action games featuring comical characters. Pac-Man was also Japan's fourth highest-grossing arcade game of 1981.

In North America, Midway had limited expectations prior to release, initially manufacturing 5,000 units for the US, before it caught on immediately upon release there. Some arcades purchased entire rows of Pac-Man cabinets. It soon became a nationwide success. Upon release in 1980, it was earning about $8.1 million per week in the United States. Within one year, more than 100,000 arcade units had been sold which grossed more than $1 billion in quarters. It overtook Atari's (1979) as the best-selling arcade game in the country, and surpassed the film Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) with more than $1 billion in revenue. Pac-Man was America's highest-grossing arcade game of 1981, and second highest game of 1982. By 1982, it was estimated to have had 30 million active players across the United States. The game's success was partly driven by its popularity among female audiences, becoming "the first commercial videogame to involve large numbers of women as players" according to Midway's Stan Jarocki, with Pac-Man being the favorite coin-op game among female gamers through 1982. Among the nine arcade games covered by How to Win Video Games (1982), Pac-Man was the only one with females accounting for a majority of players.

The number of arcade units sold had tripled to 400,000 by 1982, receiving an estimated total of between seven billion coins and $6 billion. In a 1983 interview, Nakamura said that though he did expect Pac-Man to be successful, "I never thought it would be this big." Pac-Man is the best-selling arcade game of all time (surpassing Space Invaders), with total estimated earnings ranging from 10 billion coins and $3.5 billion ($7.7 billion adjusted for inflation) to $6 billion ($17 billion adjusted for inflation) in arcades. Pac-Man and also topped the US RePlay cocktail arcade cabinet charts for 23 months, from February 1982 through 1983 up until February 1984.

The Atari 2600 version of the game sold over 8 million copies, making it the console's best-selling title. In addition, Coleco's tabletop mini-arcade unit sold over 1.5 million units in 1982, the Pac-Man Nelsonic Game Watch sold more than 500,000 units the same year, the Family Computer (Famicom) version and its 2004 Game Boy Advance re-release sold a combined 598,000 copies in Japan, the Atari 5200 version sold 35,011 cartridges between 1986 and 1988, the Atari XE computer version sold 42,359 copies in 1986 and 1990, Thunder Mountain's 1986 budget release for home computers received a Diamond certification from the Software Publishers Association in 1989 for selling over 500,000 copies, and mobile phone ports have sold over 30 million paid downloads as of 2010. II Computing also listed the Atarisoft port tenth on the magazine's list of top Apple II games as of late 1985, based on sales and market-share data. As of 2016, all versions of Pac-Man are estimated to have grossed a total of more than $12 billion in revenue.

Pac-Man was awarded "Best Commercial Arcade Game" at the 1982 Arcade Awards. Pac-Man also won the Video Software Dealers Association's VSDA Award for Best Videogame. In 2001, Pac-Man was voted the greatest video game of all time by a Dixons poll in the UK. The Killer List of Videogames listed Pac-Man as the most popular game of all time. The list aggregator site Playthatgame currently ranks Pac-Man as the #53rd top game of all-time & game of the year.

Pac-Man is considered by many to be one of the most influential video games of all time; The game established the maze chase game genre, the first video game with power-ups, and the individual ghosts have deterministic artificial intelligence (AI) that reacts to player actions. Pac-Man is considered one of the first video games to have demonstrated the potential of characters in the medium; its title character was the first original gaming mascot, it increased the appeal of video games with female audiences, and it was gaming's first broad licensing success. It is often cited as the first game with cutscenes (in the form of brief comical interludes about Pac-Man and Blinky chasing each other), though actually Space Invaders Part II employed a similar style of between-level intermissions in 1979.

Pac-Man was a turning point for the arcade video game industry, which had previously been dominated by space shoot 'em ups since Space Invaders (1978). Pac-Man popularized a genre of "character-led" action games, leading to a wave of character action games involving player characters in 1981, such as Nintendo's prototypical platform game Donkey Kong, Konami's and Universal Entertainment's . Pac-Man was one of the first popular non-shooting action games, defining key elements of the genre such as "parallel visual processing" which requires simultaneously keeping track of multiple entities, including the player's location, the enemies, and the energizers.

"Maze chase" games exploded on home computers after the release of Pac-Man. Some of them appeared before official ports and garnered more attention from consumers, and sometimes lawyers, as a result. These include (1981) and Snack Attack (1982) for the Apple II, Jawbreaker (1981) for the Atari 8-bit family, (1981) for the TRS-80, and K.C. Munchkin! (1981) for the Odyssey². Namco themselves produced several other maze chase games, including (1980), (1982), (1992), and (1994).[citation needed ] Atari sued Philips for creating K.C. Munchkin in the case Atari, Inc. v. North American Philips Consumer Electronics Corp., leading to Munchkin being pulled from store shelves under court order. No major competitors emerged to challenge Pac-Man in the maze-chase subgenre.

Pac-Man also inspired 3D variants of the concept, such as Monster Maze (1982), (1982), and early first-person shooters such as (1987; which also had similar character designs). John Romero credited Pac-Man as the game that had the biggest influence on his career; Wolfenstein 3D includes a Pac-Man level from a first-person perspective. Many post- Pac-Man titles include power-ups that briefly turn the tables on the enemy. The game's artificial intelligence inspired programmers who later worked for companies like Bethesda.

Guinness World Records has awarded the Pac-Man series eight records in Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, including "Most Successful Coin-Operated Game". On June 3, 2010, at the NLGD Festival of Games, the game's creator, Toru Iwatani, officially received the certificate from Guinness World Records for Pac-Man having had the most "coin-operated arcade machines" installed worldwide: 293,822. The record was set and recognized in 2005 and mentioned in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, but finally actually awarded in 2010. In 2009, Guinness World Records listed Pac-Man as the most recognizable video game character in the United States, recognized by 94% of the population, above Mario who was recognized by 93% of the population. In 2015, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Pac-Man to its World Video Game Hall of Fame. The Pac-Man character and game series became an icon of video game culture during the 1980s.

The game has inspired various real-life recreations, involving real people or robots. One event called Pac-Manhattan set a Guinness World Record for "Largest Pac-Man Game" in 2004.

The business term " Pac-Man defense" in mergers and acquisitions refers to a hostile takeover target that attempts to reverse the situation and instead acquire its attempted acquirer, a reference to Pac-Man's energizers. The "Pac-Man renormalization" is named for a cosmetic resemblance to the character, in the mathematical study of the Mandelbrot set. The game's popularity has also led to "Pac-Man" being adopted as a nickname, such as by boxer Manny Pacquiao and the American football player Adam Jones.

On August 21, 2016, in the 2016 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, during a video which showcases Tokyo as the host of the 2020 Summer Olympics, a small segment shows Pac-Man and the ghosts racing and eating dots on a running track.

Merchandise

A wide variety of Pac-Man merchandise have been marketed with the character's image. By 1982, Midway had about 95-105 licensees selling Pac-Man merchandise, including major companies, such as AT&T selling a Pac-Man telephone. There were more than 500 Pac-Man related products.

Pac-Man themed merchandise sales had exceeded $1 billion ($2.8 billion adjusted for inflation) in the US by 1982. Pac-Man related merchandise products included bumber stickers, jewellery, accessories (such as a $20,000 Ms. Pac-Man choker with 14 karat gold), bicycles, breakfast cereals, popsicles, t-shirts, toys, handheld electronic game imitations, and pasta.

Television

The animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera aired on ABC from 1982 to 1983. It was the highest-rated Saturday morning cartoon show in the US during late 1982.

A computer-generated animated series titled Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures aired on Disney XD in June 2013, and also on Discovery Family in November 2019.

The Buckner & Garcia song " Pac-Man Fever" (1981) went to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and received a Gold certification for more than 1 million records sold by 1982, and a total of 2.5 million copies sold as of 2008. More than one million copies of the group's Pac-Man Fever album (1982) were sold.

In 1982, "Weird Al" Yankovic recorded a parody of " Taxman" by the Beatles as "Pac-Man". It was eventually released in 2017 as part of Squeeze Box: The Complete Works of "Weird Al" Yankovic. In 1992, Aphex Twin (with the name Power-Pill) released , a techno album which consists mostly of samples from the game.

On July 20, 2020, Gorillaz and ScHoolboy Q, released a track entitled " PAC-MAN" as a part of Gorillaz' Song Machine series to commemorate the game's 40th anniversary, with the music video depicting the band's frontman, 2-D, playing a Gorillaz-themed Pac-Man arcade game.

The Pac-Man character appears in the film (2015), with Denis Akiyama playing series creator Toru Iwatani. Iwatani makes a cameo at the beginning of the film as an arcade technician. Pac-Man is referenced and makes an appearance in the 2017 film, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and the video game, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. The game, the character, and the ghosts all also appear in the film Wreck-It Ralph, as well as the sequel Ralph Breaks the Internet.

In Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale where Kirito and his friends beat a virtual reality game called PAC-Man 2026, which is loosely based on . In the Japanese tokusatsu film Kamen Rider Heisei Generations: Dr. Pac-Man vs. Ex-Aid & Ghost with Legend Riders, a Pac-Man-like character is the main villain.

The 2018 film uses Pac-Man as a strong plot element in the story of a 1999 couch-bound man who attempts to beat the game (and encounters the famous Level 256 glitch) before the year 2000 problem occurs.

Pac-Man is referenced in a 2018 Black Mirror interactive film called Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. In the movie, the character Colin Ritman (Will Poulter) begins to tell Stefan about Pac-Man and how the game has a much deeper meaning. The conspiracy is that choice and free will is an illusion. Colin's theory is that Pac (P.A.C.) stands for Program And Control. Pac-Man is "Program And Control Man" and a metaphor of someone being chased by their own demons, leaving them unable to do anything except consume to no end. Because, if they don't, then they'll be consumed. A cool conspiracy, but likely untrue.

Various attempts for a feature film based on Pac-Man have been planned since the peak of the original game's popularity. Following the release of Ms. Pac-Man, a feature film was being developed, but never reached an agreement. In 2008, a live-action film based on the series was in development at Crystal Sky. In 2022, plans for a live-action Pac-Man film were revived at Wayfarer Studios, based on an idea by Chuck Williams.

Other gaming media

In 1982, Milton Bradley released a board game based on Pac-Man. Players move up to four Pac-Man characters (traditional yellow plus red, green, and blue) plus two ghosts as per the throws of a pair of dice. The two ghost pieces were randomly packed with one of four colors.

Sticker manufacturer Fleer included rub-off game cards with its Pac-Man stickers. The card packages contain a Pac-Man style maze with all points along the path hidden with opaque coverings. From the starting position, the player moves around the maze while scratching off the coverings to score points.

A Pac-Man-themed downloadable content package for was released in 2020 in commemoration of the game's 40th anniversary. This pack introduced a new ghost called 'Creepy', based on the Creeper.

Perfect scores and other records

A perfect score on the original Pac-Man arcade game is 3,333,360 points, achieved when the player obtains the maximum score on the first 255 levels by eating every dot, energizer, fruit and blue ghost without losing a man, then uses all six men to obtain the maximum possible number of points on level 256.

The first person to achieve a publicly witnessed and verified perfect score without manipulating the game's hardware to freeze play was Billy Mitchell, who performed the feat on July 3, 1999. Some recordkeeping organizations removed Mitchell's score after a 2018 investigation by Twin Galaxies concluded that two unrelated Donkey Kong score performances submitted by Mitchell had not used an unmodified original circuit board. As of July 2020, seven other gamers had achieved perfect Pac-Man scores on original arcade hardware. The world record for the fastest completion of a perfect score, according to Twin Galaxies, is currently held by David Race with a time of 3 hours, 28 minutes, 49 seconds.

In December 1982, eight-year-old boy Jeffrey R. Yee received a letter from United States president Ronald Reagan congratulating him on a world record score of 6,131,940 points, possible only if he had passed level 256. In September 1983, Walter Day, chief scorekeeper at Twin Galaxies at the time, took the U.S. National Video Game Team on a tour of the East Coast to visit gamers who claimed the ability to pass that level. None demonstrated such an ability. In 1999, Billy Mitchell offered $100,000 to anyone who could pass level 256 before January 1, 2000. The offer expired with the prize unclaimed.

After announcing in 2018 that it would no longer recognize the first perfect score on Pac-Man, Guinness World Records reversed that decision and reinstated Billy Mitchell's 1999 performance on June 18, 2020.

Remakes and sequels

Pac-Man inspired a long series of sequels, remakes, and re-imaginings, and is one of the longest-running video game franchises in history. The first of these was , developed by the American-based General Computer Corporation and published by Midway in 1982. The character's gender was changed to female in response to Pac-Man's popularity with women, with new mazes, moving bonus items, and faster gameplay being implemented to increase its appeal. Ms. Pac-Man is one of the best-selling arcade games in North America, where Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man had become the most successful machines in the history of the amusement arcade industry. Legal concerns raised over who owned the game caused Ms. Pac-Man to become owned by Namco, who assisted in production of the game. Ms. Pac-Man inspired its own line of remakes, including Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness (2000), and Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze, and is also included in many Namco and Pac-Man collections for consoles.

Namco's own follow-up to the original was Super Pac-Man, released in 1982. This was followed by the Japan-exclusive in 1983. Midway produced many other Pac-Man sequels during the early 1980s, including Pac-Man Plus (1982), (1983), Baby Pac-Man (1983), and Professor Pac-Man (1984). Other games include the isometric (1987), the side-scrollers (1984), Hello! Pac-Man (1994), and (1995), the 3D platformer Pac-Man World (1999), and the puzzle games (1991) and (2005). Iwatani designed Pac-Land and Pac-Mania, both of which remain his favorite games in the series. Pac-Man Championship Edition, published for the Xbox 360 in 2007, was Iwatani's final game before leaving the company. Its neon visuals and fast-paced gameplay was met with acclaim, leading to the creation of Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (2010) and Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 (2016).

Coleco's tabletop Mini-Arcade versions of the game yielded 1.5 million units sold in 1982. Nelsonic Industries produced a Pac-Man LCD wristwatch game with a simplified maze also in 1982.

Namco Networks sold a downloadable Windows PC version of Pac-Man in 2009 which also includes an enhanced mode which replaces all of the original sprites with the sprites from Pac-Man Championship Edition. Namco Networks made a downloadable bundle which includes its PC version of Pac-Man and its port of called Namco All-Stars: Pac-Man and Dig Dug. In 2010, Namco Bandai announced the release of the game on Windows Phone 7 as an Xbox Live game.

For the weekend of May 21-23, 2010, Google changed the logo on its homepage to a playable version of the game in recognition of the 30th anniversary of the game's release. The Google Doodle version of Pac-Man was estimated to have been played by more than 1 billion people worldwide in 2010, so Google later gave the game its own page.

In April 2011, Soap Creative published World's Biggest Pac-Man, working together with Microsoft and Namco-Bandai to celebrate Pac-Man's 30th anniversary. It is a multiplayer browser-based game with user-created, interlocking mazes.

For April Fools' Day in 2017, Google created a playable of the game on Google Maps where users were able to play the game using the map onscreen.

References

Further reading

Trueman, Doug (November 10, 1999). "The History of Pac-Man". . Archived from the original on June 26, 2009. Comprehensive coverage on the history of the entire series up through 1999.

Morris, Chris (May 10, 2005). "Pac Man Turns 25". .

Vargas, Jose Antonio (June 22, 2005). "Still Love at First Bite: At 25, Pac-Man Remains a Hot Pursuit". The Washington Post.

Hirschfeld, Tom. How to Master the Video Games, Bantam Books, 1981. ISBN 0-553-20164-6 Strategy guide for a variety of arcade games including Pac-Man. Includes drawings of some of the common patterns.

External links

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Pac-Man Developer(s) Namco Publisher(s) Designer(s) Toru Iwatani Programmer(s) Shigeo FunakiShigeichi Ishimura Artist(s) Hiroshi Ono [4] Composer(s) Shigeichi IshimuraToshio Kai Series Pac-Man Platform(s) Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, MSX, Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, VIC-20, Intellivision, ZX Spectrum, TI-99/4A, IBM PC, Game Boy, Game Gear, Game Boy Color,

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This was the first debut of Mario, who is the most influential video game character of all time.

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Donkey Kong is an arcade game released by Nintendo in Japan on July 9, 1981, July 31, 1981, in North America, and in Europe during the same year. An early example of the platform game genre, the gameplay focuses on maneuvering the main character across a series of platforms to ascend a construction site, all while avoiding or jumping over obstacles. The originally unnamed character, who was later called Jumpman, then Mario, must rescue a damsel in distress, Pauline, from the titular giant ape, Donkey Kong. The hero and ape would later become two of Nintendo's most popular and recognizable characters. Donkey Kong is one of the most important games from the golden age of arcade video games as well as one of the most popular arcade games of all time.

The game was the latest in a series of efforts by Nintendo to break into the North American market. Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's president at the time, assigned the project to a first-time video game designer named Shigeru Miyamoto. Drawing from a wide range of inspirations, including , Beauty and the Beast, and , Miyamoto developed the scenario and designed the game alongside Nintendo's chief engineer, Gunpei Yokoi. The two men broke new ground by using graphics as a means of characterization, including cutscenes to advance the game's plot and integrating multiple stages into the gameplay.

Although Nintendo's American staff was initially apprehensive, Donkey Kong succeeded commercially and critically in North America and Japan. Nintendo licensed the game to Coleco, who developed home console versions for numerous platforms. Other companies cloned the game and avoided royalties altogether. Miyamoto's characters appeared on cereal boxes, television cartoons, and dozens of other places. A lawsuit brought by Universal City Studios alleging Donkey Kong violated its trademark of King Kong, ultimately failed. The success of Donkey Kong and Nintendo's victory in the courtroom helped to position the company for video-game market dominance from its release in 1981 until the late 1990s.

Following 1980's Space Panic, Donkey Kong is one of the earliest examples of the platform game genre even prior to the term being coined; the U.S. gaming press used climbing game for games with platforms and ladders. As the first platform game to feature jumping, Donkey Kong requires the player to jump between gaps and over obstacles or approaching enemies, setting the template for the future of the platform genre. With its four unique stages, Donkey Kong was the most complex arcade game at the time of its release, and one of the first arcade games to feature multiple stages, following 1980's and 1981's and

Competitive video gamers and referees stress the game's high level of difficulty compared to other classic arcade games. Winning the game requires patience and the ability to accurately time Mario's ascent. In addition to presenting the goal of saving Pauline, the game also gives the player a score. Points are awarded for the following: leaping over obstacles; destroying objects with a hammer power-up; collecting items such as hats, parasols, and purses (presumably belonging to Pauline); removing rivets from platforms, and completing each stage (determined by a steadily decreasing bonus counter). The player typically receives three lives with a bonus awarded for 7,000 points, although this can be modified via the game's built-in DIP switches. One life is lost whenever Mario touches Donkey Kong or any enemy object, falls too far through a gap or off the end of a platform, or lets the bonus counter reach zero.

The game is divided into four different single-screen stages. Each represents 25 meters of the structure Donkey Kong has climbed, one stage being 25 meters higher than the previous. The final stage occurs at 100 meters. Stage one involves Mario scaling a construction site made of crooked girders and ladders while jumping over or hammering barrels and oil drums tossed by Donkey Kong. Stage two involves climbing a five-story structure of conveyor belts, each of which transport cement pans. The third stage involves the player riding elevators while avoiding bouncing springs. The fourth and final stage requires Mario to remove eight rivets from the platforms supporting Donkey Kong; removing the final rivet causes Donkey Kong to fall and the hero to be reunited with Pauline. These four stages combine to form a level.

Upon completion of the fourth stage, the level then increments, and the game repeats the stages with progressive difficulty. For example, Donkey Kong begins to hurl barrels faster and sometimes diagonally, and fireballs speed up. The victory music alternates between levels 1 and 2. The fourth level, however, consists of 5 stages with the final stage at 125 meters. The 22nd level is colloquially known as the kill screen, due to an error in the game's programming that kills Mario after a few seconds, effectively ending the game.

Donkey Kong is considered to be the earliest video game with a storyline that visually unfolds on screen. The eponymous Donkey Kong character is the game's villain. The hero is a carpenter originally unnamed in the Japanese arcade release, later named Jumpman and then Mario. Donkey Kong kidnaps Mario's girlfriend, originally known as Lady, but later renamed Pauline. The player must take the role of Mario and rescue her. This is the first occurrence of the damsel in distress scenario that provided the template for countless video games to come.

The game uses graphics and animation for characterization. Donkey Kong smirks upon Mario's demise. Pauline has a pink dress and long hair, and a speech balloon crying "HELP!" appears frequently beside her. Mario, depicted in red overalls and a red cap, is an everyman character, a type common in Japan. Graphical limitations and the low pixel resolution of the small sprites prompted his design: drawing a mouth with so few pixels was infeasible, so the character was given a mustache; the programmers could not animate hair, so he got a cap; to make his arm movements visible, he needed colored overalls. The artwork used for the cabinets and promotional materials make these cartoon-like character designs even more explicit. Pauline, for example, is depicted as disheveled (like King Kong's Fay Wray) in a torn dress and stiletto heels.

Like 1980s , Donkey Kong employs cutscenes to advance its plot. The game opens with the gorilla climbing a pair of ladders to the top of a construction site, accompanied by music (a variation on the theme from Dragnet). He sets Pauline down and stomps his feet, causing the steel beams to change shape. He moves to his final perch and sneers. A melody plays, and the level (or stage) starts. This brief animation sets the scene and adds background to the gameplay, a first for video games. Upon reaching the end of the stage, another cutscene begins. A heart appears between Mario and Pauline, but Donkey Kong grabs her and climbs higher, causing the heart to break. The narrative concludes when Mario reaches the end of the rivet stage. He and Pauline are reunited, and a short intermission plays. The gameplay then loops from the beginning at a higher level of difficulty, without any formal ending.

As of early 1981, Nintendo's efforts to expand to North America were unsuccessful, culminating with the attempted export of the otherwise successful Radar Scope. They were left with a large number of unsold Radar Scope machines, so company president Hiroshi Yamauchi thought of simply converting them into something new. He approached a young industrial designer named Shigeru Miyamoto, who had been working for Nintendo since 1977, to see if he could design such a replacement. Miyamoto said that he could. Yamauchi appointed Nintendo's head engineer, Gunpei Yokoi, to supervise the project. Nintendo's budget for the development of the game was $100,000. Some sources also claim that Ikegami Tsushinki was involved in some of the development. They played no role in the game's creation or concept, but were hired to provide "mechanical programming assistance to fix the software created by Nintendo".

At the time, Nintendo was also pursuing a license to make a game based on the comic strip. When this license attempt failed, Nintendo took the opportunity to create new characters that could then be marketed and used in later games. Miyamoto came up with many characters and plot concepts, but he eventually settled on a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter, and a girlfriend that mirrors the rivalry between Bluto and Popeye for Olive Oyl. Bluto became an ape, which Miyamoto said was "nothing too evil or repulsive". He would be the pet of the main character, "a funny, hang-loose kind of guy." Miyamoto has also named " Beauty and the Beast" and the 1933 film as influences. Although its origin as a comic strip license played a major part, Donkey Kong marked the first time that the storyline for a video game preceded the game's programming rather than simply being appended as an afterthought. Unrelated Popeye games were eventually released by Nintendo for the Game & Watch the following month and for the arcades in 1982.

Yamauchi wanted primarily to target the North American market, so he mandated that the game be given an English title, though many of their games to this point had English titles anyway. Miyamoto decided to name the game for the ape, whom he felt was the strongest character. The story of how Miyamoto came up with the name "Donkey Kong" varies. A false urban myth says that the name was originally meant to be "Monkey Kong", but was misspelled or misinterpreted due to a blurred fax or bad telephone connection. Another, more credible story claims Miyamoto looked in a Japanese-English dictionary for something that would mean "stubborn gorilla", or that "Donkey" was meant to convey "silly" or "stubborn"; "Kong" was common Japanese slang for "gorilla". A rival claim is that he worked with Nintendo's export manager to come up with the title, and that "Donkey" was meant to represent "stupid and goofy". In the end, Miyamoto stated that he thought the name would convey the thought of a "stupid ape".

Miyamoto himself had high hopes for his new project. He lacked the technical skills to program it alone, so instead came up with concepts and consulted technicians to see if they were possible. He wanted to make the characters different sizes, move in different manners and react in various ways. Yokoi thought Miyamoto's original design was too complex, though he had some difficult suggestions himself, such as using see-saws to catapult the hero across the screen (eventually found too hard to program, though a similar concept appeared in the Popeye arcade game). Miyamoto then thought of using sloped platforms, barrels and ladders. When he specified that the game would have multiple stages, the four-man programming team complained that he was essentially asking them to make the game repeatedly. Nevertheless, they followed Miyamoto's design, creating a total of approximately 20 kilobytes of content. Yukio Kaneoka composed a simple soundtrack to serve as background music for the levels and story events.

The circuit board of Radar Scope was restructured for Donkey Kong. The Radar Scope hardware, originally inspired by the Namco hardware, was designed for a large number of enemies moving around at high speeds, which Donkey Kong does not require, so the development team removed unnecessary functions and reduced the scale of the circuit board. While the gameplay and graphics were reworked for updated ROM chips, the existing CPU, sound hardware and monitor were left intact. The character set, scoreboard, upper HUD display, and font are almost identical to Radar Scope, with palette differences. The Donkey Kong hardware has the memory capacity for displaying 128 foreground sprites at 16x16 pixels each and 256 background tiles at 8x8 pixels each. Mario and all moving objects use single sprites, the taller Pauline uses two sprites, and the larger Donkey Kong uses six sprites.

Hiroshi Yamauchi thought the game was going to sell well and phoned to inform Minoru Arakawa, head of Nintendo's operations in the U.S. Nintendo's American distributors, Ron Judy and Al Stone, brought Arakawa to a lawyer named Howard Lincoln to secure a trademark.

The game was sent to Nintendo of America for testing. The sales manager disliked it for being too different from the maze and shooter games common at the time, and Judy and Lincoln expressed reservations over the strange title. Still, Arakawa adamantly believed that it would be a hit. American staff began translating the storyline for the cabinet art and naming the characters. They chose "Pauline" for the Lady, after Polly James, wife of Nintendo's Redmond, Washington, warehouse manager, Don James. The name of "Jumpman", a name originally chosen for its similarity to the popular brands and , was eventually changed to "Mario" in likeness of Mario Segale, the landlord of the original office space of Nintendo of America. These character names were printed on the American cabinet art and used in promotional materials. Donkey Kong was ready for release.

Stone and Judy convinced the managers of two bars in Seattle, Washington, to set up Donkey Kong machines. The managers initially showed reluctance, but when they saw sales of $30 a day-or 120 plays-for a week straight, they requested more units. In their Redmond headquarters, a skeleton crew composed of Arakawa, his wife Yoko, James, Judy, Phillips, and Stone set about gutting 2,000 surplus Radar Scope machines and converting them with Donkey Kong motherboards and power supplies from Japan. The game officially went on sale in July 1981. Actor Harris Shore created the first live-action Mario in the television advertisements for Colecovision's hand-held Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong, Junior video games.

Makers of video game consoles were also interested. Taito offered a considerable sum to buy all rights to Donkey Kong, but Nintendo turned them down after three days of discussion within the company. Rivals Coleco and Atari approached Nintendo in Japan and the United States respectively. In the end, Yamauchi granted Coleco exclusive console and tabletop rights to Donkey Kong because he believed that "It [was] the hungriest company". In addition, Arakawa believed that as a more established company in the U.S., Coleco could better handle marketing. In return, Nintendo received an undisclosed lump sum plus $1.40 per game cartridge sold and $1 per tabletop unit. On December 24, 1981, Howard Lincoln drafted the contract. He included language that Coleco would be held liable for anything on the game cartridge, an unusual clause for a licensing agreement. Arakawa signed the document the next day, and, on February 1, 1982, Yamauchi persuaded the Coleco representative in Japan to sign without review by the company's lawyers.

Coleco did not offer the game cartridge stand-alone; instead, it was bundled with the ColecoVision console, which went on sale in August 1982. Six months later, Coleco offered Atari 2600 and Intellivision versions, too. The company did not port it to the Atari 5200, a system comparable to its own (as opposed to the less powerful 2600 and Intellivision). Coleco's sales doubled to $500 million and its earnings quadrupled to $40 million. Coleco's console versions of Donkey Kong sold six million cartridges in total, grossing over $153 million, and earning Nintendo more than $5 million in royalties. Coleco also released stand-alone Mini-Arcade tabletop versions of Donkey Kong, which, along with , , and , sold three million units combined. Meanwhile, Atari got the license for computer versions of Donkey Kong and released it for the Atari 400 and 800. When Coleco unveiled the Adam Computer, running a port of Donkey Kong at the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Illinois, Atari protested that it was in violation of the licensing agreement. Yamauchi demanded that Arnold Greenberg, Coleco's president, withdraw his Adam port. This version of the game is cartridge-based, and thus not a violation of Nintendo's license with Atari; still, Greenberg complied. Ray Kassar of Atari was fired the next month, and the home PC version of Donkey Kong was not released.

In 1983, Atari released several computer versions under the Atarisoft label. All of the computer ports have the cement factory level, while most of the console versions do not. None of the home versions have all of the intermission animations from the arcade game. Some have Donkey Kong on the left side of the screen in the barrel level (as he is in the arcade game) and others have him on the right side.

Miyamoto created a greatly simplified version for the Game & Watch multiscreen handheld device. Other ports include the Apple II, Atari 7800, Intellivision, Commodore VIC-20, Famicom Disk System, IBM PC, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Atari 8-bit family, and Mini-Arcade versions. Two separate ports were developed for the Commodore 64: the first was published by Atarisoft in 1983, and the second by Ocean Software in 1986.

The game was ported to Nintendo's Family Computer (Famicom) console and released in Japan on July 15, 1983, as one of the system's three launch games. It was also an early game for the Famicom's international redesign, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), as it was launched on June 1, 1986, in North America and October 15, 1986, in Europe. The game was ported by the Famicom and NES developer, Nintendo Research & Development 2, under the Arcade Classics Series of NES games. The cement factory level is not included, however, nor are most of the cutscenes since initial ROM cartridges do not have enough memory available. However, the port includes a new song composed by Yukio Kaneoka for the title screen. Both Donkey Kong and its sequel, Donkey Kong Jr., are included in the 1988 NES compilation Donkey Kong Classics.

In 2002 the NES port of Donkey kong is rereleased for the e-reader, a Game Boy Advance add-on. Later in 2004 the NES version will also be released as a separate cartridge for the GBA under the Classic NES Series.

A complete remake of the original arcade game on the Game Boy, titled Donkey Kong (referred to as Donkey Kong '94 during development) contains levels from both the original Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. arcades. It starts with the same damsel-in-distress premise and four basic locations as the arcade game and then progresses to 97 additional puzzle-based levels. It is the first game to have built-in enhancement for the Super Game Boy accessory.

The Atari 8-bit computer port of Donkey Kong contains one of the longest-undiscovered Easter eggs in a video game. Programmer Landon Dyer had his initials appear if the player died under certain conditions, then returned to the title screen. This remained undiscovered for 26 years until Dyer revealed it on his blog, stating "there's an easter egg, but it's totally not worth it, and I don't remember how to bring it up anyway." The steps required to trigger it were later discovered by Don Hodges, who used an emulator and a debugger to trace through the game's code.

In his 1982 book Video Invaders, Steve Bloom described Donkey Kong as "another bizarre cartoon game, courtesy of Japan". Donkey Kong was, however, extremely popular in the United States and Canada, garnering a positive reaction from consumers and was a significant commercial success for Nintendo, pulling them out of financial troubles. The game's initial 2,000 units sold, and more orders were made. Arakawa began manufacturing the electronic components in Redmond because waiting for shipments from Japan was taking too long. By October, Donkey Kong was selling 4,000 units a month, and by late June 1982, Nintendo had sold 60,000 Donkey Kong machines overall and earned $180 million. Judy and Stone, who worked on straight commission, became millionaires. Arakawa used Nintendo's profits to buy 27 acres (11 ha) of land in Redmond in July 1982. Nintendo earned another $100 million on the game in its second year of release, totaling $280 million (equivalent to $787,423,133 in 2019). It remained Nintendo's top seller into mid- 1983. Donkey Kong also sold steadily in Japan. Game Machine listed the game on their October 1, 1983, issue as being the twentieth most-successful table arcade unit of the year. Electronic Games speculated in June 1983 that the game's home versions contributed to the arcade version's extended popularity, compared to the four to six months that the average game lasted.

In January 1983, the 1982 Arcade Awards gave it the Best Single-player video game award and the Certificate of Merit as runner-up for Coin-Op Game of the Year. Ed Driscoll reviewed the Atari VCS version of Donkey Kong in The Space Gamer No. 59. Edwards commented that "The faults really outweigh the plusses, especially if you've got ' Donkey Kong Fever'. For the addicted, your cure lies elsewhere. Still, if you just play the game occasionally, or never, you may like this cartridge. However, play the store's copy, or try a friend's, before you buy." In September 1982, Arcade Express reviewed the ColecoVision port and scored it 9 out of 10. Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games in 1983 stated that "Coleco did a fabulous job" with Donkey Kong, the best of the console's first five games and "the most faithful adaptation of the original video game I have seen". The magazine's Danny Goodman stated that of Coleco's three console versions, the one for the ColecoVision was the best, "followed surprisingly by the Atari and Intellivision, in that order". Computer and Video Games reviewed the ColecoVision port in its September 1984 issue and scored it 4 out of 4 in all four categories of Action, Graphics, Addiction and Theme.

The Famicom version of the game sold 840,000 units in Japan.

In April 1982, Sid Sheinberg, a seasoned lawyer and president of MCA and Universal City Studios, learned of the game's success and suspected it might be a trademark infringement of Universal's own . On April 27, 1982, he met with Arnold Greenberg of Coleco and threatened to sue over Coleco's home version of Donkey Kong. Coleco agreed on May 3, 1982, to pay royalties to Universal of 3% of their Donkey Kong's net sale price, worth about $4.6 million. Meanwhile, Sheinberg revoked Tiger's license to make its King Kong game, but O. R. Rissman refused to acknowledge Universal's claim to the trademark. When Universal threatened Nintendo, Howard Lincoln and Nintendo refused to cave. In preparation for the court battle ahead, Universal agreed to allow Tiger to continue producing its King Kong game as long as they distinguished it from Donkey Kong.

Universal sued Nintendo on June 29, 1982, and announced its license with Coleco. The company sent cease and desist letters to Nintendo's licensees, all of which agreed to pay royalties to Universal except Milton Bradley and Ralston Purina. Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo, Co., Ltd. was heard in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York by Judge Robert W. Sweet. Over seven days, Universal's counsel, the New York firm Townley & Updike, argued that the names King Kong and Donkey Kong were easily confused and that the plot of the game was an infringement on that of the films. Nintendo's counsel, John Kirby, countered that Universal had themselves argued in a previous case that King Kong's scenario and characters were in the public domain. Judge Sweet ruled in Nintendo's favor, awarding the company Universal's profits from Tiger's game ($56,689.41), damages and attorney's fees.

Universal appealed, trying to prove consumer confusion by presenting the results of a telephone survey and examples from print media where people had allegedly assumed a connection between the two Kongs. On October 4, 1984, however, the court upheld the previous verdict.

Nintendo and its licensees filed counterclaims against Universal. On May 20, 1985, Judge Sweet awarded Nintendo $1.8 million for legal fees, lost revenues, and other expenses. However, he denied Nintendo's claim of damages from those licensees who had paid royalties to both Nintendo and Universal. Both parties appealed this judgment, but the verdict was upheld on July 15, 1986.

Nintendo thanked John Kirby with the gift of a $30,000 sailboat named Donkey Kong and "exclusive worldwide rights to use the name for sailboats". A later Nintendo protagonist was named in Kirby's honor. The court battle also taught Nintendo they could compete with larger entertainment industry companies.

In 1996 Next Generation listed the arcade, Atari 7800, and cancelled Coleco Adam versions as number 50 on their "Top 100 Games of All Time", commenting that even ignoring its massive historical significance, Donkey Kong stands as a great game due to its demanding challenges and graphics which manage to elegantly delineate an entire scenario on a single screen. In February 2006, Nintendo Power rated it the 148th best game made on a Nintendo system. Today, Donkey Kong is the fifth most popular arcade game among collectors.

The NES version was re-released as an unlockable game in Animal Crossing for the GameCube. It was also published on Virtual Console for the Wii, Wii U, and Nintendo 3DS. The Wii U version is also the last game that was released to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the Japanese version of the NES, the Famicom. The original arcade version of the game appears in the Nintendo 64 game Donkey Kong 64, and must be beaten to finish the game. Nintendo released the NES version on the e-Reader and for the Game Boy Advance Classic NES Series in 2002 and 2004, respectively. In 2004, Namco released an arcade cabinet which contains Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Mario Bros.

Donkey Kong: Original Edition is a port based on the NES version that reinstates the cement factory stage and includes some intermission animations absent from the original NES version, which has only ever been released on the Virtual Console. It was preinstalled on 25th Anniversary PAL region red Wii systems, which were first released in Europe on October 29, 2010. In Japan, a download code for the game for Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console was sent to users who purchased New Super Mario Bros. 2 or Brain Age: Concentration Training from the Nintendo eShop from July 28 to September 2, 2012. In North America, a download code for the game for Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console was sent to users who purchased one of five select 3DS games on the Nintendo eShop and registered it on Club Nintendo from October 1, 2012, to January 6, 2013. In Europe and Australia, it was released for purchase on the Nintendo 3DS eShop, being released on September 18, 2014, in Europe and on September 19, 2014, in Australia. The original arcade version was re-released as part of the Arcade Archives series for Nintendo Switch on June 14, 2018, and the NES version was re-released as one of the launch titles for Nintendo Switch Online on September 19, 2018.

was officially licensed from Nintendo and manufactured by Falcon for some non-US markets. Nevertheless, Crazy Kong machines found their way into some American arcades, often installed in cabinets marked as Congorilla. Nintendo was quick to take legal action against those distributing the game in the US. Bootleg copies of Donkey Kong also appeared in both North America and France under the Crazy Kong, Konkey Kong or Donkey King names. The 1982 Logger arcade game from Century Electronics is a direct clone of Donkey Kong, with a large bird standing in for the ape and rolling logs instead of barrels.

In 1981, O. R. Rissman, president of Tiger Electronics, obtained a license to use the name from Universal City Studios. Under this title, Tiger created a handheld game with a scenario and gameplay based directly on Nintendo's creation.

Many home computer clones directly borrowed the gorilla theme: Killer Gorilla (BBC Micro, 1983), Killer Kong (ZX Spectrum, 1983), Crazy Kong 64 (Commodore 64, 1983), Kongo Kong (Commodore 64, 1983), Donkey King (TRS-80 Color Computer, 1983), and Kong (TI-99/4A, 1983). One of the first releases from Electronic Arts was Hard Hat Mack (Apple II, 1983), a three-stage game without an ape, but using the construction site setting from Donkey Kong. Other clones recast the game with different characters, such as Cannonball Blitz (Apple II, 1982), with a soldier and cannonballs replacing the ape and barrels, and the American Southwest-themed Canyon Climber (Atari 8-bit, 1982).

Epyx's (Atari 8-bit, 1983) reuses a prototypical name for the Mario character in Donkey Kong. A magazine ad for the game has the tagline "If you liked Donkey Kong, you'll love JUMPMAN!" , along with Miner 2049er (Atari 8-bit, 1982) and Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory (Atari 8-bit, 1984), focuses on traversing all of the platforms in the level, or collecting scattered objects, instead of climbing to the top.

There were so many games with multiple ladder and platforms stages by 1983 that Electronic Games described Nintendo's own Popeye game as "yet another variation of a theme that's become all too familiar since the success of Donkey Kong". That year Sega released a Donkey Kong clone called Congo Bongo in arcades. Although using isometric perspective, the structure and gameplay are similar.

Donkey Kong spawned the sequel Donkey Kong Jr. (1982) with the player controlling Donkey Kong's son in an attempt to save his father from the now-evil Mario. The 1983 spinoff introduced Mario's brother Luigi in a single-screen cooperative game set in a sewer, and launched the Mario franchise. Also in 1983, Donkey Kong 3 appeared in the form of a fixed shooter, with an exterminator named Stanley ridding the ape-and insects-from a greenhouse.

Nintendo revived the Donkey Kong franchise in the 1990s for a series of platform games and spin-offs developed by Rare, beginning with Donkey Kong Country in 1994. In 2004, Nintendo released Mario vs. Donkey Kong, a sequel to the Game Boy's Donkey Kong, in which Mario must chase Donkey Kong to get back the stolen Mini-Mario toys. In the follow-up Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis, Donkey Kong once again falls in love with Pauline and kidnaps her, and Mario uses the Mini-Mario toys to help him rescue her. Donkey Kong Racing for the GameCube was in development by Rare, but was canceled when Microsoft purchased the company. In 2004, Nintendo released the first of the Donkey Konga games, a rhythm-based game series that uses a special bongo controller. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat ( 2005) is a unique platform action game that uses the same bongo controller accessory. In 2007, Donkey Kong Barrel Blast was released for the Nintendo Wii. It was originally developed as a GameCube game and would have used the bongo controller, but it was delayed and released exclusively as a Wii game with no support for the bongo accessory. The Donkey Kong Country series was revived by Retro Studios in 2010 with the release of Donkey Kong Country Returns, and its sequel, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, in 2014.

Donkey Kong appears as a game in the Wii U game , which features multiple NES games and sometimes "remixes" them by presenting significantly modified versions of the games as challenges. One such challenge features Link from The Legend of Zelda traveling through the first screen to save Pauline. The difficulty is increased compared to the original Donkey Kong because Link cannot jump, as in Zelda.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl includes a demo of the NES version of Donkey Kong, and a stage called "75m", a replica of its Donkey Kong namesake.

By late June 1982, Donkey Kong's success had prompted more than 50 parties in the U.S. and Japan to license the game's characters. Mario and his simian nemesis appeared on cereal boxes, board games, pajamas, and manga. In 1983, the animation studio Ruby-Spears produced a Donkey Kong cartoon (as well as Donkey Kong Jr.) for the Saturday Supercade program on CBS. In the show, mystery crime-solving plots in the mode of are framed around the premise of Mario and Pauline chasing Donkey Kong (voiced by Soupy Sales), who has escaped from the circus. The show lasted two seasons.

In 1982, Buckner & Garcia and R. Cade and the Video Victims both recorded songs (" Do the Donkey Kong" and "Donkey Kong", respectively) based on the game. Artists like DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince and Trace Adkins referenced the game in songs. Episodes of The Simpsons, , Crank Yankers and The Fairly OddParents have referenced the game. Even today, sound effects from the Atari 2600 version often serve as generic video game sounds in films and television series. The phrase "It's on like Donkey Kong" has been used in various works of popular culture. In November 2010, Nintendo applied for a trademark on the phrase with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters tells the story of Steve Wiebe's attempts to break the Donkey Kong world record, then considered to have been held by Billy Mitchell. In the early 2010s, Hank Chien set a record of 1,138,600. This was broken four years later by Robbie Lakeman. The current world record was set by Lakeman on September 22, 2020 with a score of 1,271,100.

In 2018, Mitchell was stripped of his records by Twin Galaxies and banned from submitting new scores after Twin Galaxies concluded that Mitchell had illicitly used emulators to achieve his scores. Twin Galaxies prohibits the use of emulators for high scores they publish because they allow undetectable cheating. However, in 2020 Guinness World Records reversed their decision and reinstated Billy Mitchell's previous world records, based on new evidence including eyewitness reports and expert testimonials.

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Donkey Kong is an arcade game released by Nintendo in Japan on July 9, 1981, July 31, 1981, in North America, and in Europe during the same year. An early example of the platform game genre, the gameplay focuses on maneuvering the main character across a series of platforms to ascend a construction site, all while avoiding or jumping over obstacles.

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The Master System is a third-generation 8-bit home video game console manufactured by Sega. It was originally a remodeled export version of the Sega Mark III, the third iteration of the SG-1000 series of consoles, which was released in Japan in 1985 and featured enhanced graphical capabilities over its predecessors. The Master System launched in North America in 1986, followed by Europe in 1987, and Brazil in 1989. A Japanese version of the Master System was also launched in 1987, which features a few enhancements over the export models (and by proxy the original Mark III): a built-in FM audio chip, a rapid-fire switch, and a dedicated port for the 3D glasses. The Master System II, a cheaper model, was released in 1990 in North America and Europe.

The original Master System models use both cartridges and a credit card-sized format known as Sega Cards. Accessories for the consoles include a light gun and 3D glasses that work with a range of specially designed games. The later Master System II redesign removed the card slot, turning it into a strictly cartridge-only system and is incompatible with the 3D glasses.

The Master System was released in competition with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Its library is smaller and with fewer well-reviewed games than the NES, due in part to Nintendo licensing policies requiring platform exclusivity. Though the Master System had newer, improved hardware, it failed to overturn Nintendo's significant market share advantage in Japan and North America. However, it attained significantly more success in Europe and Brazil.

The Sega Master System is estimated to have sold between 10 and 13 million units worldwide. In addition, Tectoy has sold 8 million licensed Master System variants in Brazil. Retrospective criticism has recognized its role in the development of the Sega Genesis, and a number of well received games, particularly in PAL (including PAL-M) regions, but is critical of its limited library in the NTSC regions, which were dominated by the NES.

On July 15, 1983, Sega released its first video game console, the SG-1000, in Japan. The launch coincided with the same day its competitor Nintendo launched the Famicom. In 1984, parent company Gulf and Western Industries divested its non-core businesses including Sega, and Sega president Hayao Nakayama was installed as CEO. Sega released another console, the SG-1000 II, featuring several hardware alterations, including detachable controllers. Nakayama and Sega co-founder David Rosen arranged a management buyout with financial backing from CSK Corporation and installed CSK CEO Isao Okawa as chairman.

Hoping to better compete with Nintendo, Sega released another console, the Sega Mark III, in Japan in 1985. The Mark III was a redesigned version of the SG-1000. It was engineered by the same team, including Hideki Sato and Masami Ishikawa, who had worked on the II and later led development of the Sega Genesis. According to Sato, the console was designed because of the limitations of the TMS9918 graphics chip in the SG-1000 and II, which did not have the power for the kinds of games Sega wanted to make. The Mark III's chip was designed in-house, based around the unit in Sega's System 2 arcade system board.

The Sega Mark III was released in Japan in October 1985 at a price of ¥15,000. Though its hardware was more powerful than the Famicom, the Mark III was not successful on launch. Problems arose from Nintendo's licensing practices with third-party developers, whereby Nintendo required that games for the Famicom not be published on other consoles. Sega developed its own games and obtained the rights to port games from other developers, but they did not sell well. Sega developer Mark Cerny said "pressure was very, very high", with a typical Master System game allotted only three months of development time.

Although the SG-1000 had not been released in the United States, Sega hoped that their video game console business would fare better in North America than it had in Japan. To accomplish this, Sega of America was established in 1986 to manage the company's consumer products in North America. Rosen and Nakayama hired Bruce Lowry, Nintendo of America's vice president of sales. Lowry was persuaded to change companies because Sega would allow him to start his new office in San Francisco. He chose the name "Sega of America" for his division because he had worked for Nintendo of America and liked the combination of words. Initially, Sega of America was tasked with repackaging the Mark III for a Western release. Sega of America rebranded the Mark III as the Master System, similar to Nintendo's reworking of the Famicom into the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The name was chosen by Sega of America employees throwing darts against a whiteboard of suggested names. Plans to release a cheaper console, the Base System, also influenced the decision. Okawa approved of the name after being told it was a reference to the competitive nature of both the video game industry and martial arts, in which only one competitor can be the "Master". The console's futuristic final design was intended to appeal to Western tastes. The North American packaging was white to differentiate it from the black NES packaging, with a white grid design inspired by Apple computer products.

The Master System was first revealed in North America at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago in June 1986. It was initially sold in a package with the "Power Base" console, a light gun, two controllers, and a pack-in multicart. The console was launched in September 1986 at a price of $200 (equivalent to $472 in 2020), including the games and Safari Hunt. Nintendo was exporting the Famicom to the US as the NES, and both companies planned to spend $15 million in late 1986 to market their consoles; Sega hoped to sell 400,000 to 750,000 consoles in 1986. By the end of 1986, 125,000 Master System consoles had been sold, more than the Atari 7800's 100,000 but less than Nintendo's 1.1 million. Other sources indicate that more than 250,000 consoles were sold by Christmas 1986.

As in Japan, the Master System in North America had a limited game library. Limited by Nintendo's licensing practices, Sega only had two third-party American publishers, Activision and Parker Brothers. Agreements with both of those companies came to an end in 1989. Sega claimed that the Master System was the first console "where the graphics on the box are actually matched by the graphics of the game", and pushed the "arcade experience" in adverts. Its marketing department was run by only two people, giving Sega a disadvantage in advertising. As one method of promoting the console, at the end of 1987 Sega partnered with astronaut Scott Carpenter to start the "Sega Challenge", a traveling program set up in recreational centers where kids were tested on non-verbal skills such as concentration and the ability to learn new skills. and Shooting Gallery were two games included in the challenge.

In 1987, amid struggling sales in the US, Sega sold the US distribution rights for the Master System to the toy company Tonka, which had no experience with electronic entertainment systems. The thinking at Sega behind the deal was to leverage Tonka's knowledge of the American toy market, since Nintendo had marketed the NES as a toy to great success in the region. The announcement was made shortly after the 1987 Summer CES. During this time, much of Sega of America's infrastructure shifted from marketing and distribution to focus on customer service, and Lowry departed the company. Tonka blocked localization of several popular Japanese games, and during 1988 were less willing to purchase EPROMs needed for game cartridge manufacture during a shortage. They also became less willing to invest in video games after taking massive loans in purchasing Kenner Toys in 1987, followed by poor holiday season sales and financial losses. Though the distributor of the console had changed, the Master System continued to perform poorly in the market.

The Mark III was rereleased as the Master System in Japan in October 1987 for ¥16,800, but still sold poorly. Neither model posed a serious challenge to Nintendo in Japan, and, according to Sato, Sega was only able to attain 10% of the Japanese console market.

The Master System was launched in Europe in 1987. It was distributed by Mastertronic in the United Kingdom, Master Games in France, and Ariolasoft in West Germany, though Ariolasoft initially purchased the distribution rights for the United Kingdom. Because Ariolasoft could not agree to a pricing agreement with Sega, Mastertronic signed a deal in 1987 to take control of UK distribution, and announced the deal at the 1987 Summer CES. The company announced the release of 12 titles by autumn. Mastertronic advertised the Master System as "an arcade in the home" and launched it at £99 (equivalent to £281 in 2019). Advance orders from retailers were high, but Sega proved unable to deliver inventory until Boxing Day on December 26, causing many retailers to cancel their orders; Mastertronic and Master Games entered financial crises and Ariolasoft vowed never to work with Sega again. Mastertronic had already sold a minority interest to the Virgin group to enter the console business, and sold the remainder to avoid bankruptcy. The newly rebranded Virgin Mastertronic took over all European distribution in 1988.

Virgin Mastertronic focused marketing the Master System on ports of Sega's arcade games and positioning it as a superior video game alternative to the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum computers. As a result of this marketing and of Nintendo's less effective early approaches in Europe, the Master System began to attract European developers. The Master System held a significant part of the video game console market in Europe through the release of Sega's succeeding console, the Mega Drive. In 1989, Virgin Mastertronic began offering rentals of the Master System console and 20 games. The United Kingdom also hosted a Sega video games national championship, with the winner competing against Japanese and American champions on British television show Motormouth. Players competed on a variety of games, including Astro Warrior, platform games, and sports games. During the late 1980s, the Master System was outselling the NES in the United Kingdom.

The Master System was successful in Europe. By 1990, the Master System was the best-selling console in Europe, though the NES was beginning to have a fast-growing user base in the UK. For the year 1990, Virgin Mastertronic sold 150,000 Master Systems in the United Kingdom, greater than the 60,000 Mega Drives and Nintendo's 80,000 consoles sold in the same period. In the whole of Europe that year, Sega sold a combined 918,000 consoles, greater than Nintendo's 655,000.

The Master System was also successful in Brazil, where it was distributed by Tectoy and launched in September 1989. Tectoy, a Brazilian toy company startup focused on electronic toys, reached out to Sega about distributing their products. Despite hesitation given the situation with Tonka in the US, Tectoy was eventually given liberty to manage Sega products in Brazil. Their success distributing Sega's laser tag gun based on the anime Zillion gave Sega the confidence to allow Tectoy to distribute the Master System. By the end of 1990, the installed base in Brazil was about 280,000 units. Tectoy introduced a telephone service with game tips, created a Master System club, and presented the program Master Tips during commercial breaks of the television show Sessão Aventura of Rede Globo. Nintendo did not arrive in Brazil until 1993, and were unable to officially compete, given that clones of the NES dominated the Brazilian market. Tectoy claimed 80% of the Brazilian video game market.

Although the Master System was a success in Europe, and later in Brazil, it failed to ignite significant interest in the Japanese or North American markets, which, by the mid-to-late 1980s, were both dominated by Nintendo. By 1988, Nintendo held 83 percent of the North American video game market. With Sega continuing to have difficulty penetrating the home market, Sega's console R&D team, led by Ishikawa and supervised by Sato, began work on a successor to the Master System almost immediately after its launch. Another competitor arose in Japan in 1987 when Japanese computer giant NEC released the PC Engine ( TurboGrafx-16 in North America) amid great publicity.

Sega released its next console, the 16-bit Mega Drive, in Japan on October 29, 1988. The final licensed release for the Master System in Japan was Bomber Raid in 1989. In the same year, Sega was preparing to release the new Mega Drive, rebranded Genesis, in North America. Displeased with Tonka's handling of the Master System, Sega reacquired the marketing and distribution rights to the Master System for the United States. In 1990, Sega released the remodeled Master System II, designed as a lower-cost version without the Sega Card slot. Sega promoted the new model, but it sold poorly. By early 1992, Master System production had ceased in North America, having sold between 1.5 million and 2 million units, behind both Nintendo and Atari, which controlled 80 percent and 12 percent of the market respectively. The last licensed Master System release in North America was Sonic the Hedgehog (1991).

In Europe, where the Master System was the best-selling console up until 1990, the NES caught up with and narrowly overtook the Master System in Western Europe during the early 1990s, though the Master System maintained its lead in several markets such as the United Kingdom, Belgium and Spain. In 1993, the Master System's estimated active installed user base in Europe was 6.25 million units, larger than that of the Mega Drive's 5.73 million that year but less than the NES's 7.26 million. Combined with the Mega Drive, Sega represented the majority of the European console market that year. The Master System II was also successful and helped Sega to sustain their significant market share. Releases continued into the 1990s in Europe, including (1991), Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992) and Streets of Rage 2 (1993). The Master System was also popular in Australia, where 250,000 units were sold in 1990 alone, and where it was more successful than the NES. 650,000 consoles had been sold in Australia by November 1994.

The Master System has had continued success in Brazil, where dedicated "plug and play" consoles emulating the original hardware continue to be sold by Tectoy. These systems include the Master System Compact and the Master System 3, and Tectoy has also received requests to remake the original Master System. In 2015, it was reported that Master System plug and play systems sell around 150,000 units per year in Brazil, a level that holds its own against modern systems such as the PlayStation 4. By 2016, Tectoy had sold 8 million units of Master System branded systems in Brazil.

The Master System's main CPU is a Zilog Z80A, an 8-bit processor running at 4 MHz. It has 8 kB of ROM, 8 kB of RAM and 16 kB of video RAM. Video is provided through an RF switch (though Model 1s with an AV port can also output composite and even RGB video) and displays at a resolution of 256 × 192 pixels and up to 32 colors at one time from a total palette of 64 colors; the graphics chip was designed by Sega for the Mark III. The Master System measures 365 by 170 by 70 millimetres (14.4 in × 6.7 in × 2.8 in), while the Mark III measures 318 by 145 by 52 millimetres (12.5 in × 5.7 in × 2.0 in). Both consoles use two slots for game input: one for Mega Cartridges and one for Sega Cards, along with an expansion slot and 2 controller ports. Sound is provided by the SN76489 PSG chip, which can provide three square wave channels and one noise channel. The Japanese version also integrates the YM2413 FM chip, an optional feature on the Mark III. With few exceptions, Master System hardware is identical to the hardware in the Mark III. Games for the console are playable on the Sega Genesis using the Power Base Converter accessory, and on the Game Gear using the Master Gear Converter. Compared to the base NES, the Master System has twice as much memory and a higher CPU clock rate.

Sega produced several iterations of the Master System. The Master System II, released in 1990, removed a number of components to reduce cost, Sega Card slot, reset button, power light, expansion port, and startup music and logo. In most areas the Master System II's A/V port was omitted, leaving only RF output available; this was reversed in France, where the local version of the Master System II had only A/V video output available and omitted the RF hardware. In Brazil, Tectoy released several licensed variations; the Master System Super Compact functions wirelessly with an RF transmitter, and the Master System Girl, molded in bright pink plastic, was targeted at girls. The Master System 3 Collection, released in 2006, contains 120 built-in games. Handheld versions of the Master System were released under several brands, such as Coleco in 2006.

Master System controllers

Light Phaser

SegaScope 3-D glasses

A number of cross-compatible accessories were created for the Mark III and Master System. The controller consists of a rectangle with a D-pad and two buttons. Sega also introduced additional Mark III controllers, such as a paddle controller. A combination steering wheel and flight stick, the Handle Controller, was released in 1989. The Sega Control Stick is an arcade-style joystick with the buttons on the opposite side as the standard controller. Unreleased in Europe, the Sega Sports Pad utilizes a trackball and is compatible with three games. Sega also created an expansion for its controller, the Rapid Fire Unit, that allows for auto-fire by holding down one of two buttons. This unit connects between the console and the controller. A light gun peripheral, the Light Phaser, was based on the weapon of the same name from the Japanese anime . It is compatible with 13 games and released exclusively in the West.

A pair of 3D glasses, the SegaScope 3-D, were created for games such as Space Harrier 3D, although Mark III users need an additional converter to use them. The Mark III has an optional RF transmitter accessory, allowing wireless play that broadcast the game being played on a UHF television signal. The SegaScope 3-D works via an active shutter system creating a stereoscopic effect. The glasses need to be constantly connected to the Sega Card slot, and thus do not function with the Master System II. A total of eight games, including and Out Run, are compatible with the glasses.

Developed under the name "Project Mercury" and designed based on the Master System's hardware, the Game Gear was a handheld game console. It was first released in Japan on October 6, 1990, in North America and Europe in 1991, and in Australia and New Zealand in 1992. Originally retailing at JP¥19,800 in Japan, US$149.99 in North America, and GB£99.99 in Europe, the Game Gear was designed to compete with the Game Boy, which Nintendo had released in 1989. There are similarities between the Game Gear and the Master System hardware, but the games are not directly compatible; Master System games are only playable on Game Gear using the Master Gear Converter accessory. A large part of the Game Gear's game library consists of Master System ports. Because of hardware similarities including the landscape screen orientation, Master System games are easily portable to the handheld. In particular, many Master System ports of Game Gear games were done by Tectoy for the Brazilian market, as the Master System was more popular than the Game Gear in the region.

Master System games came in two formats: ROM cartridges held up to 4 Mbit of code, while Sega Cards held up to 256 kbit. Cards, cheaper to manufacture than the cartridges, included and Super Tennis, but were eventually dropped due to their small memory size. The size of the release library varies based on region; North America received just over 100 games, with Japan receiving less. Europe, by contrast, received over 300 licensed games, including 8-bit ports of Genesis games and PAL-exclusive releases. The first Mark III-specific cartridge was Fantasy Zone, released on June 15, 1986, and Bomber Raid was the final release on February 4, 1989, a few months after the launch of the Mega Drive. The final North American release was Sonic the Hedgehog in October 1991. Games for PAL regions continued to be released until the mid-1990s. The Sega Mark III and the Japanese Master System are backwards-compatible with SC-3000/SG-1000 cartridges, and can play Sega Card games without the Card Catcher peripheral. However, educational and programming cartridges for the SC-3000 require the SK-1100 keyboard peripheral, which is compatible with the Mark III but not the Japanese Master System. Mark III-specific games were initially available in card format (labelled My Card Mark III to distinguish themselves from games designed for the SC-3000/SG-1000), starting with Teddy Boy Blues and , both released on October 20, 1985. Of the games released for the Master System, Phantasy Star is considered a benchmark role-playing game (RPG), and became a successful franchise. Sega's flagship character at the time, Alex Kidd, featured in games including Alex Kidd in Miracle World. Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap was influential for its blend of platform gameplay with RPG elements. Different Master System consoles included built-in games, including Hang-On, Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Sonic the Hedgehog.

The more extensive PAL region library includes 8-bit entries in Genesis franchises such as Streets of Rage, a number of additional Sonic the Hedgehog series games, and dozens of PAL-exclusives such as Lucky Dime Caper, , Ninja Gaiden, Master of Darkness and Power Strike II. Retro Gamer's Damien McFerran praised the "superb" PAL library of "interesting ports and excellent exclusives", which was richer than the North American library and provided a "drip-feed of quality titles". After the Master System was discontinued in other markets, additional games were released in Brazil by Tectoy, including ports of Street Fighter II and Dynamite Headdy. Tectoy created Portuguese translations of games exclusive to the region. Some of these would tie in to popular Brazilian entertainment franchises; for example, became Geraldinho, certain titles became Monica's Gang games, and Ghost House became Chapolim vs. Dracula: Um Duelo Assutador, based on Mexican TV series El Chapulín Colorado. Tectoy also ported games to the Master System, including various games from the Genesis and Game Gear. Aside from porting, the company developed Férias Frustradas do Pica-Pau after finding out that Woody Woodpecker (named Pica-Pau in Portuguese) was the most popular cartoon on Brazilian television, along with at least twenty additional exclusives. These titles were developed in-house by Tectoy in Brazil.

Due in part to Nintendo's licensing practices, which stipulated that third-party NES developers could not release games on other platforms, few third-party developers released games for the Master System. According to Sato, Sega was focused on porting its arcade games instead of building relationships with third parties. According to Sega designer Mark Cerny, most of Sega's early Master System games were developed within a strict three-month deadline, which affected their quality. Computer Gaming World compared new Sega games to "drops of water in the desert". Games for the Master System took advantage of more advanced hardware compared to the NES; Alex Kidd in Miracle World, for example, showcases "blistering colors and more detailed sprites" than NES games. The Master System version of was praised for its visuals, comparable to those of the TurboGrafx-16 port.

In 2005, Sega reached a deal with Chinese company AtGames to release emulated Master System software in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. Several Master System games were released for download on Nintendo's Wii Virtual Console, beginning with Fist of the North Star in 2008 in Japan and in North America. Master System games were also released via the GameTap online service.

Due to the continued release of new variants in Brazil, the Master System is considered by many video gaming publications to be the longest lived gaming console in video games history, a title it took from the Atari 2600. Sales of the Master System have been estimated between 10 million and 13 million units, not including later Brazil sales. It saw much more continued success in Europe and Brazil than it did in Japan and North America. In 1989, the Sega Master System was listed in the top 20 products of NPD Group's Toy Retail Sales Tracking Service. However, the Electronic Gaming Monthly 1992 Buyer's Guide indicated a souring interest in the console. Four reviewers scored it 5, 4, 5, and 5 out of a possible 10 points each, focusing on the better value of the Genesis and lack of quality games for the Master System. In 1993, reviewers scored it 2, 2, 3, and 3 out of 10, noting its abandonment by Sega in North America and lack of new releases. By contrast, 62 million NES units were sold in North America alone, outselling the Master System several times over. According to Bill Pearse of Playthings, the NES gained an advantage through better software and more recognizable characters. Sega closed the gap between Nintendo in the next generation with the release of the Genesis, which sold 30.75 million consoles compared with the 49 million Super Nintendo Entertainment System consoles.

Retrospective feedback of the Master System praises its support toward development of the Sega Genesis, but has been critical of its small game library. Writing for AllGame, Dave Beuscher noted that the Master System "was doomed by the lack of third-party software support and all but disappeared from the American market by 1992". Writing for Retro Gamer, Adam Buchanan praised the larger PAL library as a "superb library of interesting ports and excellent exclusives". Damien McFerran, also of Retro Gamer, recognized its importance to the success of the Genesis, stating, "Without this criminally undervalued machine, Sega would not have enjoyed the considerable success it had with the Mega Drive. The Master System allowed Sega to experiment with arcade conversions, original IP and even create a mascot in the form of the lovable monkey-boy Alex Kidd." In 2009, the Master System was named the 20th best console of all time by , behind the Atari 7800 (17th) and the NES (1st). IGN cited the Master System's small and uneven NTSC library as the major problems: "Months could go by between major releases and that made a dud on the Master System feel even more painful."

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The Master System is a third-generation 8-bit home video game console manufactured by Sega. It was originally a remodeled export version of the Sega Mark III, the third iteration of the SG-1000 series of consoles, which was released in Japan in 1985 and featured enhanced graphical capabilities over its predecessors.

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The first 3d open world game ever created.

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Mercenary is a 3D action-adventure game written for the Atari 8-bit family and published by Novagen Software in 1985. It was converted to the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga and Commodore 16/116/ Plus/4 platforms. The game uses vector graphics renderings of vast, sparse environments and has open-ended gameplay. It was also released as Mercenary: Escape from Targ and Mercenary: A Flight Simulator Adventure.

Mercenary was favourably reviewed and followed by two sequels: Damocles and Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis.

Having crash-landed on the planet Targ ( en route to the Gamma System of Damocles), the player's main objective is to find a means of escape. There are several ways to achieve this end. A civil war between two factions, the Palyars (indigenous "good guys") and the Mechanoids (invading "bad guys"), affords the player an opportunity to earn money to buy their escape from Targ.

The player is accompanied and advised by Benson, a "9th generation PC". This interaction is handled via a scrolling news ticker at the bottom of the display. As well as providing assistance to the player, much of the humour within the games comes from the occasional sarcastic remarks made by Benson.

The player explores a world rendered in realtime 3D graphics, completing a number of non-linear tasks in order to achieve a single main objective. The title of the series derives from the player's role in carrying out tasks as a "hired gun". The player is able to play the warring factions off against one another to the player's own advantage. For instance, each faction seeks the destruction of installations belonging to its rival, and the capture of material or other resources to support their cause. There are other routes to escape, and it is possible to combine strategies to both leave Targ and keep the wealth accrued there.

Mercenary: The Second City

Mercenary: The Second City, released in 1986, is an expansion pack. Initially its major distinction is the new colour scheme, representing the other side of the planet. The ground is now red rather than the original green, and the sky is no longer blue. Instead, it is pink in the Amiga and Atari (8-bit and ST) versions, dark blue on the Commodore 8-bit platforms (C64 and Plus/4) and yellow on the ZX Spectrum.

However, after a similar objective, the substantive differences reveal themselves subtly: there is a different city layout, a more intricate underground complex, a new set of puzzles to overcome and several significant changes with game objects.

Mercenary received strong positive reviews from gaming magazines across all platforms, with the original Mercenary receiving a Gold Medal from magazine. reviewer Bob Sodaro noted the replay value of Mercenary for the Commodore 64, writing: "Prior to marking up the maps [included with the game], you should make a number of photocopies so you'll have clean copies when playing subsequent adventures". also advised making copies of the map and taking notes. It described the game's size and Atari 8-bit version's graphics as "awesome", but warned that a color display was required. The magazine concluded that " Mercenary's video effects make it a good game overall. But if you aren't in the right place to pick up the clues, you'll get nowhere".

The ZX Spectrum version of Mercenary was voted number 15 in the Your Sinclair Readers' Top 100 Games of All Time. In 1996, GamesMaster ranked the Commodore 64 version 33rd on their "Top 100 Games of All Time."

Damocles (also advertised as Mercenary II) is the second game in the series. It was released on the Atari ST and Amiga platforms in 1990. Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum versions were in development but cancelled. Damocles represents the game environment using filled polygon graphics. Two mission disks were released.

Mercenary III (also known as Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis or Damocles II) is the third game in the series. It was released on the Atari ST and Amiga in 1992. This time the roads of the various cities are populated by vehicles such as taxis and buses. Observation and attack spacecraft are present in the skies. Interaction with other characters is possible to a limited degree.

Re-releases

Mercenary and The Second City were later combined into the Mercenary Compendium.

In the 2000s, the three games were ported to Microsoft Windows. It was distributed with the agreement of the former Novagen team. The program, called MDDClone ( Mercenary, Damocles, Dion crisis Clone) is freeware, includes all three games, selectable through a drop-down list. The graphics and gameplay are identical to the Atari ST version, with the additional option to fix some bugs that were originally present.

Another port, focusing on the first game, was released in 2010. Called MDDClone-SDL, this offers support for higher resolutions and texture mapping. Versions for Windows, OSX, Linux and FreeBSD are available).

In 2018, an open source port of Damocles and Mercenary III was released. Called Mercenary Reloaded, this port offers support for higher resolutions, a higher frame rate with smoother movements, virtual reality as per the specifications of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display, and a separate side-by-side stereoscopic mode.

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Mercenary is a 3D action-adventure game written for the Atari 8-bit family and published by Novagen Software in 1985. It was converted to the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga and Commodore 16/116/ Plus/4 platforms. The game uses vector graphics renderings of vast, sparse environments and has open-ended gameplay.

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The first 16-bit console.

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One of the most

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The Legend of Zelda, originally released in Japan as The Hyrule Fantasy: Zelda no Densetsu, is an action-adventure game developed and published by Nintendo. The first game of The Legend of Zelda series, it is set in the fantasy land of Hyrule and centers on an elf-like boy named Link, who aims to collect the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom in order to rescue Princess Zelda from Ganon. The player controls Link from a top-down perspective and navigates throughout the overworld and dungeons, collecting weapons, defeating enemies and uncovering secrets along the way.

Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, it was originally released in Japan as a launch title for the Family Computer Disk System in February 1986. More than a year later, North America and Europe received releases on the Nintendo Entertainment System in cartridge format, being the first home console game to include an internal battery in the US for saving data. This version was later released in Japan in 1994 under the title The Hyrule Fantasy: Zelda no Densetsu 1. The game was ported to the GameCube and Game Boy Advance, and was available via the Virtual Console on the Wii, Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. It was also one of 30 games included in the NES Classic Edition system, and is available on the Nintendo Switch through the Nintendo Switch Online service.

The Legend of Zelda was a critical and commercial success for Nintendo. The game sold over 6.5 million copies, launched a major franchise, and has been regularly featured in lists of the greatest video games of all time. A sequel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, was first released in Japan for the Famicom Disk System less than a year after its predecessor, and numerous additional successors and spinoffs have been released in the decades since its debut.

Link attacking Octorok monsters with his sword in the overworld.

The Legend of Zelda incorporates elements of action, adventure, and role-playing genres. The player controls Link from a flip-screen overhead perspective as he travels the overworld, a large outdoor map with various environments. Link begins the game equipped only with a small shield, but can enter a cave and receive a sword from an old man who advises, " It's dangerous to go alone! Take this." Throughout the adventure, Link finds and acquires various items that increase his abilities further, including Heart Containers which increase his life meter; magic rings which decrease the amount of damage Link takes from enemy attacks; and stronger swords which allow Link to inflict more damage to enemies. These items are mainly found in caves scattered throughout the land. Some are easily accessible, while others are hidden beneath obstacles such as rocks, trees, and waterfalls. Defeated enemies sometimes drop items including hearts, which refill the life meter, and Rupees, the in-game currency. Rupees can also be found in hidden treasure caves and are used to buy equipment, information, and ability upgrades.

Hidden in the overworld are entrances to eight large dungeons housing the pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom. Each dungeon has a unique maze-like layout of rooms connected by doors and secret passages, often barred by monsters (which must be defeated) or by blocks (which must be moved to gain entrance). Dungeons also contain useful items Link can add to his inventory, such as a boomerang for stunning enemies and retrieving distant items, and a magical recorder that lets Link teleport to the entrance of any dungeon he has previously cleared. Once Link has collected all eight pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom from these dungeons, he gains access to a ninth and final dungeon in order to defeat Ganon and rescue Zelda. The game may be completed by traversing any given dungeon on the overworld and is largely flexible to players, although gameplay steadily increases in difficulty, and some rooms can only be passed by using items gained in previous locations. There are dungeons with secret entrances which must be uncovered while freely wandering the overworld after acquiring useful items. This freedom allows many ways of progressing through the game. It is possible to reach the final boss without receiving the normally vital sword at its outset. The game world contains 600 separate scenes, with the overworld consisting of over 97 scenes and the underworld consisting of nine multi-scene labyrinths.

After initially completing the game, a player can begin a more difficult version referred to as the "Second Quest" (, Ura Zeruda, translated literally to "Other Zelda"), which alters many locations, secrets, and includes entirely distinct dungeons and stronger enemies. Although more difficult "replays" were not unique to Zelda, few games offered completely different levels upon the second playthrough. By starting a new file with the name entered as "ZELDA", this mode can instead be accessed without needing to beat the game first.

Within the official Zelda Chronology, The Legend of Zelda takes place in an Era called "The Era of Decline", which exists within an alternative reality. In this era, Hyrule has been reduced to a small kingdom where the residents now live in caves, setting the background for The Legend of Zelda.

The story of The Legend of Zelda is described in the instruction booklet and during the short prologue which plays after the title screen: A small kingdom in the land of Hyrule is engulfed by chaos when an army led by Ganon, the prince of darkness, invades and steals the Triforce of Power, one part of a magical artifact which alone bestows great strength. In an attempt to prevent him from acquiring the Triforce of Wisdom, Princess Zelda splits it into eight fragments and hides them in secret underground dungeons. Before eventually being kidnapped by Ganon, she commands her nursemaid Impa to find someone courageous enough to save the kingdom. While wandering the land, the old woman is surrounded by Ganon's henchmen, when a young boy named Link appears and rescues her. Upon hearing Impa's plea, he resolves to save Zelda and sets out to reassemble the scattered fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom, with which Ganon can then be defeated.

During the course of the tale, Link locates and braves the eight underworld labyrinths, and beyond their defeated guardian monsters retrieves each fragment. With the completed Triforce of Wisdom, he is able to infiltrate Ganon's hideout in Death Mountain, confronting the prince of darkness and destroying him with the Silver Arrow. Obtaining the Triforce of Power from Ganon's ashes, Link returns it and the restored Triforce of Wisdom to the rescued Princess Zelda, and peace returns to Hyrule.

The game was first released in Japan as a disk for the Famicom Disk System. It was later converted to a cartridge for American release on the NES.

The Legend of Zelda was directed and designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka (credited as S. Miyahon and Ten Ten respectively in the closing credits). Miyamoto produced the game, and Tezuka wrote the story and script. Much of the programming was done by Toshihiko Nakago of Nintendo's partner SRD. Keiji Terui, a screenwriter who worked on anime shows such as and Dragon Ball, wrote the backstory for the manual, drawing inspiration from conflicts in medieval Europe. Development began in 1984, and the game was originally intended to be a launch game for the Famicom Disk System. The development team worked on The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. concurrently, and tried to separate their ideas: Super Mario Bros. was to be linear, where the action occurred in a strict sequence, whereas The Legend of Zelda would be the opposite. In Mario, Miyamoto downplayed the importance of the high score in favor of simply completing the game. This concept was carried over to The Legend of Zelda. Miyamoto was also in charge of deciding which concepts were " Zelda ideas" or " Mario ideas". Contrasting with Mario, Zelda was made non-linear and forced the players to think about what they should do next. According to Miyamoto, those in Japan were confused and had trouble finding their way through the multi-path dungeons, and in initial game designs, the player would start with the sword already in their inventory. Rather than merely simplifying matters for players, Miyamoto forced the player to listen to the old man who gives the player their sword, and encouraged interaction among people to share their ideas with each other to find the various hidden secrets, a new form of gaming communication. Relatedly, this concept turned into the root of another series to be developed many years in the future: Miyamoto said that Zelda became the inspiration for Animal Crossing, a game based solely on communication.

With The Legend of Zelda, Miyamoto wanted to flesh out the idea of a game "world" even further, giving players a "miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer". He drew his inspiration from his experiences as a boy around Kyoto, where he explored nearby fields, woods, and caves, always trying through Zelda games to impart players some sense of that limitless wonder he felt through unknown exploration. According to Miyamoto: "When I was a child, I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this". The memory of being lost amid the maze of sliding doors in his family's home in Sonobe was recreated in Zelda's labyrinthian dungeons. Tezuka wrote the setting to be a fairytale adventure, taking inspiration from fantasy books such as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

The hero "Link" was so named in part to connect players inserted into this world with their interactive role, as something of a blank slate representing their individuality or methods. Designed by Miyamoto as a coming of age motif to identify with, journeying as an ordinary boy strengthened by trials to triumph over great challenges and rise to meet evil. The name of the titular princess came from Zelda Fitzgerald. Miyamoto explained that "Zelda was the wife of famous novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was a famous and beautiful woman from all accounts, and I liked the sound of her name. So I took the liberty of using [it] for the very first title". Early Zelda concepts involved technological elements, with microchips for the Triforce made of electronic circuits and a time-traveling hero, another factor of their name relating to the idea of a computer hyper-"link". While the final game and subsequent games in the series follow a more traditional medieval sword and sorcery setting, later entries have incorporated some technology-based concepts.

Koji Kondo (credited as Konchan) composed the game's five music tracks. He had planned to use Maurice Ravel's as the title theme but was forced to change it late in the development cycle after learning that the copyright for the orchestral piece had not yet expired. As a result, Kondo wrote a new arrangement of the overworld theme within one day, which has become an iconic motif echoing throughout continued entries of the series.

The original floppy disk release

In February 1986, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda as the launch game for the Family Computer's new Disk System peripheral, joined by a re-release of Super Mario Bros., , , , , and as part of the system's introduction. It made full use of Disk Card media's advantages over traditional ROM cartridges, with an increased size of 128 kilobytes which would be expensive to produce on cartridge format. Due to the still-limited amount of disk space, all of the text used in the game was from only a single syllabary known as katakana, which under normal circumstances primarily relates more to foreign words which supplement those of traditional Japanese origin as with hiragana and kanji characters. Rather than passwords, rewritable disks saved players' game progress, and the extra sound channel provided by the system was utilized for certain sound effects; most notably Link's sword beam at full health, roars and growls of dungeon bosses, and those of defeated enemies. Sound effects had to be altered for the eventual cartridge release version of Zelda which used the Famicom's PCM channel. The game also took advantage of that system's controller having a built-in microphone, a feature the NES model did not include. It was used to defeat the large-eared rabbit-like monster Pols Voice by blowing or shouting. The U.S. instruction manual still hints that this enemy "hates loud noise", confusing many into thinking the recorder item could be used to attack (in actuality, it has no effect). The cartridge version made use of the Memory Management Controller chip (specifically the MMC1 model), which could use bank-switching to allow for larger games than had previously been possible, and could also use battery-powered RAM letting players save their data for the first time on the NES.

The gold-colored cartridge

When Nintendo published the game in North America, the packaging design featured a small portion of the box cut away to reveal the unique gold-colored cartridge. In 1988, The Legend of Zelda sold two million copies. Nintendo of America sought to keep its strong base of fans; anyone who purchased a game and sent in a warranty card became a member of the Fun Club, whose members got a four-, eight- and eventually 32-page newsletter. Seven hundred copies of the first issue were sent out free of charge, but the number grew as the data bank of names got larger.

From the success of magazines in Japan, Nintendo knew that game tips were a valued asset. Players enjoyed the bimonthly newsletter's crossword puzzles and jokes, but game secrets were most valued. The Fun Club drew kids in by offering tips for the more complicated games, especially Zelda, with its hidden rooms, secret keys and passageways. The mailing list grew. By early 1988, there were over 1 million Fun Club members, which led then-Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa to start the Nintendo Power magazine.

Since Nintendo did not have many products, it made only a few commercials a year, meaning the quality had to be phenomenal. The budget for a single commercial could reach US$5 million, easily four or five times more than most companies spend. One of the first commercials made under Bill White, director of advertising and public relations, was the market introduction for the Legend of Zelda, which received a great deal of attention in the ad industry. In it, a wiry-haired, nerdy guy ( John Kassir) walks through the dark making goofy noises, yelling out the names of some enemies from the game, and screaming for Zelda.

The Legend of Zelda was first re-released in cartridge format for the Famicom in 1994. The cartridge version slightly modified the title screen of the Disk Card version of the game, such that it displayed the number 1 at the end of the title. In 2001, the original game was re-released in the GameCube game Animal Crossing. The only way to unlock the game is by using an Action Replay. An official re-release was included in 2003's The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition for the GameCube, and the game was again re-released on the Game Boy Advance in 2004 along with its sequel, The Adventure of Link, as part of the Famicom Mini/Classic NES Series. In 2006, it was released on the Wii's Virtual Console, and a timed demo of the game was released for the 2008 Wii game Super Smash Bros. Brawl, available in the Vault section.

All re-releases of the game are virtually identical to the original, though the GameCube, Game Boy Advance, and Virtual Console versions have been altered slightly to correct several instances of incorrect spelling from the original, most notably in the intro story. A tech demo called Classic Games was shown for the Nintendo 3DS at E3 2010, showcasing more than a dozen classic games using 3D effects, including The Legend of Zelda. Reggie Fils-Aimé, president of Nintendo of America, said that the games were slated for release on the 3DS, including The Legend of Zelda, , and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, using some of the 3DS's features, such as 3D effects, analog control, or camera support.

The Legend of Zelda was released to the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console in September 2011, as a part of the Nintendo 3DS Ambassador program, and was later released to the Nintendo 3DS eShop on December 22 in Japan; in 2012, it was released in Europe on April 12 and on July 5 in North America. The version released to the Japanese 3DS Virtual Console was the cartridge version. The game was released for the Nintendo Switch as part of the Nintendo Switch Online - Nintendo Entertainment System service on September 18, 2018. A special "Living the life of luxury!" edition of the game, which grants players all equipment and extra items at the start of the game, was later added to the service on October 10. In November 2021, Nintendo released a Legend of Zelda edition of the Game & Watch console, similar to the rereleased Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch. This version includes the original Legend of Zelda, as well as Zelda II: Adventure of Link, and the Gameboy version of Link's Awakening. The Zelda Game & Watch also includes a modified version of the Game and Watch original, Vermin, with Link replacing Mr. Game and Watch.

The Legend of Zelda received highly positive reviews from critics and was a best-seller for Nintendo. Upon release in Japan, it sold 1 million copies on its first day of release, and sold a total of 1.69 million for the Famicom Disk System in Japan. In North America, the game was highly anticipated and topped the video game charts upon release. It became the first NES game to sell over 1 million cartridges in the United States during 1987, increasing to more than 2 million cartridges sold by 1988. It went on to sell 3 million cartridges in the United States by 1990, and eventually 6.51 million copies worldwide.

Critics lauded the graphics, Kondo's score, writing, and gameplay, hailing the latter as groundbreaking. In Japan, Famicom Tsūshin ( Famitsu) magazine gave it a full score of 5 out of 5 stars, while the first Famitsu Best Hit Game Awards gave Zelda the award for best background music and listed it as the third best Game of the Year (just below Dragon Quest and ). Upon release in North America, Computer Entertainer called it an "excellent" adventure game that exceeded expectations and said it had "more to offer than the typical hack-and-slash" epics, with "monsters to fight, secret doors to discover, and plenty of frustration" rewarded with new treasures, weapons, experience, places and discoveries. The review also praised the "very appealing" and "beautiful, fairy-tale" quality, the battery backup save feature, the "charming graphics, superb original music, excellent animation, and smooth transitions in scrolling between locations". They called it "an incredibly rich, deep gaming experience that goes far beyond the typical cartridge game" with appeal "to both male and female players" of all ages, making it a "must-have" for every Nintendo owner. Computer Gaming World in 1988 named the game as the best adventure of the year, stating that Zelda had been a "sensational success" in bringing elements of computer action-adventures to consoles. In 1990, the magazine implied that the game was a killer app, causing computer RPG players who had dismissed consoles as "mere arcade toys" to buy the NES.

Upon release in Europe, Tony Takoushi reviewed the game in British magazine Computer and Video Games and called it a massive arcade adventure packed full of dragons, imprisoned princesses, traps and pitfalls. They said it has "an enormous country to examine" with "dozens of things to collect" along with hidden power-ups and bonuses, while praising the "supreme" playability and the "excellent" graphics and sound, but they criticized the "hefty" price tag of £39 or $69 (equivalent to $170 in 2022) in the United Kingdom. magazine reviewed the game in 1989, calling it a "role-playing epic" that proves "consoles can be just as good at role-playing games as they are for arcade entertainment" while listing it as one of the top four best games available for the NES (along with Super Mario Bros., Mike Tyson's Punch-Out and Super Mario Bros. 2). Zelda was reviewed in 1992 by where it received a 78% rating due in great part to mediocre sub-scores for music and graphics. A 1993 review of the game was printed in American magazine #198 by Sandy Petersen in the "Eye of the Monitor" column, scoring the game 4 out of 5 stars.

It was reissued in 1992 as part of Nintendo's "Classic Series" and featured a grey cartridge. The game placed first in the player's poll "Top 30" in Nintendo Power's first issue and continued to dominate the list into the early 1990s. The Legend of Zelda was also voted by Nintendo Power readers as the "Best Challenge" in the Nintendo Power Awards '88. The magazine also listed it as the best Nintendo Entertainment System video game ever created, stating that it was fun despite its age and innovated on the genre. GamesRadar ranked it the third best NES game ever made. The staff praised its "mix of complexity, open world design, and timeless graphics".

The Legend of Zelda has received critical acclaim from modern critics and remains well regarded. It is often featured in lists of games considered the greatest or most influential. In 1995, ranked the game 2nd on its "Top 100 Video Games". It placed first in Game Informer's list of the "Top 100 Games of All Time" and "The Top 200 Games of All Time" (in 2001 and 2009 respectively), thirteenth in Electronic Gaming Monthly's 100th issue listing the "100 Best Games of All Time", fifth in Electronic Gaming Monthly's 200th issue listing "The Greatest 200 Videogames of Their Time", seventh in Nintendo Power's list of the 200 Best Nintendo Games Ever, 77th in Official Nintendo Magazine's 100 greatest Nintendo games of all time and 80th among IGN readers' "Top 99 Games". Zelda was inducted into GameSpy's Hall of Fame in August 2000 and voted by GameSpy's editors as the tenth best game of all time. Editors of the popular Japanese magazine Weekly Famitsu voted the game among the best on the Famicom. In 1997 Next Generation listed the North American release in their "Five Greatest Game Packages of All Time", citing the die-cut hole which revealed the gold cartridge, full color manual, and fold-out map. In 2016, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted The Legend of Zelda to its World Video Game Hall of Fame.

The Legend of Zelda is considered a spiritual forerunner of the modern action role-playing video game (RPG) genre. Though it is often not considered part of the genre since it lacked key RPG mechanics such as experience points, it had many features in common with RPGs and served as the template for the action role-playing game genre. The game's fantasy setting, musical style and action-adventure gameplay were adopted by many RPGs. Its commercial success helped lay the groundwork for involved, non-linear games in fantasy settings, such as those found in successful RPGs, including , Soul Blazer, Square's Seiken Densetsu series, , and Brave Fencer Musashi. The popularity of the game also spawned several clones trying to emulate the game. Despite this, Miyamoto did not consider Zelda an RPG, but classified Zelda as "a real-time adventure game"; he said he was "not interested in systems where everything in the game is decided by stats and numbers" but what's "important to me is to preserve as much of that "live" feeling as possible" which he said " action games are better suited in conveying" to players.

The Legend of Zelda spawned a solitary sequel, many prequels and spin-offs and is one of Nintendo's most popular series. It established important characters and environments of the Zelda universe, including Link, Princess Zelda, Ganon, Impa, and the Triforce as the power that binds Hyrule together. The overworld theme and distinctive "secret found" jingle have appeared in nearly every subsequent Zelda game. The theme has also appeared in various other games featuring references to the Zelda series.

An arcade system board, called the Triforce, was developed jointly by Namco, Sega, and Nintendo, with the first games appearing in 2002. The name "Triforce" is a reference to Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda series of games, and symbolized the three companies' involvement in the project.

featured The Legend of Zelda as one of the 15 most influential games of all time, for being an early example of open world, nonlinear gameplay, and for its introduction of battery backup saving worldwide, to laying the foundations for later action-adventure games like and role-playing video games like Final Fantasy, while influencing most modern games in general. In 2009, Game Informer called The Legend of Zelda "no less than the greatest game of all time" on their list of "The Top 200 Games of All Time", saying that it was "ahead of its time by years if not decades".

In 2011, Nintendo celebrated the game's 25th anniversary in a similar vein to the Super Mario Bros. 25th anniversary celebration the previous year. This celebration included a free mailout Club Nintendo offer of the Ocarina of Time soundtrack to owners of the 3DS version of that particular game, the first digital for Nintendo eShop release of Link's Awakening DX, special posters that are mailed out as rewards through Club Nintendo, and a special stage inspired by the original Legend of Zelda in the video game Super Mario 3D Land for the Nintendo 3DS.

There have also been a few substantially altered versions of the game that have been released as pseudo-sequels, and - or -versions. As part of a promotional advertisement campaign for their charumera noodles, Myojo Foods Co., Ltd. released a version of the original The Legend of Zelda in 1986, Zelda no Densetsu: Teikyō Charumera. It is one of the rarest video games available on the second-hand collector's market, and copies have sold for over US$1,000.

From August 6 to September 2, 1995, Nintendo, in collaboration with the St.GIGA satellite radio network, began broadcasts of a substantially different version of the original The Hyrule Fantasy: Legend of Zelda for a Super Famicom peripheral, the Satellaview-a satellite modem add-on. The game, BS Zelda no Densetsu, was released for download in four episodic, weekly installments which were rebroadcast at least four times between the game's 1995 premiere and January 1997. BS Zelda was the first Satellaview game to feature a " SoundLink" soundtrack-a streaming audio track through which, every few minutes, players were cautioned to listen carefully as a voice actor narrator, broadcasting live from the St.GIGA studio, would give them plot and gameplay clues. In addition to the SoundLink elements, BS Zelda also featured updated 16-bit graphics, a smaller overworld, and different dungeons. Link was replaced by one of the two Satellaview avatars: a boy wearing a backward baseball cap or a girl with red hair.

Between December 30, 1995, and January 6, 1996, a second version of the game, BS Zelda no Densetsu MAP 2, was broadcast to the Satellaview as the functional equivalent of the original The Legend of Zelda's Second Quest. MAP 2 was rebroadcast only once, in March 1996.

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The Legend of Zelda (video game) - Wikipedia

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The Legend of Zelda , originally released in Japan as The Hyrule Fantasy: Zelda no Densetsu , is an action-adventure game developed and published by Nintendo. The first game of The Legend of Zelda series, it is set in the fantasy land of Hyrule and centers on an elf-like boy named Link, who aims to collect the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom in order to rescue Princess Zelda from Ganon.

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1980-1993

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In the year 1993, the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer is the earliest fifth gen console that was released and had a massive third-party support and a hype amount of hype for a new entertainment system coming into the industry.
Over the few years it was around it has software issues and a huge price tag at the time going for $700; at the same time it had only 1 game on the market at its release. The 3DO was discontinued 3 years after its release onto the market but despite being regarded a failed system, it was the fourth best selling fifth gen console

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This was one of the first FPS games ever created, and defined the genre.

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Doom

Developer(s)
id Software

Publisher(s)

id Software

Designer(s)

Programmer(s)

Artist(s)

Composer(s)
Robert Prince

Series
Doom

Engine
Doom engine[a]

Platform(s)

Release

Sega 32X

NA: November 21, 1994

EU: 1994

AU: 1994

SNES

NA: September 1, 1995

EU: October 26, 1995

JP: March 1, 1996

Game Boy Advance

NA: October 24, 2001[1]

EU: November 16, 2001

Xbox 360

Android, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

Genre(s)
First-person shooter

Mode(s)

Single-player, multiplayer

Doom is a 1993 first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by id Software for MS-DOS. Players assume the role of a space marine, popularly known as Doomguy, fighting their way through hordes of invading demons from hell. Id began developing Doom after the release of their previous FPS, Wolfenstein 3D (1992). It emerged from a 3D game engine developed by John Carmack, who wanted to create a science fiction game inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and the films Evil Dead II and The first episode, comprising nine levels, was distributed freely as shareware; the full game, with two further episodes, was sold via mail order. An updated version with an additional episode and more difficult levels, The Ultimate Doom, was released in 1995 and sold at retail.

Doom is one of the most significant games in video game history, frequently cited as one of the greatest games ever made. It sold an estimated 3.5 million copies by 1999; between 10 and 20 million people are estimated to have played it within two years of launch, and in late 1995, it was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 95. Along with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom helped define the FPS genre and inspired numerous similar games, often called Doom clones. It pioneered online distribution and technologies including 3D graphics, networked multiplayer gaming, and support for custom modifications via packaged WAD files. Its graphic violence and supposed hellish imagery drew controversy.

Doom has been ported to numerous platforms. The Doom franchise continued with Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994) and expansion packs including Master Levels for Doom II (1995). The source code was released in 1997 under a proprietary license, and then later in 1999 under the GNU General Public License v2.0 or later. , a horror game built with the id Tech 4 engine, was released in 2004, followed by a 2005 Doom film. id returned to the fast-paced action of the classic games with the 2016 game and the 2020 sequel Doom Eternal.

Doom is a first-person shooter presented with early 3D graphics. The player controls an unnamed space marine-later termed " Doomguy"-through a series of levels set in military bases on the moons of Mars and in hell. To finish a level, the player must traverse through the area to reach a marked exit room. Levels are grouped together into named episodes, with the final level focusing on a boss fight with a particularly difficult enemy. While the environment is presented in a 3D perspective, the enemies and objects are instead 2D sprites presented from several preset viewing angles, a technique sometimes referred to as 2.5D graphics with its technical name called ray casting. Levels are often labyrinthine, and a full screen automap is available which shows the areas explored to that point.

While traversing the levels, the player must fight a variety of enemies, including demons and possessed undead humans, while managing supplies of ammunition, health, and armor. Enemies often appear in large groups, and the game features five difficulty levels which increase the quantity and damage done by enemies, with enemies respawning upon death and moving faster than normal on the hardest difficulty setting. The monsters have very simple behavior, consisting of either moving toward their opponent, or attacking by throwing fireballs, biting, using magic abilities and clawing. They will reactively fight each other if one monster inadvertently harms another, though most monsters are immune to attacks from their own kind. The environment can include pits of toxic waste, ceilings that lower and crush objects, and locked doors requiring a keycard or a remote switch. The player can find weapons and ammunition throughout the levels or can collect them from dead enemies, including a pistol, a chainsaw, a plasma rifle, and the BFG 9000. Power-ups include health or armor points, a mapping computer, partial invisibility, a safety suit against toxic waste, invulnerability, or a super-strong melee berserker status.

The main campaign mode is single-player mode, in an episodic succession of missions. Two multiplayer modes are playable over a network: cooperative, in which two to four players team up to complete the main campaign, and deathmatch, in which two to four players compete. Four-player online multiplayer mode via dialup was made available one year after launch through the DWANGO service. Cheat codes give the player instant super powers including invulnerability, all weapons, and walking through walls.

Doom is divided into three episodes: "Knee-Deep in the Dead", "The Shores of Hell", and "Inferno". A fourth episode, "Thy Flesh Consumed", was added in an expanded version of the game, The Ultimate Doom, released on April 30, 1995, two years after Doom and one year after Doom II. The campaign contains very few plot elements, with the minimal story instead given in the instruction manual and in short text segues between episodes.

In the future, an unnamed marine (known as the "Doom marine" or "Doom guy") is posted to a dead-end assignment on Mars after assaulting a superior officer who ordered his unit to fire on civilians. The Union Aerospace Corporation, which operates radioactive waste facilities there, allows the military to conduct secret teleportation experiments that go terribly wrong. A base on Phobos urgently requests military support, while Deimos disappears entirely, and the marine joins a combat force to secure Phobos. He waits at the perimeter as ordered while the entire assault team is wiped out. With no way off the moon, and armed with only a pistol, he enters the base intent on revenge.

In "Knee-Deep in the Dead", the marine fights demons and possessed humans in the military and waste processing facilities on Phobos. The episode ends with the marine defeating two powerful Barons of Hell guarding a teleporter to the Deimos base. Emerging from the teleporter, he is overwhelmed and comes to with only a pistol again. In "The Shores of Hell", he fights on through Deimos research facilities that are corrupted with satanic architecture and kills a gigantic cyberdemon. From an overlook he discovers that the moon is floating above hell and rappels down to the surface. In "Inferno", the marine takes on hell itself and destroys a cybernetic spider-demon that masterminded the invasion of the moons. A portal to Earth opens and he steps through, only to find that Earth has also been invaded. "Thy Flesh Consumed" follows the marine's initial assault on the Earth invasion force, setting the stage for Doom II: Hell on Earth.

In May 1992, id Software released Wolfenstein 3D, later called the "grandfather of 3D shooters", specifically first-person shooters, because it established the fast-paced action and technical prowess commonly expected in the genre and greatly increased the genre's popularity. Immediately following its release most of the id Software team began work on a set of episodes for the game, titled Spear of Destiny, while id co-founder and lead programmer John Carmack instead focused on technology research for the company's next game. Following the release of Spear of Destiny in September 1992, the team began to plan their next game. They wanted to create another 3D game using a new engine Carmack was developing, but were largely tired of Wolfenstein. They initially considered making another game in the Commander Keen series, as proposed by co-founder and lead designer Tom Hall, but decided that the platforming gameplay of the series was a poor fit for Carmack's fast-paced 3D engines. Additionally, the other two co-founders of id, designer John Romero and lead artist Adrian Carmack, wanted to create something in a darker style than the Keen games. John Carmack then came up with his own concept: a game about using technology to fight demons, inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns the team played, combining the styles of Evil Dead II and . The concept originally had a working title of Green and Pissed, but Carmack soon renamed it Doom after a line in the 1986 film The Color of Money: "'What you got in there?' / 'In here? Doom.'"

The team agreed to pursue the Doom concept, and development began in November 1992. The initial development team was composed of five people: programmers John Carmack and Romero, artists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, and designer Hall. They moved offices to a dark office building, which they named "Suite 666", and drew inspiration from the noises coming from the dentist's office next door. They also decided to cut ties with Apogee Software, their previous publisher, and self-publish Doom.

Early in development, rifts in the team began to appear. At the end of November, Hall delivered a design document, which he named the Doom Bible, that described the plot, backstory, and design goals for the project. His design was a science fiction horror concept wherein scientists on the Moon open a portal from which aliens emerge. Over a series of levels, the player discovers that the aliens are demons while hell steadily infects the level design over the course of the game. John Carmack not only disliked the idea but dismissed the idea of having a story at all: "Story in a game is like story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but it's not that important." Rather than a deep story, he wanted to focus on the technological innovations of the game, dropping the levels and episodes of Wolfenstein in favor of a fast, continuous world. Hall disliked the idea, but the rest of the team sided with Carmack. Hall spent the next few weeks reworking the Doom Bible to work with Carmack's technological ideas. Hall was forced to rework it again in December, however, after the team decided that they were unable to create a single, seamless world with the hardware limitations of the time, which contradicted much of the document.

At the start of 1993, id put out a press release, touting Hall's story about fighting off demons while "knee-deep in the dead". The press release proclaimed the new game features that John Carmack had created, as well as other features, including multiplayer gaming features, that had not yet even been designed. Early versions of the game were built to match the Doom Bible; a "pre-alpha" version of the first level includes Hall's introductory base scene. Initial versions of the game also retain " arcade" elements present in Wolfenstein 3D, like score points and score items, but those were removed early in development as they were out of tone. Other elements, such as a complex user interface, an inventory system, a secondary shield protection, and lives were modified and slowly removed over the course of development.

Soon, however, the Doom Bible as a whole was rejected. Romero wanted a game even "more brutal and fast" than Wolfenstein, which did not leave room for the character-driven plot Hall had created. Additionally, the team believed it emphasized realism over entertaining gameplay, and they did not see the need for a design document at all. Some ideas were retained, but the story was dropped and most of the game design was removed. By early 1993, levels were being created for the game and a demo was produced. John Carmack and Romero, however, disliked Hall's military base-inspired level design. Romero especially believed that the boxy, flat level designs were uninspiring, too similar to Wolfenstein, and did not show off the engine's capabilities. He began to create his own, more abstract levels for the game, which the rest of the team saw as a great improvement.

Hall was upset with the reception to his designs and how little impact he was having as the lead designer. He was also upset with how much he was having to fight with John Carmack in order to get what he saw as obvious gameplay improvements, such as flying enemies, and began to spend less time at work. In July the other founders of id fired Hall, who went to work for Apogee. He was replaced in September, ten weeks before the game was released, by game designer Sandy Petersen, who was laid off from MicroProse 5 months prior. In 2020, Petersen recalled that Carmack and Romero wanted to hire other artists, but Cloud and Adrian disagreed, saying that a designer was required to help build a cohesive gameplay experience. They relented and Petersen was immediately hired. He redesigned 20 of the 27 levels and they were well received by the team.

The team also added a third programmer, Dave Taylor. Petersen and Romero designed the rest of Doom's levels with different aims: the team believed that Petersen's designs were more technically interesting and varied, while Romero's were more aesthetically interesting. In late 1993, after the multiplayer component was coded, the development team began playing four-player multiplayer games matches, which Romero termed " deathmatch". According to Romero, the game's deathmatch mode was inspired by fighting games such as Street Fighter II, , and Art of Fighting.

Doom was programmed largely in the ANSI C programming language, with a few elements in assembly language, targeting the IBM PC and MS-DOS platform by compiling with Watcom C/C++ and using the included royalty-free 80386 DOS-extender. id developed on NeXT computers running the NeXTSTEP operating system. The data used by the game engine, including level designs and graphics files, are stored in WAD files, short for "Where's All the Data?". This allows for any part of the design to be changed without needing to adjust the engine code. Carmack designed this system so fans could easily modify the game; he had been impressed by the modifications made by fans of Wolfenstein 3D, and wanted to support that with an easily swappable file structure along with releasing the map editor online.

Unlike Wolfenstein, which had flat levels with walls at right angles, the Doom engine allows for walls and floors at any angle or height, though two traversable areas cannot be on top of each other. The lighting system was based on adjusting the color palette of surfaces directly: rather than calculating how light traveled from light sources to surfaces using ray tracing, the game calculates the light level of a small area based on its distance from light sources. It then modifies the color palette of that section's surface textures to mimic how dark it would look. This same system is used to cause far away surfaces to look darker than close ones. Romero came up with new ways to use Carmack's lighting engine such as strobe lights. He programmed engine features such as switches and movable stairs and platforms. After Romero's complex level designs started to cause problems with the engine, Carmack began to use binary space partitioning to quickly select the reduced portion of a level that the player could see at a given time. Taylor programmed other features into the game, added cheat codes; some, such as idspispopd, were based on ideas their fans had submitted online while eagerly awaiting the game.

Adrian Carmack was the lead artist for Doom, with Kevin Cloud as an additional artist. They designed the monsters to be "nightmarish", with graphics that are realistic and dark instead of staged or rendered, so a mixed media approach was taken. The artists sculpted models of some of the enemies, and took pictures of them in stop motion from five to eight different angles so that they could be rotated realistically in-game. The images were then digitized and converted to 2D characters with a program written by John Carmack. Adrian Carmack made clay models for a few demons, and had Gregor Punchatz build latex and metal sculptures of the others. The weapons were made from combined parts of children's toys. The developers scanned themselves as well, using Cloud's arm for the marine's arm holding a gun, and Adrian's snakeskin boots and wounded knee for textures.

As with Wolfenstein 3D, id hired composer Bobby Prince to create the music and sound effects. Romero directed Prince to make the music in techno and metal styles. Many tracks were directly inspired by songs by metal bands such as Alice in Chains and Pantera. Prince believed that ambient music would be more appropriate, and produced numerous tracks in both styles in hope of convincing the team, and Romero incorporated both. Prince did not make music for specific levels, as they were composed before the levels were completed; instead, Romero assigned each track to each level late in development. Prince created the sound effects based on short descriptions or concept art of a monster or weapon, and adjusted them to match the completed animations. The monster sounds were created from animal noises, and Prince designed all the sounds to be distinct on the limited sound hardware of the time, even when many sounds were playing at once. He also designed the sound effects to play on different frequencies from those used for the MIDI music, so they would clearly cut through the music.

The ability for user-generated content to provide custom levels and other game modifications using WAD files became a popular aspect of Doom. Gaining the first large mod-making community, Doom affected the culture surrounding first-person shooters, and also the industry. Several future professional game designers started their careers making Doom WADs as a hobby, such as Tim Willits, who later became the lead designer at id Software.

The first level editors appeared in early 1994, and additional tools have been created that allow most aspects of the game to be edited. Although the majority of WADs contain one or several custom levels mostly in the style of the original game, others implement new monsters and other resources, and heavily alter the gameplay. Several popular movies, television series, other video games and other brands from popular culture have been turned into Doom WADs by fans, including , , The Simpsons, , Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, , Beavis and Butt-head, , and Sonic the Hedgehog. Some works, like the Theme Doom Patch, combined enemies from several films, such as , , and The Terminator. Some add-on files were also made that changed the sounds made by the various characters and weapons.

From 1994 to 1995, WADs were primarily distributed online over bulletin board systems or sold in collections on compact discs in computer shops, sometimes bundled with editing guide books. FTP servers became the primary method in later years. A few WADs have been released commercially, including the Master Levels for Doom II, which was released in 1995 along with Maximum Doom, a CD containing 1,830 WADs that had been downloaded from the Internet. The idgames FTP archive contains more than 18,000 files, and this represents only a fraction of the complete output of Doom fans. Third-party programs were also written to handle the loading of various WADs, since all commands must be entered on the DOS command line to run. A typical launcher would allow the player to select which files to load from a menu, making it much easier to start. In 1995, WizardWorks released the D!Zone pack featuring hundreds of levels for Doom and Doom II. D!Zone was reviewed in by Jay & Dee; Jay gave the pack 1 out of 5 stars, and Dee gave the pack 1½ stars.

In 2016, Romero published two new Doom levels: E1M4b ("Phobos Mission Control") and E1M8b ("Tech Gone Bad"). In 2018, for the 25th anniversary of Doom, Romero announced Sigil, an unofficial Episode Five consisting of 9 missions. It was released on May 22, 2019, with a soundtrack by Buckethead. It was then released for free on May 31, with a MIDI soundtrack by James Paddock.

With plans to self-publish, the team had to set up the systems to sell Doom as it neared completion. Jay Wilbur, who had been hired as CEO and sole member of the business team, planned the marketing and distribution of Doom. He believed that the mainstream press was uninterested in the game, and as id would make the most money off of copies they sold directly to customers-up to 85 percent of the planned US$40 price-he decided to leverage the shareware market as much as possible, buying only a single ad in any gaming magazine. Instead, he reached out directly to software retailers, offering them copies of the first Doom episode for free, allowing them to charge any price for it, in order to spur customer interest in buying the full game directly from id.

Doom's original release date was the third quarter of 1993, which the team did not meet. By December 1993, the team was working non-stop on the game, with several employees sleeping at the office. Programmer Dave Taylor claimed that working on the game gave him such a rush that he would pass out from the intensity. Id began receiving calls from people interested in the game or angry that it had missed its planned release date, as hype for the game had been building online. At midnight on December 10, 1993, after working for 30 straight hours, the development team at id uploaded the first episode of the game to the Internet, letting interested players distribute it for them. So many users were connected to the first FTP server that they planned to upload the game to, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that even after the network administrator increased the number of connections while on the phone with Wilbur, id was unable to connect, forcing them to kick all other users off to allow id to upload the game. When the upload finished thirty minutes later, 10,000 people attempted to download the game at once, crashing the university's network.

Within hours of Doom's release, university networks were banning Doom multiplayer games, as a rush of players overwhelmed their systems. After being alerted by network administrators the morning after release that the game's deathmatch network connection setup was crippling some computer networks, John Carmack quickly released a patch to change it, though many administrators had to implement Doom-specific rules to keep their networks from crashing due to the overwhelming traffic. In 1995, an expanded version of Doom developed for the retail market, The Ultimate Doom, was released by GT Interactive, and contained a fourth episode.

In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 95. According to Windows producer Gabe Newell, who later founded the game company Valve, "[id] ... didn't even distribute through retail, it distributed through bulletin boards and other pre-internet mechanisms. To me, that was a lightning bolt. Microsoft was hiring 500-people sales teams and this entire company was 12 people, yet it had created the most widely distributed software in the world. There was a sea change coming." He said that Doom "made me rethink everything I thought about games - control systems, design, rendering. It convinced me that games were the future of entertainment."

Microsoft hired id Software to port Doom to Windows with the WinG API,[when? ] and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates briefly considered buying the company. Newell led development of a Windows 95 port of Doom to promote Windows as a gaming platform. One promotional video for Windows 95 had Gates digitally superimposed into the game.

An unofficial port of Doom to Linux was released by id programmer Dave Taylor in 1994; it was hosted by id but not supported or made official. Official ports were released for Sega 32X, Atari Jaguar, and Mac OS in 1994, SNES and PlayStation in 1995, 3DO in 1996, Sega Saturn in 1997, Acorn Risc PC in 1998, Game Boy Advance in 2001, Xbox 360 in 2006, iOS in 2009, and Nintendo Switch in 2019. Notable exceptions in the list of official ports, as well as Linux, are AmigaOS and Symbian. Some of these were bestsellers even many years after the initial release. Doom has also been ported unofficially to numerous platforms; so many ports exist, including for esoteric devices such as smart thermostats and oscilloscopes, that variations on "It runs Doom" or "Can it run Doom?" are long-running memes.

Although Petersen said Doom was "nothing more than the computer equivalent of Whack-A-Mole", Doom received critical acclaim and was widely praised in the gaming press, broadly considered to be one of the most important and influential titles in gaming history. Upon release, GamesMaster gave it a 90% rating. gave it five stars, praising the improvements over Wolfenstein 3D, the "fast-moving arcade shoot 'em up" gameplay, and network play. Computer and Video Games gave the game a 93% rating, praising its atmosphere and stating that "the level of texture-mapped detail and the sense of scale is awe inspiring", but criticized the occasionally repetitive gameplay and considered the violence excessive. A common criticism of Doom was that it was not a true 3D game, since the game engine did not allow corridors and rooms to be stacked on top of one another ( room-over-room), and instead relied on graphical trickery to make it appear that the player character and enemies were moving along differing elevations.

Computer Gaming World stated in February 1994 that Wolfenstein 3D fans should "look forward to a delight of insomnia", and "Since networking is supported, bring along a friend to share in the visceral delights". A longer review in March 1994 said that Doom "was worth the wait ... a wonderfully involved and engaging game", and its technology "a new benchmark" for the gaming industry. The reviewer praised the "simply dazzling" graphics", and reported that "DeathMatches may be the most intense gaming experience available today". While criticizing the "ho-hum endgame" with a too-easy end boss, he concluded that Doom "is a virtuoso performance".

praised the graphics and levels but criticized the "simple 3D perspective maze adventure/shoot 'em up" gameplay. The review concluded: "You'll be longing for something new in this game. If only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances... Now, that would be interesting." Decades later, the review attracted mockery, and "if only you could talk to these creatures" became a running joke in video game culture. A 2016 piece in the International Business Times defended the sentiment, saying it anticipated the dialogue systems of games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Mass Effect and .

In 1994, named Doom the third-best computer game of all time. The editors wrote: "Although it's only been around for a couple of months, Doom has already done more to establish the PC's arcade clout than any other title in gaming history." In 1994 Computer Gaming World named Doom Game of the Year. The various Doom console ports have received generally favorable reviews.

In 1995, Next Generation said it was "The most talked about PC game ever - and with good reason. Running on a 486 machine (essential for maximum effect), Doom took PC graphics to a totally new level of speed, detail, and realism, and provided a genuinely scary degree of immersion in the gameworld." In the same year, Flux magazine ranked the pc version 3rd on their "Top 100 Video Games." In 1996, Computer Gaming World named it the fifth best video game of all time, and the third most-innovative game. In 1996, GamesMaster rated the SNES version 7th on their "The Gamesmaster SNES Top 10." In 1998, declared it the 34th-best computer game ever released, and the editors called it "Probably the most imitated game of all time, Doom continued what Wolfenstein 3D began and elevated the fledgling 3D-shooter genre to blockbuster status".

In 2001, Doom was voted the number one game of all time in a poll among over 100 game developers and journalists conducted by GameSpy. In 2003, IGN ranked it as the 44th top video game of all time and also called it " the breakthrough game of 1993", adding: "Its arsenal of powerful guns (namely the shotgun and BFG), intense level of gore and perfect balance of adrenaline-soaked action and exploration kept this gamer riveted for years." proclaimed Doom the most influential game of all time in its ten-year anniversary issue in April 2004.

In 2004, readers of Retro Gamer voted Doom as the ninth top retro game, with the editors commenting: "Only a handful of games can claim that they've changed the gaming world, and Doom is perhaps the most qualified of them all." In 2005, IGN ranked it as the 39th top game. On March 12, 2007, The New York Times reported that Doom was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, the so-called game canon. The Library of Congress took up this video game preservation proposal and began with the games from this list.

In 2009, GameTrailers ranked Doom as the number one "breakthrough PC game". That year Game Informer put Doom sixth on the magazine's list of the top 200 games of all time, stating that it gave "the genre the kick start it needed to rule the gaming landscape two decades later". Game Informer staff also put it sixth on their 2001 list of the 100 best games ever. IGN included Doom at 2nd place in the Top 100 Video Game Shooters of all Time, just behind , citing the game's "feel of running and gunning", memorable weapons and enemies, pure and simple fun, and its spreading on nearly every gaming platform in existence.

In 2012, named it one of the 100 greatest video games of all time as "it established the look and feel of later shooters as surely as Xerox PARC established the rules of the virtual desktop", adding that "its impact also owes a lot to the gonzo horror sensibility of its designers, including John Romero, who showed a bracing lack of restraint in their deployment of gore and Satanic iconography". Including Doom on the list of the greatest games of all time, GameSpot wrote that "despite its numerous appearances in other formats and on other media, longtime fans will forever remember the original 1993 release of Doom as the beginning of a true revolution in action gaming". In 2015, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Doom to its World Video Game Hall of Fame. In 2018, Complex listed the game #47 in their "The Best Super Nintendo Games of All Time."

In 2021, listed Doom as the third best game in the series, behind and Doom (2016). They said that the gameplay "still holds up", but argued it was inferior to Doom II due to the latter's improved enemy variety.

With the release of Doom, millions of users installed the Shareware version on their computer and id Software quickly began making $100,000 daily (for $9 per copy). Sandy Petersen later remarked that the game "sold a couple of hundred thousand copies during its first year or so", as piracy kept its initial sales from rising higher, and Wilbur in 1995 estimated first-year sales as 140,000. id sold 3.5 million physical copies from its release through 1999. According to PC Data, which tracked sales in the United States, by April 1998 Doom's shareware edition had yielded 1.36 million units sold and $8.74 million in revenue in the United States. This led PC Data to declare it the country's fourth-best-selling computer game for the period between January 1993 and April 1998. The Ultimate Doom SKU reached sales of 787,397 units by September 1999. At the time, PC Data ranked them as the country's eighth- and 20th-best-selling computer games since January 1993. In addition to its sales, the game's status as shareware dramatically increased its market penetration. 's David McCandless wrote that the game was played by "an estimated six million people across the globe", and other sources estimate that 10-20 million people played Doom within 24 months of its launch.

Doom became a problem at workplaces, both occupying the time of employees and clogging computer networks. Intel, Lotus Development, and Carnegie Mellon University were among many organizations reported to form policies specifically disallowing Doom-playing during work hours. At the Microsoft campus, Doom was by one account equal to a "religious phenomenon". Doom was #1 on Computer Gaming World's "Playing Lately?" survey for February 1994. One reader said that "No other game even compares to the addictiveness of NetDoom with four devious players! ... The only game I've stayed up 72+ straight hours to play", and another reported that "Linking four people together for a game of Doom is the quickest way to destroy a productive, boring evening of work".

Doom was notorious for its high levels of graphic violence and satanic imagery, which generated controversy from a broad range of groups. Doom for the 32X was one of the first video games to be given an M for Mature rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board due to its violent gore and nature. Yahoo! Games listed it as one of the top ten most controversial games of all time. It was criticized by religious organizations for its diabolic undertones and was dubbed a "mass murder simulator" by critic and Killology Research Group founder David Grossman. Doom prompted fears that the then-emerging virtual reality technology could be used to simulate extremely realistic killing.

The game again sparked controversy in the United States when it was found that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who committed the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, were avid players of the game. While planning for the massacre, Harris said in his journal that the killing would be "like playing Doom", and "it'll be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, World War II, Vietnam, and Doom all mixed together", and that his shotgun was "straight out of the game". A rumor spread afterwards that Harris had designed a Doom level that looked like the high school, populated with representations of Harris's classmates and teachers, and that he practiced for the shootings by playing the level repeatedly. Although Harris did design custom Doom levels (which later became known as the " Harris levels"), none have been found to be based on Columbine High School.

In the earliest release versions, the level E1M4: Command Control contains a swastika-shaped structure, which was put in as a homage to Wolfenstein 3D. The swastika was removed in later versions; according to Romero, the change was done out of respect after id Software received a complaint from a military veteran.

Doom has appeared in several forms in addition to video games, including a Doom comic book, four novels by Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver (loosely based on events and locations in the games), a Doom board game and a live-action film starring Karl Urban and The Rock released in 2005. The game's development and impact on popular culture is the subject of the book Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner.

The Doom series remained dormant between 1997 and 2000, when was finally announced. A retelling of the original Doom using entirely new graphics technology and a slower paced survival horror approach, Doom 3 was hyped to provide as large a leap in realism and interactivity as the original game and helped renew interest in the franchise when it was released in 2004, under the id Tech 4 game engine.

The series again remained dormant for 10 years until a reboot, simply titled Doom and running on the new id Tech 6, was announced with a beta access to players that had pre-ordered Wolfenstein: The New Order. The game held its closed alpha multiplayer testing in October 2015, as closed and open beta access ran during March to April 2016. Returning to the series' roots in fast-paced action and minimal storytelling, the full game eventually released worldwide on May 13, 2016. The project initially started as Doom 4 in May 2008, set to be a remake of Doom II: Hell on Earth and ditching the survival horror aspect of Doom 3. Development completely restarted as id's Tim Willits remarked that Doom 4 was "lacking the personality of the long-running shooter franchise".

Doom was influential and dozens of new first-person shooter games appeared following Doom's release, often referred to as " Doom clones". The term was initially popular, and after 1996, gradually replaced by " first-person shooter", which had firmly superseded around 1998. Some of these were cheap clones, hastily assembled and quickly forgotten, and others explored new grounds of the genre with high acclaim. Many of Doom's closely imitated features include the selection of weapons and cheat codes. Some successors include Apogee's Rise of the Triad (based on the Wolfenstein 3D engine) and Looking Glass Studios's System Shock.[citation needed ] The popularity of -themed WADs is rumored to have been the factor that prompted LucasArts to create their first-person shooter Dark Forces.

The Doom engine was licensed by id Software to several other companies, who released their own games using the technology, including , Hexen: Beyond Heretic, Strife: Quest for the Sigil, and Hacx: Twitch 'n Kill. A Doom-based game called was released in 1996 by Ralston Foods as a promotion to increase cereal sales, and the United States Marine Corps produced Marine Doom as a training tool, later released to the public.

When 3D Realms released Duke Nukem 3D in 1996, a tongue-in-cheek science fiction shooter based on Ken Silverman's technologically similar Build engine, id Software had nearly finished developing , its next-generation game, which mirrored Doom's success for much of the remainder of the 1990s and reduced interest in its predecessor (Wolfenstein 3D).

In addition to the thrilling nature of the single-player game, the deathmatch mode was an important factor in the game's popularity. Doom was not the first first-person shooter with a deathmatch mode; , an FPS released in 1974, was running multiplayer deathmatch over ethernet on Xerox computers by 1977. The widespread distribution of PC systems and the violence in Doom made deathmatching particularly attractive. Two-player multiplayer was possible over a phone line by using a modem, or by linking two PCs with a null-modem cable. Because of its widespread distribution, Doom hence became the game that introduced deathmatching to a large audience and was also the first game to use the term "deathmatch".

Although the popularity of the Doom games dropped with the release of more modern first-person shooters, the game still retains a strong fan base that continues to this day by playing competitively and creating WADs, and Doom-related news is still tracked at multiple websites such as Doomworld. Interest in Doom was renewed in 1997, when the source code for the Doom engine was released (it was also placed under the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later on October 3, 1999). Fans then began porting the game to various operating systems, even to previously unsupported platforms such as the Dreamcast. As for the PC, over 50 different Doom source ports have been developed. New features such as OpenGL rendering and scripting allow WADs to alter the gameplay more radically.

Devoted players have spent years creating speedruns for Doom, competing for the quickest completion times of individual levels and the whole game and sharing knowledge about routes through the levels and how to exploit bugs in the Doom engine for shortcuts. Doom was one of the first games to have a speedrunning community, which has remained active up until the present day. A record speedrun on E1M1, the first level in the game, was achieved in September 1998, and took 20 years and "tens of thousands of futile attempts" in order to be surpassed. Achievements include the completion of both Doom and Doom II on the "Ultra-Violence" difficulty setting in less than 30 minutes each. In addition, a few players have also managed to complete Doom II in a single run on the difficulty setting "Nightmare!", on which monsters are more aggressive, launch faster projectiles (or, in the case of the Pinky Demon, simply move faster), and respawn roughly 30 seconds after they have been killed (level designer John Romero characterized the idea of such a run as "[just having to be] impossible"). Movies of most of these runs are available from the COMPET-N website.

One notable fan of Doom is Christoph Schneider from the German rock band Rammstein; he uses the stage name "Doom" which was inspired by the video game. Schneider needed a stage name for the German copyright agency, but found there were too many Christoph Schneiders in the entertainment industry. Schneider's band mate Paul Landers suggested the name "Doom" because they liked the game. Schneider has said that had he known that name would be on every Rammstein record he played on, he would have chosen a different one.

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Doom Developer(s) id Software Publisher(s) id Software Designer(s) Programmer(s) Artist(s) Composer(s) Robert Prince Series Doom Engine Doom engine [a] Platform(s) Release Sega 32X NA: November 21, 1994 EU: 1994 AU: 1994 SNES NA: September 1, 1995 EU: October 26, 1995 JP: March 1, 1996 Game Boy Advance NA: October 24, 2001[1] EU: November 16, 2001 Xbox 360 Android, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One Genre(s) First-person shooter Mode(s) Single-player, multiplayer Doom is a 1993 first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by id Software for MS-DOS.

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The Sega Saturn released in 1994 in Japan, and 6 months later in North America. It was Sega's entry into the 32-bit market. It became the most popular console in Japan, but it flopped in Europe and America due to costing $100 than the Playstation, which was sold at $299. The best-selling game on the console was Madden 97, which was the first multi-platform game as it released on both the Playstation and Sega Saturn. It was also the Playstation's best-selling game of 1996.

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TETRIS
Tetris variant on the Hagenuk MT-2000 device from 1994

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First console with 32-bit graphics.

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Also known as

PS

PS1

PSone

PS One (redesign)

PSX (codename)

Release date
PlayStation PS One

Lifespan

1994-2006 (12 years)

Introductory price

¥39,800, US$299, £299, F1,490, DM599[3]

Discontinued

WW: 23 March 2006[11][12]

Units sold

102.49 million[11]

CPU

R3000 @ 33.8688 MHz

Memory

2 MB RAM, 1 MB VRAM

Controller input

PlayStation controller, PlayStation Analog Joystick, Dual Analog Controller, DualShock

Online services

i-mode Mobile Phone Connection Cable (Japan only)

Lightspan Online Connection CD (third-party)

Best-selling game

Gran Turismo, 10.85 million shipped[13][14]

The PlayStation (abbreviated as PS, commonly known as the PS1/PS one or its codename PSX) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was released in Japan on 3 December 1994, in North America on 9 September 1995, in Europe on 29 September 1995, and in Australia on 15 November 1995. As a fifth-generation console, the PlayStation primarily competed with the Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn.

Sony began developing the PlayStation after a failed venture with Nintendo to create a CD-ROM peripheral for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the early 1990s. The console was primarily designed by Ken Kutaragi and Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan, while additional development was outsourced in the United Kingdom. An emphasis on 3D polygon graphics was placed at the forefront of the console's design. PlayStation game production was designed to be streamlined and inclusive, enticing the support of many third-party developers.

The console proved popular for its extensive game library, popular franchises, low retail price, and aggressive youth marketing which advertised it as the preferable console for adolescents and adults. Premier PlayStation franchises included Gran Turismo, , Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Metal Gear, , and Final Fantasy, all of which spawned numerous sequels. PlayStation games continued to sell until Sony ceased production of the PlayStation and its games on 23 March 2006-over eleven years after it had been released, and less than a year before the debut of the PlayStation 3. A total of 3,061 PlayStation games were released, with cumulative sales of 967 million units.

The PlayStation signalled Sony's rise to power in the video game industry. It received acclaim and sold strongly; in less than a decade, it became the first computer entertainment platform to ship over 100 million units. Its use of compact discs heralded the game industry's transition from cartridges. The PlayStation's success led to a line of successors, beginning with the PlayStation 2 in 2000. In the same year, Sony released a smaller and cheaper model, the PS one.

A photo of the only known SNES-based PlayStation prototype[16]

The PlayStation was conceived by Ken Kutaragi, a Sony executive who managed a hardware engineering division and was later dubbed "the Father of the PlayStation". Kutaragi's interest in working with video games stemmed from seeing his daughter play games on Nintendo's Famicom. Kutaragi convinced Nintendo to use his SPC-700 sound processor in the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) through a demonstration of the processor's capabilities. His willingness to work with Nintendo derived from both his admiration of the Famicom and conviction in video game consoles becoming the main home-use entertainment systems. Although Kutaragi was nearly fired because he worked with Nintendo without Sony's knowledge, president Norio Ohga recognised the potential in Kutaragi's chip and decided to keep him as a protégé.

The inception of the PlayStation dates back to a 1988 joint venture between Nintendo and Sony. Nintendo had produced floppy disk technology to complement cartridges in the form of the Family Computer Disk System, and wanted to continue this complementary storage strategy for the SNES. Since Sony was already contracted to produce the SPC-700 sound processor for the SNES, Nintendo contracted Sony to develop a CD-ROM add-on, tentatively titled the "Play Station" or " SNES-CD". The PlayStation name had already been trademarked by Yamaha, but Nobuyuki Idei liked it so much that he agreed to acquire it for an undisclosed sum rather than search for an alternative.

Sony was keen to obtain a foothold in the rapidly expanding video game market. Having been the primary manufacturer of the ill-fated MSX home computer format, Sony had wanted to use their experience in consumer electronics to produce their own video game hardware. Although the initial agreement between Nintendo and Sony was about producing a CD-ROM drive add-on, Sony had also planned to develop a SNES-compatible Sony-branded console. This iteration was intended to be more of a home entertainment system, playing both SNES cartridges and a new CD format named the "Super Disc", which Sony would design. Under the agreement, Sony would retain sole international rights to every Super Disc game, giving them a large degree of control despite Nintendo's leading position in the video game market. Furthermore, Sony would also be the sole benefactor of licensing related to music and film software that it had been aggressively pursuing as a secondary application.

The Play Station was to be announced at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. However, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi was wary of Sony's increasing leverage at this point and deemed the original 1988 contract unacceptable upon realising it essentially handed Sony control over all games written on the SNES CD-ROM format. Although Nintendo was dominant in the video game market, Sony possessed a superior research and development department. Wanting to protect Nintendo's existing licensing structure, Yamauchi cancelled all plans for the joint Nintendo-Sony SNES CD attachment without telling Sony. He sent Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa (his son-in-law) and chairman Howard Lincoln to Amsterdam to form a more favourable contract with Dutch conglomerate Philips, Sony's rival. This contract would give Nintendo total control over their licences on all Philips-produced machines.

Kutaragi and Nobuyuki Idei, Sony's director of public relations at the time, learned of Nintendo's actions two days before the CES was due to begin. Kutaragi telephoned numerous contacts, including Philips, to no avail. On the first day of the CES, Sony announced their partnership with Nintendo and their new console, the Play Station. At 9 am on the next day, in what has been called "the greatest ever betrayal" in the industry, Howard Lincoln stepped onto the stage and revealed that Nintendo was now allied with Philips and would abandon their work with Sony.

Ken Kutaragi, the "Father of the PlayStation", pictured at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2014

Incensed by Nintendo's renouncement, Ohga and Kutaragi decided that Sony would develop their own console. Nintendo's contract-breaking was met with consternation in the Japanese business community, as they had broken an "unwritten law" of native companies not turning against each other in favour of foreign ones. Sony's American branch considered allying with Sega to produce a CD-ROM-based machine called the Sega Multimedia Entertainment System, but their board of directors in Tokyo vetoed the idea when American CEO Tom Kalinske presented them the proposal. Kalinske recalled them saying: "That's a stupid idea, Sony doesn't know how to make hardware. They don't know how to make software either. Why would we want to do this?" Sony halted their research, but decided to develop what it had developed with Nintendo and Sega into a console based on the SNES.

Despite the tumultuous events at the 1991 CES, negotiations between Nintendo and Sony were still ongoing. A deal was proposed: the Play Station would still have a port for SNES games, on the condition that it would still use Kutaragi's audio chip and that Nintendo would own the rights and receive the bulk of the profits. Roughly two hundred prototype machines were created, and some software entered development. Many within Sony were still opposed to their involvement in the video game industry, with some resenting Kutaragi for jeopardising the company. Kutaragi remained adamant that Sony not retreat from the growing industry and that a deal with Nintendo would never work. Knowing that it had to take decisive action, Sony severed all ties with Nintendo on 4 May 1992.

To determine the fate of the PlayStation project, Ohga chaired a meeting in June 1992, consisting of Kutaragi and several senior Sony board members. Kutaragi unveiled a proprietary CD-ROM-based system he had been secretly working on which played games with immersive 3D graphics. Kutaragi was confident that his LSI chip could accommodate one million logic gates, which exceeded the capabilities of Sony's semiconductor division at the time. Despite gaining Ohga's enthusiasm, there remained opposition from a majority present at the meeting. Older Sony executives also opposed it, who saw Nintendo and Sega as "toy" manufacturers. The opposers felt the game industry was too culturally offbeat and asserted that Sony should remain a central player in the audiovisual industry, where companies were familiar with one another and could conduct "civili[s]ed" business negotiations. After Kutaragi reminded him of the humiliation he suffered from Nintendo, Ohga retained the project and became one of Kutaragi's most staunch supporters.

Ohga shifted Kutaragi and nine of his team from Sony's main headquarters to Sony Music Entertainment Japan (SMEJ), a subsidiary of the main Sony group, so as to retain the project and maintain relationships with Philips for the MMCD development project. The involvement of SMEJ proved crucial to the PlayStation's early development as the process of manufacturing games on CD-ROM format was similar to that used for audio CDs, with which Sony's music division had considerable experience. While at SMEJ, Kutaragi worked with Epic/Sony Records founder Shigeo Maruyama and Akira Sato; both later became vice presidents of the division that ran the PlayStation business. Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) was jointly established by Sony and SMEJ to handle the company's ventures into the video game industry. On 27 October 1993, Sony publicly announced that it was entering the game console market with the PlayStation. According to Maruyama, there was uncertainty over whether the console should primarily focus on 2D, sprite-based graphics or 3D polygon graphics. After Sony witnessed the success of Sega's Virtua Fighter (1993) in Japanese arcades, the direction of the PlayStation became "instantly clear" and 3D polygon graphics became the console's primary focus. SCE president Teruhisa Tokunaka expressed gratitude for Sega's timely release of Virtua Fighter as it proved "just at the right time" that making games with 3D imagery was possible. Maruyama claimed that Sony further wanted to emphasize the new console's ability to utilize redbook audio from the CD-ROM format in its games alongside high quality visuals and gameplay.

Wishing to distance the project from the failed enterprise with Nintendo, Sony initially branded the PlayStation the "PlayStation X" (PSX). Sony formed their European division and North American division, known as Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) and Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), in January and May 1995. The divisions planned to market the new console under the alternative branding "PSX" following the negative feedback regarding "PlayStation" in focus group studies. Early advertising prior to the console's launch in North America referenced PSX, but the term was scrapped before launch. The console was not marketed with Sony's name in contrast to Nintendo's consoles. According to Phil Harrison, much of Sony's upper management feared that the Sony brand would be tarnished if associated with the console, which they considered a "toy".

Since Sony had no experience in game development, it had to rely on the support of third-party game developers. This was in contrast to Sega and Nintendo, which had versatile and well-equipped in-house software divisions for their arcade games and could easily port successful games to their home consoles. Recent consoles like the Atari Jaguar and 3DO suffered low sales due to a lack of developer support, prompting Sony to redouble their efforts in gaining the endorsement of arcade-savvy developers. A team from Epic Sony visited more than a hundred companies throughout Japan in May 1993 in hopes of attracting game creators with the PlayStation's technological appeal. Sony found that many disliked Nintendo's practices, such as favoring its own games over others. Through a series of negotiations, Sony acquired initial support from Namco, Konami, and Williams Entertainment, as well as 250 other development teams in Japan alone. Namco in particular was interested in developing for PlayStation since Namco rivalled Sega in the arcade market. Attaining these companies secured influential games such as Ridge Racer (1993) and Mortal Kombat 3 (1995), Ridge Racer being one of the most popular arcade games at the time, and it was already confirmed behind closed doors that it would be the PlayStation's first game by December 1993, despite Namco being a longstanding Nintendo developer. Namco's research managing director Shegeichi Nakamura met with Kutaragi in 1993 to discuss the preliminary PlayStation specifications, with Namco subsequently basing the Namco System 11 arcade board on PlayStation hardware and developing to compete with Virtua Fighter. The System 11 launched in arcades several months before the PlayStation's release, with the arcade release of Tekken in September 1994.

Ian Hetherington pictured in 1990. Hetherington and Psygnosis played important roles in the PlayStation project.

Despite securing the support of various Japanese studios, Sony had no developers of their own by the time the PlayStation was in development. This changed in 1993 when Sony acquired the Liverpudlian company Psygnosis (later renamed SCE Liverpool) for US$48 million, securing their first in-house development team. The acquisition meant that Sony could have more launch games ready for the PlayStation's release in Europe and North America. Ian Hetherington, Psygnosis' co-founder, was disappointed after receiving early builds of the PlayStation and recalled that the console "was not fit for purpose" until his team got involved with it. Hetherington frequently clashed with Sony executives over broader ideas; at one point it was suggested that a television with a built-in PlayStation be produced. In the months leading up to the PlayStation's launch, Psygnosis had around 500 full-time staff working on games and assisting with software development.

The purchase of Psygnosis marked another turning point for the PlayStation as it played a vital role in creating the console's development kits. While Sony had provided MIPS R4000-based Sony NEWS workstations for PlayStation development, Psygnosis employees disliked the thought of developing on these expensive workstations and asked Bristol-based SN Systems to create an alternative PC-based development system. Andy Beveridge and Martin Day, owners of SN Systems, had previously supplied development hardware for other consoles such as the Mega Drive, Atari ST, and the SNES. When Psygnosis arranged an audience for SN Systems with Sony's Japanese executives at the January 1994 CES in Las Vegas, Beveridge and Day presented their prototype of the condensed development kit, which could run on an ordinary personal computer with two extension boards. Impressed, Sony decided to abandon their plans for a workstation-based development system in favour of SN Systems's, thus securing a cheaper and more efficient method for designing software. An order of over 600 systems followed, and SN Systems supplied Sony with additional software such as an assembler, linker, and a debugger. SN Systems produced development kits for future PlayStation systems, including the PlayStation 2 and was bought out by Sony in 2005.

Sony strived to make game production as streamlined and inclusive as possible, in contrast to the relatively isolated approach of Sega and Nintendo. Phil Harrison, representative director of SCEE, believed that Sony's emphasis on developer assistance reduced most time-consuming aspects of development. As well as providing programming libraries, SCE headquarters in London, California, and Tokyo housed technical support teams that could work closely with third-party developers if needed. Sony did not favor its own over non-Sony products, unlike Nintendo; Peter Molyneux of Bullfrog Productions admired Sony's open-handed approach to software developers and lauded their decision to use PCs as a development platform, remarking that "[it was] like being released from jail in terms of the freedom you have". Another strategy that helped attract software developers was the PlayStation's use of the CD-ROM format instead of traditional cartridges. In contrast to other disc-reading consoles such as the 3DO, the PlayStation could quickly generate and synthesise data from the CD since it was an image-generation system, rather than a data-replay system. Nintendo cartridges were expensive to manufacture, and the company controlled all production, prioritizing its own games, while inexpensive compact disc manufacturing occurred at dozens of locations around the world.

The PlayStation's architecture and interconnectability with PCs was beneficial to many software developers. The use of the programming language C proved useful during the early stages of development as it safeguarded future compatibility of the machine should developers decide to make further hardware revisions. Sony used the free software GNU C compiler, also known as GCC, to guarantee short debugging times as it was already familiar to many programmers. Despite the inherent flexibility, some developers found themselves restricted due to the console's lack of RAM. While working on beta builds of the PlayStation, Molyneux observed that its MIPS processor was not "quite as bullish" compared to that of a fast PC and said that it took his team two weeks to port their PC code to the PlayStation development kits and another fortnight to achieve a four-fold speed increase. An engineer from Ocean Software, one of Europe's largest game developers at the time, thought that allocating RAM was a challenging aspect given the 3.5 megabyte restriction. Kutaragi said that while it would have been easy to double the amount of RAM for the PlayStation, the development team refrained from doing so to keep the retail cost down. Kutaragi saw the biggest challenge in developing the system to be balancing the conflicting goals of high performance, low cost, and being easy to program for, and felt he and his team were successful in this regard.

Its technical specifications were finalised in 1993 and its design during 1994. The PlayStation name and its final design were confirmed during a press conference on May 10, 1994, although the price and release dates had not been disclosed yet.

Sony released the PlayStation in Japan on 3 December 1994, a week after the release of the Sega Saturn, at a price of . Sales in Japan began with a "stunning" success with long queues in shops. Ohga later recalled that he realized how important PlayStation had become for Sony when friends and relatives begged for consoles for their children. PlayStation sold 100,000 units on the first day and two million units within six months, although the Saturn outsold the PlayStation in the first few weeks due to the success of Virtua Fighter. By the end of 1994, 300,000 PlayStation units were sold in Japan compared to 500,000 Saturn units. A grey market emerged for PlayStations shipped from Japan to North America and Europe, with buyers of such consoles paying up to £700.

"When September 1995 arrived and Sony's Playstation roared out of the gate, things immediately felt different than [sic] they did with the Saturn launch earlier that year. Sega dropped the Saturn $100 to match the Playstation's $299 debut price, but sales weren't even close-Playstations flew out the door as fast as we could get them in stock.

-Lee Hutchinson of Ars Technica, a Babbage's employee in 1995, recalling how PlayStation preorders greatly outnumbered Saturn sales at his shop.
Before the release in North America, Sega and Sony presented their consoles at the first Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles on 11 May 1995. At their keynote presentation, Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske revealed that its Saturn console would be released immediately to select retailers at a price of $399. Next came Sony's turn: Olaf Olafsson, the head of SCEA, summoned Steve Race, the head of development, to the conference stage, who said "$299" and left the audience with a round of applause. The attention to the Sony conference was further bolstered by the surprise appearance of Michael Jackson and the showcase of highly anticipated games, including (1995), Ridge Racer and Tekken (1994). In addition, Sony announced that no games would be bundled with the console.

Although the Saturn had released early in the United States to gain an advantage over the PlayStation, the surprise launch upset many retailers who were not informed in time, harming sales. Some retailers such as KB Toys responded by dropping the Saturn entirely. The PlayStation went on sale in North America on 9 September 1995. It sold more units within two days than the Saturn had in five months, with almost all of the initial shipment of 100,000 units sold in advance and shops across the country running out of consoles and accessories. The well-received Ridge Racer contributed to the PlayStation's early success, with some critics considering it superior to Sega's arcade counterpart Daytona USA (1994). There were over 100,000 pre-orders placed and 17 games available on the market by the time of the PlayStation's American launch, in comparison to the Saturn's six launch games.

The PlayStation released in Europe on 29 September 1995 and in Australia on 15 November 1995. By November it had already outsold the Saturn by three to one in the United Kingdom, where Sony had allocated a £20 million marketing budget during the Christmas season compared to Sega's £4 million. Sony found early success in the United Kingdom by securing listings with independent shop owners as well as prominent High Street chains such as Comet and Argos. Within its first year, the PlayStation secured over 20% of the entire American video game market. From September to the end of 1995, sales in the United States amounted to 800,000 units, giving the PlayStation a commanding lead over the other fifth-generation consoles, though the SNES and Mega Drive from the fourth generation still outsold it. Sony reported that the attach rate of sold games and consoles was four to one. To meet increasing demand, Sony chartered jumbo jets and ramped up production in Europe and North America. By early 1996, the PlayStation had grossed $2 billion (equivalent to $3.732 billion 2022) from worldwide hardware and software sales. By late 1996, sales in Europe totalled 2.2 million units, including 700,000 in the UK. Approximately 400 PlayStation games were in development, compared to around 200 games being developed for the Saturn and 60 for the Nintendo 64.

In India, the PlayStation was launched in test market during 1999-2000 across Sony showrooms, selling 100 units. Sony finally launched the console (PS One model) countrywide on 24 January 2002 with the price of Rs 7,990 and 26 games available from start.

The PlayStation was backed by a successful marketing campaign, allowing Sony to gain an early foothold in Europe and North America. Initially, PlayStation demographics were skewed towards adults, but the audience broadened after the first price drop. While the Saturn was positioned towards 18- to 34-year-olds,[118] the PlayStation was initially marketed exclusively towards teenagers. Executives from both Sony and Sega reasoned that because younger players typically looked up to older, more experienced players, advertising targeted at teens and adults would draw them in too. Additionally, Sony found that adults reacted best to advertising aimed at teenagers; Lee Clow surmised that people who started to grow into adulthood regressed and became "17 again" when they played video games.[119] The console was marketed with advertising slogans stylised as "LIVE IN Y UR W RLD. PL Y IN URS" and "U R NOT E" (red E).[28] Clow thought that by invoking such provocative statements, gamers would respond to the contrary and say "'Bullshit. Let me show you how ready I am.'"[121] As the console's appeal enlarged, Sony's marketing efforts broadened from their earlier focus on mature players to specifically target younger children as well.[122]

Shortly after the PlayStation's release in Europe, Sony tasked marketing manager Geoff Glendenning with assessing the desires of a new target audience. Sceptical over Nintendo and Sega's reliance on television campaigns, Glendenning theorised that young adults transitioning from fourth-generation consoles would feel neglected by marketing directed at children and teenagers. Recognising the influence early 1990s underground clubbing and rave culture had on young people, especially in the United Kingdom, Glendenning felt that the culture had become mainstream enough to help cultivate PlayStation's emerging identity. Sony partnered with prominent nightclub owners such as Ministry of Sound and festival promoters to organise dedicated PlayStation areas where demonstrations of select games could be tested. Sheffield-based graphic design studio The Designers Republic was contracted by Sony to produce promotional materials aimed at a fashionable, club-going audience. Psygnosis' Wipeout in particular became associated with nightclub culture as it was widely featured in venues. By 1997, there were 52 nightclubs in the United Kingdom with dedicated PlayStation rooms. Glendenning recalled that he had discreetly used at least £100,000 a year in slush fund money to invest in impromptu marketing.

In 1996, Sony expanded their CD production facilities in the United States due to the high demand for PlayStation games, increasing their monthly output from 4 million discs to 6.5 million discs. This was necessary because PlayStation sales were running at twice the rate of Saturn sales, and its lead dramatically increased when both consoles dropped in price to $199 that year. The PlayStation also outsold the Saturn at a similar ratio in Europe during 1996, with 2.2 million consoles sold in the region by the end of the year. Sales figures for PlayStation hardware and software only increased following the launch of the Nintendo 64. Tokunaka speculated that the Nintendo 64 launch had actually helped PlayStation sales by raising public awareness of the gaming market through Nintendo's added marketing efforts. Despite this, the PlayStation took longer to achieve dominance in Japan. Tokunaka said that, even after the PlayStation and Saturn had been on the market for nearly two years, the competition between them was still "very close", and neither console had led in sales for any meaningful length of time.

By 1998, Sega, encouraged by their declining market share and significant financial losses, launched the Dreamcast as a last-ditch attempt to stay in the industry. Although its launch was successful, the technically superior 128-bit console was unable to subdue Sony's dominance in the industry. Sony still held 60% of the overall video game market share in North America at the end of 1999. Sega's initial confidence in their new console was undermined when Japanese sales were lower than expected, with disgruntled Japanese consumers reportedly returning their Dreamcasts in exchange for PlayStation software. On 2 March 1999, Sony officially revealed details of the PlayStation 2, which Kutaragi announced would feature a graphics processor designed to push more raw polygons than any console in history, effectively rivalling most supercomputers. The PlayStation continued to sell strongly at the turn of the new millennium: in June 2000, Sony released the PSOne, a smaller, redesigned variant which went on to outsell all other consoles in that year, including the PlayStation 2. The combined successes of both PlayStation consoles led to Sega retiring the Dreamcast in 2001, and abandoning the console business entirely. The PlayStation was eventually discontinued on 23 March 2006-over eleven years after its release, and less than a year before the debut of the PlayStation 3.

The main microprocessor is a 32-bit LSI R3000 CPU with a clock rate of 33.86 MHz and 30 MIPS. Its CPU relies heavily on the "cop2" 3D and matrix math coprocessor on the same die to provide the necessary speed to render complex 3D graphics. The role of the separate GPU chip is to draw 2D polygons and apply shading and textures to them: the rasterisation stage of the graphics pipeline. Sony's custom 16- bit sound chip supports ADPCM sources with up to 24 sound channels and offers a sampling rate of up to 44.1 kHz and MIDI sequencing. It features 2 MB of main RAM, with an additional 1 MB being allocated to video memory. The PlayStation has a maximum colour depth of 16.7 million true colours with 32 levels of transparency and unlimited colour look-up tables. Its video output, initially provided by a parallel I/O cable (and later a serial I/O used for the PlayStation Link Cable) displays resolutions from 256×224 to 640×480 pixels. Different games can use different resolutions.

The PlayStation uses a proprietary video compression unit, MDEC, which is integrated into the CPU and allows for the presentation of full motion video at a higher quality than other consoles of its generation. Unusual for the time, the PlayStation lacks a dedicated 2D graphics processor; 2D elements are instead calculated as polygons by the Geometry Transfer Engine (GTE) so that they can be processed and displayed on screen by the GPU. Whilst running, the GPU can also generate a total of 4,000 sprites and 180,000 polygons per second, in addition to 360,000 per second flat-shaded.

The PS One "combo pack" with 5-inch LCD screen attachment

The PlayStation went through a number of variants during its production run. Externally, the most notable change was the gradual reduction in the number of external connectors from the rear of the unit. This started with the original Japanese launch units; the SCPH-1000, released on 3 December 1994, was the only model that had an S-Video port, as it was removed from the next model. Subsequent models saw a reduction in number of parallel ports, with the final version only retaining one serial port.

Sony marketed a development kit for amateur developers known as the Net Yaroze (meaning "Let's do it together" in Japanese). It was launched in June 1996 in Japan, and following public interest, was released the next year in other countries. The Net Yaroze allowed hobbyists to create their own games and upload them via an online forum run by Sony. The console was only available to buy through an ordering service and with the necessary documentation and software to program PlayStation games and applications through C programming compilers.

On 7 July 2000, Sony released the PS One (stylised as PS one), a smaller, redesigned version of the original PlayStation. It was the highest-selling console through the end of the year, outselling all other consoles-including the PlayStation 2. In 2002, Sony released a 5-inch (130 mm) LCD screen add-on for the PS One, referred to as the "Combo pack". It also included a car cigarette lighter adaptor adding an extra layer of portability. Production of the LCD "Combo Pack" ceased in 2004, when the popularity of the PlayStation began to wane in markets outside Japan. A total of 28.15 million PS One units had been sold by the time it was discontinued in March 2006.

Three iterations of the PlayStation's controller were released over the console's lifespan. The first controller, the PlayStation controller, was released alongside the PlayStation in December 1994. It features four individual directional buttons (as opposed to a conventional D-pad), a pair of shoulder buttons on both sides, Start and Select buttons in the centre, and four face buttons consisting of simple geometric shapes: a green triangle, red circle, blue cross, and a pink square ( , , , ).[165] Rather than depicting traditionally used letters or numbers onto its buttons, the PlayStation controller established a trademark which would be incorporated heavily into the PlayStation brand. Teiyu Goto, the designer of the original PlayStation controller, said that the circle and cross represent "yes" and "no", respectively (though this layout is reversed in Western versions); the triangle symbolises a point of view and the square is equated to a sheet of paper to be used to access menus.[166] The European and North American models of the original PlayStation controllers are roughly 10% larger than its Japanese variant, to account for the fact the average person in those regions has larger hands than the average Japanese person.

Sony's first analogue gamepad, the PlayStation Analog Joystick (often erroneously referred to as the "Sony Flightstick"), was first released in Japan in April 1996. Featuring two parallel joysticks, it uses potentiometer technology previously used on consoles such as the Vectrex; instead of relying on binary eight-way switches, the controller detects minute angular changes through the entire range of motion. The stick also features a thumb-operated digital hat switch on the right joystick, corresponding to the traditional D-pad, and used for instances when simple digital movements were necessary. The Analog Joystick sold poorly in Japan due to its high cost and cumbersome size.

The increasing popularity of 3D games prompted Sony to add analogue sticks to its controller design to give users more freedom over their movements in virtual 3D environments. The first official analogue controller, the Dual Analog Controller, was revealed to the public in a small glass booth at the 1996 PlayStation Expo in Japan, and released in April 1997 to coincide with the Japanese releases of analogue-capable games and Bushido Blade. In addition to the two analogue sticks (which also introduced two new buttons mapped to clicking in the analogue sticks), the Dual Analog controller features an "Analog" button and LED beneath the "Start" and "Select" buttons which toggles analogue functionality on or off. The controller also features rumble support, though Sony decided that haptic feedback would be removed from all overseas iterations before the United States release. A Sony spokesman stated that the feature was removed for "manufacturing reasons", although rumours circulated that Nintendo had attempted to legally block the release of the controller outside Japan due to similarities with the Nintendo 64 controller's Rumble Pak. However, a Nintendo spokesman denied that Nintendo took legal action. Next Generation's Chris Charla theorized that Sony dropped vibration feedback to keep the price of the controller down.

In November 1997, Sony introduced the DualShock controller. Its name derives from its use of two (dual) vibration motors (shock). Unlike its predecessor, its analogue sticks feature textured rubber grips, longer handles, slightly different shoulder buttons and has rumble feedback included as standard on all versions. The DualShock later replaced its predecessors as the default controller.

Sony released a series of peripherals to add extra layers of functionality to the PlayStation. Such peripherals include memory cards, the PlayStation Mouse, the PlayStation Link Cable, the Multiplayer Adapter (a four-player multitap), the Memory Drive (a disk drive for 3.5-inch floppy disks), the GunCon (a light gun), and the Glasstron (a monoscopic head-mounted display).

Released exclusively in Japan, the PocketStation is a memory card peripheral which acts as a miniature personal digital assistant. The device features a monochrome liquid crystal display (LCD), infrared communication capability, a real-time clock, built-in flash memory, and sound capability. Sharing similarities with the Dreamcast's VMU peripheral, the PocketStation was typically distributed with certain PlayStation games, enhancing them with added features. The PocketStation proved popular in Japan, selling over five million units. Sony planned to release the peripheral outside Japan but the release was cancelled, despite receiving promotion in Europe and North America.

In addition to playing games, most PlayStation models are equipped to play audio CDs; the Asian model SCPH-5903 can also play Video CDs. Like most CD players, the PlayStation can play songs in a programmed order, shuffle the playback order of the disc and repeat one song or the entire disc. Later PlayStation models use a music visualisation function called SoundScope. This function, as well as a memory card manager, is accessed by starting the console without either inserting a game or closing the CD tray, thereby accessing a graphical user interface (GUI) for the PlayStation BIOS. The GUI for the PS One and PlayStation differ depending on the firmware version: the original PlayStation GUI had a dark blue background with rainbow graffiti used as buttons, while the early PAL PlayStation and PS One GUI had a grey blocked background with two icons in the middle.

PlayStation emulation is versatile and can be run on numerous modern devices. Bleem! was a commercial emulator which was released for IBM-compatible PCs and the Dreamcast in 1999. It was notable for being aggressively marketed during the PlayStation's lifetime, and was the centre of multiple controversial lawsuits filed by Sony. Bleem! was programmed in assembly language, which allowed it to emulate PlayStation games with improved visual fidelity, enhanced resolutions, and filtered textures that was not possible on original hardware. Sony sued Bleem! two days after its release, citing copyright infringement and accusing the company of engaging in unfair competition and patent infringement by allowing use of PlayStation BIOSs on a Sega console. Bleem! were subsequently forced to shut down in November 2001.

Sony was aware that using CDs for game distribution could have left games vulnerable to piracy, due to the growing popularity of CD-R and optical disc drives with burning capability. To preclude illegal copying, a proprietary process for PlayStation disc manufacturing was developed that, in conjunction with an augmented optical drive in Tiger H/E assembly, prevented burned copies of games from booting on an unmodified console. Specifically, all genuine PlayStation discs were printed with a small section of deliberate irregular data, which the PlayStation's optical pick-up was capable of detecting and decoding. Consoles would not boot game discs without a specific wobble frequency contained in the data of the disc pregap sector (the same system was also used to encode discs' regional lock-outs). This signal was within Red Book CD tolerances, so PlayStation discs' actual content could still be read by a conventional disc drive; however, the disc drive could not detect the wobble frequency (therefore duplicating the discs omitting it), since the laser pickup system of any optical disc drive would interpret this wobble as an oscillation of the disc surface and compensate for it in the reading process.

As the disc authenticity was only verified during booting, this copy protection system could be circumvented by swapping any genuine disc with the copied disc, while modchips could remove the protection system altogether by tricking the console into thinking the wobble is there on the pirated disc. Sony untruthfully suggested in advertisements that discs' unique black undersides played a role in copy protection. In reality, the black plastic used was transparent to any infrared laser and did not itself pose an obstacle to duplicators or computer CD drives, although it may have helped customers distinguish between unofficial and genuine copies.[self-published source ]

Early PlayStations, particularly early 1000 models, experience skipping full-motion video or physical "ticking" noises from the unit. The problems stem from poorly placed vents leading to overheating in some environments, causing the plastic mouldings inside the console to warp slightly and create knock-on effects with the laser assembly. The solution is to sit the console on a surface which dissipates heat efficiently in a well vented area or raise the unit up slightly from its resting surface. Sony representatives also recommended unplugging the PlayStation when it is not in use, as the system draws in a small amount of power (and therefore heat) even when turned off.

The first batch of PlayStations use a KSM-440AAM laser unit, whose case and movable parts are all built out of plastic. Over time, the plastic lens sled rail wears out-usually unevenly-due to friction. The placement of the laser unit close to the power supply accelerates wear, due to the additional heat, which makes the plastic more vulnerable to friction. Eventually, one side of the lens sled will become so worn that the laser can tilt, no longer pointing directly at the CD; after this, games will no longer load due to data read errors. Sony fixed the problem by making the sled out of die-cast metal and placing the laser unit further away from the power supply on later PlayStation models.

Due to an engineering oversight, the PlayStation does not produce a proper signal on several older models of televisions, causing the display to flicker or bounce around the screen. Sony decided not to change the console design, since only a small percentage of PlayStation owners used such televisions, and instead gave consumers the option of sending their PlayStation unit to a Sony service centre to have an official modchip installed, allowing play on older televisions.

A total of 7,918 PlayStation games have been released worldwide. The PlayStation's bestselling game is Gran Turismo (1997), which sold 10.85 million units. After the PlayStation's discontinuation in 2006, the cumulative software shipment was 962 million units.

The PlayStation featured a diverse game library which grew to appeal to all types of players. The first two games available at launch were Jumping Flash! (1995) and Ridge Racer, with Jumping Flash! heralded as an ancestor for 3D graphics in console gaming. Critically acclaimed PlayStation games included Final Fantasy VII (1997), Crash Bandicoot (1996), Spyro the Dragon (1998), Metal Gear Solid (1998), all of which became established franchises. Final Fantasy VII is credited with allowing role-playing games to gain mass-market appeal outside Japan, and is considered one of the most influential and greatest video games ever made.

At the time of the PlayStation's first Christmas season, Psygnosis had produced around 70% of its launch catalogue; its breakthrough racing game Wipeout was acclaimed for its techno soundtrack and helped raise awareness of Britain's underground music community. Eidos Interactive's action-adventure game Tomb Raider contributed substantially to the success of the console in 1996, with its main protagonist Lara Croft becoming an early gaming icon and garnering unprecedented media promotion. Licensed tie-in video games of popular films were also prevalent; Argonaut Games' 2001 adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone went on to sell over eight million copies late in the console's lifespan. Third-party developers committed largely to the console's wide-ranging game catalogue even after the launch of the PlayStation 2.

Initially, in the United States, PlayStation games were packaged in long cardboard boxes, similar to non-Japanese 3DO and Saturn games. Sony later switched to the jewel case format typically used for audio CDs and Japanese video games, as this format took up less retailer shelf space (which was at a premium due to the large number of PlayStation games being released), and focus testing showed that most consumers preferred this format.

The PlayStation was mostly well received upon release. Critics in the west generally welcomed the new console; the staff of Next Generation reviewed the PlayStation a few weeks after its North American launch, where they commented that, while the CPU is "fairly average", the supplementary custom hardware, such as the GPU and sound processor, is stunningly powerful. They praised the PlayStation's focus on 3D, and complemented the comfort of its controller and the convenience of its memory cards. Giving the system 4 out of 5 stars, they concluded, "To succeed in this extremely cut-throat market, you need a combination of great hardware, great games, and great marketing. Whether by skill, luck, or just deep pockets, Sony has scored three out of three in the first salvo of this war". Albert Kim from Entertainment Weekly praised the PlayStation as a technological marvel, rivalling that of Sega and Nintendo. Famicom Tsūshin scored the console a 19 out of 40, lower than the Saturn's 24 out of 40, in May 1995.

In a 1997 year-end review, a team of five Electronic Gaming Monthly editors gave the PlayStation scores of 9.5, 8.5, 9.0, 9.0, and 9.5-for all five editors, the highest score they gave to any of the five consoles reviewed in the issue. They lauded the breadth and quality of the games library, saying it had vastly improved over previous years due to developers mastering the system's capabilities in addition to Sony revising its stance on 2D and role playing games. They also complimented the low price point of the games compared to the Nintendo 64's, and noted that it was the only console on the market that could be relied upon to deliver a solid stream of games for the coming year, primarily due to third party developers almost unanimously favouring it over its competitors.

SCE was an upstart in the video game industry in late 1994, as the video game market in the early 1990s was dominated by Nintendo and Sega. Nintendo had been the clear leader in the industry since the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985 and the Nintendo 64 was initially expected to maintain this position. The PlayStation's target audience included the generation which was the first to grow up with mainstream video games, along with 18- to 29-year-olds who were not the primary focus of Nintendo. By the late 1990s, Sony became a highly regarded console brand due to the PlayStation, with a significant lead over second-place Nintendo, while Sega was relegated to a distant third.

The PlayStation became the first "computer entertainment platform" to ship over 100 million units worldwide, with many critics attributing the console's success to third-party developers. It remains the fifth best-selling console of all time as of 2024, with a total of 102.49 million units sold. Around 7,900 individual games were published for the console during its 11-year life span, the second-most games ever produced for a console. Its success resulted in a significant financial boon for Sony as profits from its video game division contributed to 23%.

Sony's next-generation PlayStation 2, which is backward compatible with the PlayStation's DualShock controller and games, was announced in 1999 and launched in 2000. The PlayStation's lead in installed base and developer support paved the way for the success of its successor, which overcame the earlier launch of the Sega's Dreamcast and then fended off competition from Microsoft's newcomer Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube. The PlayStation 2's immense success and failure of the Dreamcast were among the main factors which led to Sega abandoning the console market. To date, five PlayStation home consoles have been released, which have continued the same numbering scheme, as well as two portable systems. Hundreds of PlayStation games were re-released as PS One Classics for purchase and download on the PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita. The PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 also maintained backward compatibility with original PlayStation discs.

The PlayStation has often ranked among the best video game consoles. In 2018, Retro Gamer named it the third best console, crediting its sophisticated 3D capabilities as one of its key factors in gaining mass success, and lauding it as a "game-changer in every sense possible". In 2009, IGN ranked the PlayStation the seventh best console in their list, noting its appeal towards older audiences to be a crucial factor in propelling the video game industry, as well as its assistance in transitioning game industry to use the CD-ROM format. Keith Stuart from The Guardian likewise named it as the seventh best console in 2020, declaring that its success was so profound it "ruled the 1990s".

The success of the PlayStation contributed to the demise of cartridge-based home consoles. While not the first system to use an optical disc format, it was the first highly successful one, and ended up going head-to-head with the proprietary cartridge-relying Nintendo 64, which the industry had expected to use CDs like PlayStation. After the demise of the Sega Saturn, Nintendo was left as Sony's main competitor in Western markets. Nintendo chose not to use CDs for the Nintendo 64; it was likely concerned with the proprietary cartridge format's ability to help enforce copy protection, given its substantial reliance on licensing and exclusive games for its revenue.

Besides their larger capacity, CD-ROMs could be produced in bulk quantities at a much faster rate than ROM cartridges, a week compared to two to three months. Further, the cost of production per unit was far cheaper, allowing Sony to offer games about 40% lower cost to the user compared to ROM cartridges while still making the same amount of net revenue. In Japan, Sony published fewer copies of a wide variety of games for the PlayStation as a risk-limiting step, a model that had been used by Sony Music for CD audio discs. The production flexibility of CD-ROMs meant that Sony could produce larger volumes of popular games to get onto the market quickly, something that could not be done with cartridges due to their manufacturing lead time. The lower production costs of CD-ROMs also allowed publishers an additional source of profit: budget-priced reissues of games which had already recouped their development costs.

Tokunaka remarked in 1996:

Choosing CD-ROM is one of the most important decisions that we made. As I'm sure you understand, PlayStation could just as easily have worked with masked ROM [cartridges]. The 3D engine and everything-the whole PlayStation format-is independent of the media. But for various reasons (including the economies for the consumer, the ease of the manufacturing, inventory control for the trade, and also the software publishers) we deduced that CD-ROM would be the best media for PlayStation.

The increasing complexity of developing games pushed cartridges to their storage limits and gradually discouraged some third-party developers. Part of the CD format's appeal to publishers was that they could be produced at a significantly lower cost and offered more production flexibility to meet demand. As a result, some third-party developers switched to the PlayStation, including Square, whose Final Fantasy VII, and Enix (later merged with Square to form Square Enix), whose Dragon Quest VII (2000) were planned for the Nintendo 64. Other developers released fewer games for the Nintendo 64 ( Konami, releasing only thirteen N64 games but over fifty on the PlayStation). Nintendo 64 game releases were less frequent than the PlayStation's, with many being developed by either Nintendo itself or second-parties such as Rare.

PlayStation Classic console and controller

The PlayStation Classic is a dedicated video game console made by Sony Interactive Entertainment that emulates PlayStation games. It was announced in September 2018 at the Tokyo Game Show, and released on 3 December 2018, the 24th anniversary of the release of the original console.

As a dedicated console, the PlayStation Classic features 20 pre-installed games; the games run off the open source emulator PCSX. The console is bundled with two replica wired PlayStation controllers (those without analogue sticks), an HDMI cable, and a USB-Type A cable. Internally, the console uses a MediaTek MT8167a Quad A35 system on a chip with four central processing cores clocked at @ 1.5 GHz and a Power VR GE8300 graphics processing unit. It includes 16 GB of eMMC flash storage and 1 Gigabyte of DDR3 SDRAM. The PlayStation Classic is 45% smaller than the original console.

The PlayStation Classic received negative reviews from critics and was compared unfavorably to Nintendo's rival Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition and Super Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition. Criticism was directed at its meager game library, user interface, emulation quality, use of PAL versions for certain games, use of the original controller, and high retail price, though the console's design received praise. The console sold poorly.

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Also known as PS PS1 PSone PS One (redesign) PSX (codename) Release date PlayStation PS One Lifespan 1994-2006 (12 years) Introductory price ¥39,800, US$299, £299, F1,490, DM599[3] Discontinued WW: 23 March 2006[11] [12] Units sold 102.49 million[11] CPU R3000 @ 33.8688 MHz Memory 2 MB RAM, 1 MB VRAM Controller

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Introduction Gaming on Smartphones (1997−2006)

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Introduction Gaming on Smartphones (1997−2006)

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The NOKIA was the first phone released with MOBILE VIDEO GAMES with variation versions of SNAKE

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The IMODE was the first APP STORE for Smartphones allowing users to download mobile games onto your smartphone

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Silent Hill was one of the first Horror games ever made, and defined the horror genre.

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Silent Hill is a 1999 survival horror game developed by Team Silent, a group in Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, and published by Konami. The first installment in the Silent Hill series, the game was released from February to July, originally for the PlayStation. Silent Hill uses a third-person view, with real-time rendering of 3D environments. To mitigate limitations of the console hardware, developers liberally used fog and darkness to muddle the graphics. Unlike earlier survival horror games that focused on protagonists with combat training, the player character of Silent Hill is an " everyman".

The game follows Harry Mason as he searches for his missing adopted daughter in the eponymous fictional American town of Silent Hill; stumbling upon a cult conducting a ritual to revive a deity it worships, he discovers her true origin. Five game endings are possible, depending on actions taken by the player, including one joke ending.

Silent Hill received positive reviews from critics on its release and was commercially successful. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest video games ever made, as well as a defining title in the survival horror genre, as it moved away from B movie horror elements toward a more psychological horror style, emphasizing atmosphere. Various adaptations of Silent Hill have been released, including a 2001 visual novel, the 2006 feature film Silent Hill, and a 2009 reimagining of the game, titled Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. The game was followed by Silent Hill 2 in 2001, and a direct sequel, Silent Hill 3, in 2003.

The objective of the player is to guide main protagonist and player character Harry Mason through a monster-filled town as he searches for his lost daughter, Cheryl. Silent Hill's gameplay consists of combat, exploration, and puzzle-solving. The game uses a third-person view, with the camera occasionally switching to other angles for dramatic effect, in pre-scripted areas. This is a change from older survival horror games, which constantly shifted through a variety of camera angles. Because Silent Hill has no heads-up display, the player must consult a separate menu to check Harry's " health". If a DualShock controller is used, a heart beat rhythm can be felt signifying that the player is at low health.

Harry confronts monsters in each area with both melee weapons and firearms. An ordinary man, Harry cannot sustain many blows from enemies, and gasps for breath after sprinting. His inexperience in handling firearms means that his aim, and therefore the player's targeting of enemies, is often unsteady. A portable radio collected early in the game alerts Harry to the presence of nearby creatures with bursts of static.

The player can locate and collect maps of each area, stylistically similar to tourist maps. Accessible from the menu and readable only when sufficient light is present, each map is marked with places of interest. Visibility is mostly low due to fog and darkness; the latter is prevalent in the "Otherworld". The player locates a pocket-size flashlight early in the game, but the light beam illuminates only a few feet. Navigating through Silent Hill requires the player to find keys and solve puzzles.

Silent Hill opens with Harry Mason's drive to the titular town with his adopted daughter Cheryl for a vacation. At the town's edge, he swerves to avoid hitting a girl in the road, and as a result, he crashes and loses consciousness. Waking up in town, he realizes that Cheryl is missing and sets out to look for her. The town is deserted and foggy, with snow falling out of season, and he begins to experience bouts of unconsciousness and encounters with hostile creatures. During his exploration of the town, he meets Cybil Bennett, a police officer from the neighboring town who is investigating the mysterious occurrences. Dahlia Gillespie, a cultist, gifts him the Flauros, a charm which she claims can counteract the darkness spreading through the town. In the town's hospital, he encounters its director, Dr. Michael Kaufmann, bewildered by the sudden changes in the town, and discovers a frightened, amnesiac nurse, Lisa Garland, hiding in one of the rooms.

Harry can later rescue Kaufmann from a monster, discover evidence of Kaufmann's role in the local drug trafficking, and stumble upon Kaufmann's hidden bottle of aglaophotis, a supernatural liquid that can exorcise demons. Harry comes to believe that a darkness is transforming the town into someone's nightmare, which is why the inhabitants have mostly disappeared. Dahlia urges him to stop "the demon" responsible for it-the girl in the road who appears to him sporadically-or Cheryl will die. Continuing his search, Harry finds himself drawn into a fight with Cybil, who has become the host to a supernatural parasite; the player can choose to save her. The next time Harry sees the girl, the Flauros activates and neutralizes her telekinetic powers. Dahlia then appears and reveals that she manipulated Harry into catching the girl-an apparition of her daughter, Alessa.

Harry then awakens in the hospital again, next to Lisa. Lisa explains that she experienced a sense of deja vu while in the basement, and when he finds her again, she despairs that she is "the same as them". She pleads with Harry to save her, and blood runs down her face; horrified, he flees. Her diary reveals that she nursed Alessa during a secret, forced hospitalization. Alessa's never-healing wounds terrified her, as she fell deeper into a drug addiction fueled by Kaufmann. Finding Dahlia with Alessa's defeated apparition and charred body, Harry demands to know Cheryl's whereabouts: he discovers that seven years earlier Dahlia conducted a ritual to force Alessa to birth the cult's deity; Alessa survived being immolated because her status as vessel rendered her immortal, while her mental resistance to the ritual caused her soul to be bisected, preventing the birth. One half manifested as the infant Cheryl, whom Harry and his wife adopted. Dahlia then casts a spell to lure Cheryl back, while Alessa was imprisoned within the hospital, enduring unceasing agony as a result of her injuries. With Alessa's plan thwarted and her soul rejoined, the deity is revived and possesses her.

Four different endings are available, dependent on the player's previous actions:

In the "Bad" ending, the deity merges with Alessa and electrocutes Dahlia before attacking Harry. He defeats it, and Cheryl's voice thanks him for freeing her. Overcome by grief, Harry collapses, and the next scene is that of his corpse in his wrecked car.
The "Bad +" ending concludes with Harry and Cybil fleeing instead after the deity's demise.

In the "Good" ending, Kaufmann, now feeling betrayed by Dahlia, demands that she restore the town to normal and uses aglaophotis to exorcise the deity out of Alessa. Harry defeats the deity, and Alessa gives him an infant, the reincarnation of herself and Cheryl. She then helps him escape from her nightmare realm.

In the "Good +" ending, Harry escapes with Cybil and the baby. In both "Good" endings, a bloody and vengeful Lisa prevents Kaufmann from escaping with Harry.

The "Joke" ending features extraterrestrials abducting Harry.

Development of Silent Hill started in September 1996. The game was created by Team Silent, a group of staff members within the Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo studio. Konami sought to produce a game that would be successful in the United States. For this reason, a Hollywood-like atmosphere was used for Silent Hill. The staff members that were assigned to the game's development had failed at their previous projects. They intended to leave Konami, as they were not allowed to realize their own ideas, and were not compatible with the company's other teams. According to composer Akira Yamaoka, the developers did not know how to proceed with the Silent Hill project, either. As the time passed, the personnel and management of Konami lost their faith in the game, and the members of Team Silent increasingly felt like outsiders. Despite the profit-oriented approach of the parent company, however, the developers of Silent Hill had much artistic freedom because the game was still produced as in the era of lower-budget 2D titles. Eventually, the development staff decided to ignore the limits of Konami's initial plan, and to make Silent Hill a game that would appeal to the emotions of players instead.

For this purpose, the team introduced a "fear of the unknown" as a psychological type of horror. The plot was made vague and occasionally contradictory to leave its true meaning in the dark, and to make players reflect upon unexplained parts. Director Keiichiro Toyama created the game's scenario, while programmer Hiroyuki Owaku wrote the text for the riddles. Toyama did not have much experience of horror movies but was interested in UFOs, the occult and David Lynch movies which influenced the game's development. Toyama questioned Konami's decision to appoint him as director, as he had never been one prior to Silent Hill.

The localization company Latina International translated the script into English. The town of Silent Hill is an interpretation of a small American community as imagined by the Japanese team. It was based on Western literature and films, as well as on depictions of American towns in European and Russian culture. The game's joke ending came out of a suggestion box created to find alternative reasons for the occurrences in Silent Hill.

Artist Takayoshi Sato corrected inconsistencies in the plot, and designed the game's cast of characters. As a young employee, Sato was initially restricted to basic tasks such as font design and file sorting. He also created 3D demos and presentations, and taught older staff members the fundamentals of 3D modeling. However, he was not credited for this work as he did not have as much respect within Konami as older employees. Sato eventually approached the company's higher-ups with a short demo movie he had rendered, and threatened to withhold this technical knowledge from other staff members if he was not assigned to 3D work. As a consequence, his superior had to give in to his demand, and he was allowed to do character designs. Instead of relying on illustrations, Sato conceived the characters of Silent Hill while creating their computer-generated models. He gave each their own distinctive characteristics, but made Harry almost completely neutral as he wanted to avoid forcing interpretations of the game on the players. Creating the skull shapes for the faces of the American cast was difficult because he had no Caucasian co-workers to use for reference. Although Sato was largely responsible for the game's cinematics and characters at this point, his superior still did not want to fully credit his work, and intended to assign a visual supervisor to him. To prevent this from happening, Sato volunteered to create the full-motion videos of Silent Hill by himself. Over the course of two and a half years, he lived in the development team's office, as he had to render the scenes with the approximately 150 Unix-based computers of his coworkers after they left work at the end of a day.

Sato estimated the game's budget was lower than the cost of Japan's biggest games at the time. He said the development team intended to make Silent Hill a masterpiece rather than a traditional sales-oriented game, and that they opted for an engaging story, which would persist over time-similar to successful literature. The game debuted at the 1998 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, where the presentations of movies and in-game scenes garnered applause from the audience. This favorable reception persuaded Konami to allot more personnel and public relation initiatives to the project. Konami later showcased Silent Hill at the European Computer Trade Show in London, and included a demo with its stealth game Metal Gear Solid in Japan.

The names and designs of some Silent Hill creatures and puzzles are based on books enjoyed by the character of Alessa, including The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The game contains several real-life references, particularly in characters' names. Cheryl Mason's first name is based on actress Sheryl Lee's first name, and Lisa Garland's surname is taken from actress Judy Garland. "Michael Kaufmann" is a combination of Troma Studios producers Michael Herz's and Lloyd Kaufmann's first name and surname, respectively. Alessa's original name was "Asia", and Dahlia's was "Daria", based on the first names of actresses Asia Argento and Daria Nicolodi-Argento's mother. Harry's name was originally "Humbert", and Cheryl's was "Dolores", in reference to the protagonist and title character of Vladimir Nabokov's novel . The American staff altered these names, as they considered them too uncommon. Fictitious religious items appearing in the game have used various religions as a basis: the evil spirit-dispelling substance Aglaophotis, which is said to be made from a medicinal herb, is based on a herb of similar name and nature in the Kabbalah ( Jewish mysticism); the "Seal of Metatron" (also referred to by Dahlia as the "Mark of Samael") references the angels Metatron and Samael, respectively; and the name of the "Flauros" was taken from the eponymous demon appearing in the , a book on magic said to have been compiled by writings of King Solomon. Certain items and doors in the "nowhere" dimension of the game were given names based on occult elements in order to symbolize magical traits of Dahlia. The names of these doors were taken from the names of the angels Ophiel, Hagith, Phaleg, and Bethor, who appear in a medieval book of black magic and are supposed to rule over planets. This motif of giving names that suggest planets was used to signify that "a deeper part of the realm of Alessa's mind is being entered", according to Owaku.

The soundtrack for Silent Hill was composed by sound director Akira Yamaoka, who requested to join the development staff after the original musician had left. In addition to the music, he was in charge of tasks such as sound effect creation and audio mastering. Yamaoka did not watch game scenes, but created the music independently from its visuals. The style of his compositions was influenced by composer Angelo Badalamenti. To differentiate Silent Hill from other games as much as possible, and to give it a cold and rusty feel, Yamaoka opted for industrial music. When he presented his musical pieces to the other staff members for the first time, they misinterpreted their sound as a game bug. Yamaoka had to explain that this noise was intended for the music, and the team only withdrew their initial objection after he elaborated on his reasons for choosing this style.

On March 5, 1999, the album Silent Hill Original Soundtracks was released in Japan. The 41st track on the CD, the ending theme "Esperándote", was composed by Rika Muranaka. After Yamaoka had approached her to create a piece of music for the game, she suggested the use of bandoneóns, violins, and a Spanish-speaking singer. It was decided to make the song a tango, and Muranaka composed the melody for the English lyrics she had conceived. When she arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to record the translated Spanish lyrics with Argentine singer Vanesa Quiroz, Muranaka realized that the syllables did not match the melodic line any more, and she had to recompose it in five minutes.

On October 29, 2013, Perseverance Records released a "Best Of" album, which features 16 newly interpreted instrumental tracks composed by Akira Yamaoka and arranged and performed by Edgar Rothermich. The 17th track on the album is the ballad "I Want Love" performed by Romina Arena.

Silent Hill was released for the PlayStation in North America on February 23, 1999, in Japan on March 4, 1999 and in Europe on July 16, 1999. It was included in the Japanese Silent Hill Complete Set in 2006. On March 19, 2009, Silent Hill became available for download from the European PlayStation Network store of the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Portable. Two days later, the game was removed due to "unforeseen circumstances". On September 10, 2009, Silent Hill was released on the North American PlayStation Network. On October 26, 2011, it was re-released on the European PlayStation Network.

A radically altered version of Silent Hill was released for the Game Boy Advance. Titled Play Novel: Silent Hill and released only in Japan in 2001, it is a gamebook-style visual novel. It contains a retelling of Silent Hill's story through text-based gameplay, with the player occasionally confronted with questions concerning what direction to take the character, as well as the puzzles, which are a major part of Silent Hill's gameplay. After completing the game once, the player has the option of playing as Cybil in a second scenario, with a third made available for download as a Paid- DLC on the Mobile Adapter GB device, once the second scenario has been completed. When the game was exhibited, Western critics were unimpressed, and criticized the lack of any soundtrack as severely detracting from the "horror" factor of the game.

A film adaptation, also titled Silent Hill, was released on April 21, 2006. The film, directed by Christophe Gans, was based loosely on the game, incorporating elements from Silent Hill 2, , and . Gans replaced Harry Mason with a female main protagonist, Rose Da Silva, because he felt Harry had many qualities typically perceived as feminine. When designing the film's visual elements, Gans was influenced by fellow directors Michael Mann, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg. The film's soundtrack includes music composed by Yamaoka. Although critical reaction was mostly negative, the film was a financial success and was praised by fans, especially for its visuals.

A " reimagining" of Silent Hill, titled Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, was developed by Climax Studios and published by Konami Digital Entertainment. The game was released on December 8, 2009, for the Wii and on January 19, 2010, for the PlayStation 2 and the PlayStation Portable, to mostly positive reviews. Although it retains the premise of a man's search for his missing daughter, Shattered Memories branches off into a different plot with altered characters. It features psychological profiling which alters various in-game elements depending on the player's response to questions in therapy, lacks the combat of Silent Hill, and replaces the "Otherworld" with a series of chase sequences through an alternate frozen version of the town.

In January 2022, a fan shot-for-shot remake developed by independent developer Codeless Games with Unreal Engine 5 was announced.

Silent Hill received "generally favorable reviews" at the review aggregate website Metacritic. The game sold over two million copies, which gained Silent Hill a place in the American PlayStation Greatest Hits budget releases. In November 1999, the Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland (VUD) gave Silent Hill a "Gold" award, indicating sales of at least 100,000 units across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Silent Hill has been compared to the Resident Evil series of survival horror video games. Bobba Fatt of labeled Silent Hill a "shameless but slick Resident Evil clone", while described it as "a near-perfect sim nightmare". Others felt that Silent Hill was Konami's answer to the Resident Evil series in that, while they noted a similarity, Silent Hill utilized a different form of horror to induce fear, attempting to form a disturbing atmosphere for the player, in contrast to the visceral scares and action-oriented approach of Resident Evil. Adding to the atmosphere was the audio, which was well-received; Billy Matjiunis of TVG described the ambient music as "engrossing"; a reviewer for Game Revolution also praised the audio, commenting that the sound and music "will set you on edge". AllGame editor Michael L. House praised Silent Hill, describing it as "a truly magnificent work of art" and "a genuinely terrifying experience combined with a unique, gripping story and immersive atmosphere". Less well-received was the voice acting which, although some reviewers remarked it was better than that found in the Resident Evil series, was found poor overall by reviewers, and accompanied by pauses between lines that served to spoil the atmosphere.

Reviewers noted that Silent Hill used real-time 3D environments, in contrast to the pre-rendered environments found in Resident Evil. Fog and darkness were heavily used to disguise the limitations of the hardware. Along with the grainy textures-also from hardware limitations-most reviewers felt that these factors actually worked in the game's favor; Francesca Reyes of described it as "adding to the atmosphere of dilapidation and decay". In using 3D environments, however, controls became an issue, and in "tougher" areas, maneuverability became "an exercise in frustration".

Edge selected it as runner-up for the Gameplay Innovation award. They stated that, whereas other "games attempt to hide the PlayStation's visual inadequecies," Konami "uses its draw-distance deficiency to chilling effect by draping atmospheric fog about the place."

The game's popularity as the first in the series was further recognized long after its release; a list of the best PS games of all time by IGN in 2000 listed it as the 14th-best PS game, while a 2005 article by detailing the best PS games listed Silent Hill as the 15th-best game produced for the console. A GameTrailers video feature in 2006 ranked Silent Hill as number one in its list of the top ten scariest games of all time. In 2005, the game was credited for moving the survival horror genre away from B movie horror elements to the psychological style seen in art house or Japanese horror films, due to the game's emphasis on a disturbing atmosphere rather than visceral horror. In November 2012, named it one of the 100 greatest video games of all time.

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Silent Hill is a 1999 survival horror game developed by Team Silent, a group in Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, and published by Konami. The first installment in the Silent Hill series, the game was released from February to July, originally for the PlayStation. Silent Hill uses a third-person view, with real-time rendering of 3D environments.

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2001 I-MODE hit 20 Million users in JAPEN

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2001 I-MODE hit 20 Million users in JAPEN

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YouTube release - February 14th 2005
release of Xbox 360 - 22nd November 2005
release of PS3 - 11th November 2006
WII release date - 19th November 2006

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The iPhone and the App Store (2007−2008)

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The iPhone and the App Store (2007−2008)

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In 2007 the IPHONE, one of the key features of this release was the amount of RAM and Large screen. This allowed the IPHONE to be capable of running more complex apps, and a new operating system that could handle multitasking.

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When the APP STORE released this allowed developers to officially and inexpensively develop native apps, whereas previously, only web apps were allowed and native apps could only be installed through jailbreaking.

At launch the app store had 500 apps but 6 months later there were over 15,000 with half a billion app downloads

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In 2009 in-app purchases were realized one of the first games with in-app purchases was TAP TAP REVENGE 3 by TAPULOUS.

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Angry Birds is made by Rovio Entertainment and is a physics-based game involving Cartoonish Birds and was inspired by the browser game Crush the Castle.

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Video game influence on other creative industries

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Video game influence on other creative industries

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With the wide success of the video games industry it was only a matter of time until it started appearing in other creative industries. A big example of this would be how there are so many movies and tv shows (live action, animated) based on video games.
The first ever live action movie was Super Mario bros released in 1985. While other video games appeared on the smaller screen with Pac-man having a animated show in the early 1980s. However because of the failure of the Mario movie this meant there was very few video game movies until the 2000s

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Due to the success of the Nintendo Wii, we saw a rise in companies trying to include motion games to their consoles. Such as the PS Move and the Xbox Kinetic. Both of which were released in the back end of 2010. In my opinion this was a precursor to many popular games we see today such as Beat Saber and Super Hot.

On April 4th of 2011, the hacking group Anonymous hacked Sony and exposed personal information of over 70 million users world wide. This event made headlines in every major news publication.

CSGO was first released in 2012, thus creating one of the biggest E-Sports games ever. Personally I only associate CSGO with E-Sports. CSGO stands for Counter-Strike Global Offensive, Counter-Strike Global Offensive is the most popular E-Sports game there is right now.

September 7th 2013, was the launch of one of the biggest video games to ever exist. Grand Theft Auto 5, with over 11 million copies generating $815 million. GTA 5 would go on to sell a further 158 million copies, selling 169 million and grossing over $6 Billion by April in 2018.

In November 15th of 2013, the launch of the Play Station 4 occurred.  Which had already sold 4.2 million units by the end of the year. The PS4 would sell another 113 million consoles before Sony had announced that they will stop reporting it's sales figures. With a 117.2 million confirmed units sold and possibly even more unreported figures, PS4 is ranked as the 2nd highest home console sold after the PS2.

2014

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Oculus release - 28th March 2016
Vr introduced the ability to play games where you could interact with the worlds using your own body. At the beginning you could only have the head and hand movements and you still have to use joysticks.
Xbox series x/s release - 10th November 2020
PS5 release - 12th November 2020