Video Game History Part 2

1980-1999 Was a very eventful time period for video games, there was a huge surge of popularity in video games in the early 80's with the success of the Atari 2600. The infamous videogame crash of 1983 threatened the future of the industry. The 80's brought numerous consoles including the NES (1985), the Sega Mega Drive (1988) and the Nintendo Game Boy. The 90's followed suit and continued to add to
the saturated market of consoles with the SNES (1991), 
the Sony PlayStation (1995) and the Sega Dreamcast (1999). Most importantly, and what the rest of this blog post will be about, these two decades brought us the beginnings of video game characters and game series'.


The fact that 9 out of the top 10 characters in Empire's "50 Greatest Video Game Characters" originated between 1980 and 1999 shows how important this time period was for characters in video games. Classic characters such as Mario and Link came from the 80's and are still in many games today, but the majority of the characters from the 80's such as Pac Man and the frog from Frogger aren't what I'd consider characters, they're more faces of a game or franchise, I'd go as far as to say that Mario is also merely a face of a franchise rather than a character. What I mean by this is that I think a character should have some kind of narrative weather it be shown through gameplay or dialogue that goes beyond "Cross the Road" or "Find the Princess". 
 
Later into the 80's and into the 90's we start to see characters pop up in games more and more, in 1987 Solid Snake is introduced in the first Metal Gear game and in 1990 we also see a roster of characters in one of the many point and click adventure games The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990.


In the first two Metal Gear games the dialogue was presented as text, which isn't a huge problem but you're never going to interprete the character exactly the way the game creators intended you to. This is because the voice and the way the character says the words in your head as you read the text will be based off of your past experiences of voices and characters. The more unique portrayal of characters came with the introduction of voice acting, although the majority of voice acting and writing itself was not very good, a good example of this would be listening to the tragically over dramatic dialogue of the original Resident Evil game released in 1996.


In 1998 voice acting in games took a giant leap forward with Metal Gear Solid which with the exception of a few lines seemed to be the first game that put considerable effort into voice acting. Even though all of the characters and plot are pretty much a satire of action films that came before it, I felt that as I was playing the game I was getting to understand all of the characters and their purpose in the plot and I saw the characters change as the game progressed. I feel that Metal Gear Solid set the benchmark in video games for voice acting and the portrayal of characters.

So to conclude, at the start of the 80's we had plenty of games but not many of them really had characters, just empty protagonists with little to no narrative assigned to them. Then as the years went on we saw actual characters appear in games with their dialogue portrayed through text. Then in the 90's and leading into the 00's voice acting was introduced which improved the portrayal of characters in video games which peaked with Metal Gear Solid. So the industry came a long way in 20 years going from a yellow circle eating smaller white circles to fully fleshed out characters in engaging narratives.

Bibliography:

https://atariage.com/2600/index.html?SystemID=2600

http://www.gamesradar.com/consoles-of-the-80s/

http://www.gamesradar.com/consoles-of-the-90s/

http://www.denofgeek.com/games/24531/the-1983-videogame-crash-what-went-wrong-and-could-it-happen-again

http://www.gamingbus.com/2012/08/06/the-growth-of-voice-acting-in-video-games/

http://www.empireonline.com/features/50-greatest-video-game-characters/default.asp?film=50 

Images in order:

 http://www.gamesradar.com/consoles-of-the-90s/?page=6

 https://atariage.com/2600/index.html?SystemID=2600

 http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/DonkeyKong

 http://metalgear.wikia.com/wiki/Metal_Gear?file=Metal_Gear.jpg

 http://www.allthatsepic.com/game-reviews/resident-evil-review-where-the-evil-began/

 http://jryanmvg.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/review-and-rating-metal-gear-solid-playstation/

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=47066773