Five Unique Eras & Titles in Gaming
The frontier of digital technology continues to revolutionize modern gaming. At the moment, many gamers are opting for new experiences, including VR titles, cloud-based gaming subscriptions, and mobile ports for games once on a console or PC.
The emphasis on evolving technology is nothing new. In fact, even before Pong hit arcades and brought gaming to the masses in 1972, an earlier project sought to push gaming and technology in a new direction. The Sword of Damocles project was completed in 1968 and featured a rudimentary augmented reality headset.
Gamers and developers will continue to innovate the future of gaming—but that doesn’t mean previous titles and platforms will fall by the wayside. Just look at Apple Arcade’s emphasis on retro-style games for proof that people enjoy callbacks to the earliest days of video games. But not all moments in gaming history are remembered with equal passion.
Let’s take a closer look at five of gaming’s most unique eras and their ongoing legacies.
Online Poker Era
Today, online poker is one of the most ubiquitous games in the world. The World Poker Tour, an international governing body for major tournaments, estimates that 100 million people play poker online around the world, with up to 60 million currently living in the US.
This is due to the leap of online poker in the early 2000s, which made headlines and entered popular culture. In fact, online casinos were one of the first truly virtual games when the first platforms appeared in the mid-1990s. Today, many people know the basics of one of the most popular games today.
In-Person Arcades
Some gamers today still remember the excitement of heading to a local arcade with a pocket full of coins. Just like online poker, in-person arcade gaming became a palpable extension of pop culture in the US throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Titles like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Tron remain part of gaming culture worldwide—even close to half a century after their release. Today, these titles are considered nostalgic, but it’s likely they’ll be regarded as the first frontier of gaming in the decades to come.
The GTA Effect
Back in 1997, Rockstar Games released an action-adventure game for Windows that broke the mold. While not many gamers were interested in the title upon its release, the GTA franchise was underway—and it wasn’t slowing down anytime soon. Subsequent releases, which culminated in GTA 5’s release in 2013, introduced millions to a new open-world format.
Though ranked highly in terms of gameplay, concept, and sales revenue, many gamers remember the GTA zeitgeist as a particularly controversial one. The game’s violent themes and adult nature tend to be either selling points or discouraging factors; there’s often little middle ground when it comes to this franchise.
Dungeons & Dragons
When Dungeons & Dragons was first released in 1974, it was a fantasy tabletop RPG. Few gamers today realize that the true origin of RPGs, from The Witcher to Final Fantasy, actually stems directly from the role-player board game.
In fact, during the rise of DnD culture in the 1970s and 80s, it was considered hyper-fringe—even more so than video gaming. But today, it serves as a flagship title for many RPG and fantasy gamers. According to GameRant, over 50 million people play the game today. Back in 2020, MT Black Games reported that DnD players watched over 4.3 billion minutes of content via Twitch.
Portable Devices
Before the rise of mobile gaming, Nintendo took a step into the unknown in the late 1980s. The release of the Game Boy introduced gamers around the world to portable devices. Though the second iteration after the Game & Watch handheld game, the Game Boy broke the mold and led to a flurry of portable device releases in the 90s and, eventually, the release of the Nintendo Switch.
While other releases like the SEGA Nomad and Gamate never hit the same stride as the Game Boy, this era was defined by tiny titles. These include games like Tetris, as well as groundbreaking releases like The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Pokémon.