(4) Nintendo And Competitors

The industry continued to decline until the late 1980s. A Japanese company called Nintendo revived interest in¹ electronic games in 1985 when it introduced its Nintendo Entertainment System in the USA. A sophisticated machine able to run more interesting graphics; the availability of more than 100 games (such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda); and more powerful computer chips allowing for faster game play all make Nintendo popular. More than 30 million NES machines were sold in the USA and more than 90 million worldwide.

Realizing that game hardware soon becomes obsolete, Nintendo pioneered the practice of releasing new consoles every five to six years. The NES, for example, was followed by the Super NES and then by the Nintendo 64. Nintendo further expanded the video-game market in 1989 by launching its Game Boy handheld system. Nintendo sold 120 million Game Boys from 1989 to 2001.

Nintendo faced serious rivals for the home market, however. In the late 1980s, the Japanese company Sega introduced a popular system known as Genesis. In 1995, Japanese electronics giant Sony Corporation launched its PlayStation line of game consoles. Sony dominated the console market after 1995, selling more than 90 million PlayStations worldwide by 2002. In 2001, Nintendo released the GameCube platform and software giant Microsoft Corporation entered the market with Xbox. These systems featured a variety of advanced capabilities such as a hard drive for saving games and the ability to connect to the Internet or LANs. Such connections enabled players to download more advanced levels of play and additional characters, and to play with other users. Some systems even sell additional equipment so online players can speak to each other and verbally help other players during play. The three major console manufacturers used such technological advances to try to gain market share in this fast-paced, lucrative business.

Notes: ¹to revive interest (in) – возрождать интерес (к).

(5) Computer Games

While video-game systems are used only for games, gaming is only one of the many uses for computers. In computer games, players can use a keyboard to type in commands, a mouse to move a cursor around the screen, or both. Many computer games also allow the use of a joystick or game controller.

In 1972, Gregory Yob of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst created the first text-based computer game, called Hunt the Wumpus. In this game, players followed a narrative containing clues about the location of a creature in a series of caverns. Using clues in the text, the players’ purpose was to locate the beast and shoot it.

In 1975, a programmer named Will Crowther created Adventure (also known as Advent and Colossal Cave). In this game, players used one- and two-word commands to respond to situations in a story. For example, in a room with a treasure chest and a staircase, a player might type “open chest”, then “down stairs”. Wrong answers often resulted in an interactive death.

During the 1970s and into the early 1980s, text-based adventure games such as this – another popular one was called Zork – dominated the field of computer games.

After playing Adventure on her husband’s computer, Roberta Williams persuaded her husband, Ken, to help her make games. Wanting to go beyond text-based technology, Roberta created simple illustrations that Ken encoded into the game. Their game, Mystery House, released in 1980, was the first computer adventure game to combine text and graphics.