The 80s began with strong growth in the video game sector encouraged by the popularity of arcades and the first video game consoles that appeared during the 70s. During these years, systems such as Oddyssey 2 (Phillips), Intellivision ( Mattel), Colecovision (Coleco), Atari 5200, Commodore 64, Turbografx (NEC). On the other hand, games such as the famous Pacman (Namco), Battle Zone (Atari), Pole Position (Namco), Tron (Midway) or Zaxxon (Sega) triumphed in arcade machines.
The business associated with this new industry achieved great things in these first years of the 80s, but, nevertheless, in 1983 the so-called video game crisis began, affecting mainly the United States and Canada, and which would not come to an end until 1985. Japan opted for the world of consoles with the success of the Famicom (called in the West as the Nintendo Entertainment System), launched by Nintendo in 1983 while in Europe it opted for microcomputers such as the Commodore 64 or the Spectrum.
At the end of their particular crisis, the Americans continued the path opened by the Japanese and adopted the NES as the main video game system. Throughout the decade, new home systems appeared such as the Master System (Sega), the Amiga (Commodore) and the 7800 (Atari) with games nowadays considered classics such as Tetris.
In the late 1980s, 16-bit consoles such as Sega's Mega Drive began to appear, and microcomputers were slowly replaced by personal computers based on IBM architectures.
In 1985 Super Mario Bros appeared, which was a turning point in the development of electronic games, since most of the previous games only contained a few screens that were repeated in a loop and the objective was simply to make a high score. The game developed by Nintendo was a burst of creativity. For the first time we had a goal and an ending in a video game. In the years that followed, other companies emulated his style of play.
In the field of arcade games, video games such as Defender, Rally-X, Dig Dug, Bubble Bobble, Gauntlet, Out Run or Shinobi stood out, in addition to a change in the nationality of the games, with Japan becoming the largest producer. Another branch of video games that grew strongly was that of portable video games. These began in the early 1970s with the first fully electronic games released by Mattel, which could hardly be considered video games, and grew in popularity thanks to arcade conversions like those made by Coleco or addictive microgames like Nintendo's Game & Watch. The definitive evolution of laptops as video game platforms came in 1989 with the launch of the Game Boy (Nintendo).
