Early Console Video Games

Early Console Video Games

A brief history of some the video games I’ve played. This post will be about consoles released between 1983-1998; Wikipedia refers to this as the 3rd, 4th and 5th generation of consoles.

I’ve been playing some video games as a source of escapism recently, and I wanted to reminisce about the video games I have played. This post will be about consoles released between 1983-1998; Wikipedia refers to this as the 3rd, 4th and 5th generation of consoles. I grew up playing a fair amount of games with my family and friends.

Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

At my cousins’ house, I could only remember two games: the classics Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros.We played as often and as much as we could. Again, we were not good at either one, but they were a lot of fun.

Duck Hunt was great, because as kids, it was so cool to play with that laser gun. I felt like I was pretty good at it, but looking back, I definitely was not. I’m pretty sure this was how I knew I am bad at first-person-shooters (which is basically what evolved from this). That snarky dog laughed at me so much!

But the best game, of course, was Super Mario Bros. I think if you had to describe Super Mario Bros, it would be the classic side-scrolling platformer. The basics of the game are just run and jump; sure, you can get a power-up and shoot fireballs, but that’s just an added bonus. However, the best thing about it was the music, because it just sends me on a nostalgia trip. My favorite level song is World 2-2, the water level; what a great song.

Sega Genesis

For the Genesis, we only owned a handful of games. There was NHL ‘94, a hockey game where you would play as existing hockey teams. We didn’t know too much about the NHL, but we loved the Mighty Ducks movie, and our home team were the San Jose Sharks (though I can’t remember if you could play as the Sharks on NHL ‘94) so we played as the Ducks a lot.

We loved Golden Axe, which was a side scroller game where you were fantasy-looking characters and would beat up bad guys. We were not good at it, and I don’t think we got very far, but we tried to get as far as we could every time we played. We also owned The Revenge of Shinobi, which was another side-scrolling platformer. You could throw knives, or, I guess they were throwing stars (shuriken). We were absolutely awful at this game, I definitely only remember playing the first level of this one.

And of course, we had Sonic the Hedgehog. This was the gem of the system, even though we were also not good at this game. I think it was a quintessential game because it was cute, it was just challenging enough without it being too hard, and you could just keep trying to jump as high as you could. Plus, it had great music.

Nintendo 64

A couple of my friends had a Nintendo 64, and I feel like this was the age (I was hitting middle school, at the time) for our group to be competitive with each other. We played Mario Kart 64, and Mario Party (I can’’t remember if it was the original, 2 or 3), and of course, Super Smash Bros. Mario Kart is a series of racing games where you can pick your favorite Mario character to race as. I always wanted Toad because I was also a short, squeaky individual. I was not good at this game, but I have to admit, I wasn’t really trying.

Mario Party is like a board game; again, you play as your favorite Mario character (I think here, I played as Mario or Luigi), and you would roll a dice, and whatever tile you landed on would determine what teams you would play as on the next mini-game. Whoever got the most stars (which you would get from various ways, but mostly winning mini-games) at the end of the game, would win. Now this game could get ugly! But again, I think I rationally knew this game was not worth losing friends over.

And lastly, Super Smash Bros is a group, fighting game, almost like a tournament, where you would all fight against each other. Each of the characters, from various Nintendo projects, had their own powers and tricks. I think I really like Kirby, because he was easy to play as. I was absolutely awful at this game (and all fighting games) so again, I didn’t really try on this one.

These games were great fun with other people though! Before, we were playing together, but we never really had two people playing at the same time, until N64 games. What a treat, to enjoy these games with friends!

Miscellaneous and Honorable Mentions

There will be more posts, at least two more, so I wanted to end this post with some games I know I’ve played during this era. These may have been played on emulator, so I can’t say I played these on console, but I wanted to give them at least a shout out. Tetris and Dr. Mario, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Mario Bros 3, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Paper Mario, Pokémon Snap; these were all such great games. Tetris and Dr Mario remains one of my favorite games to play if you just want to waste an hour playing puzzle games. And I remember begging to borrow an N64 to play Paper Mario on vacation. I’m not even sure why, because I definitely don’t remember anything about the game (but I must have played it, right?).

Let me know what games you played during these generations of consoles! I don’t remember specifically anyone with a SNES, but going through the games, I know I’ve played them! And I’ll get more into this on the next post, but Playstation remains one of my favorite consoles with a lot of great games.