In the early days, designers didn’t know how games were supposed to work, and for that matter, they didn’t know how games were supposed to be controlled. Some of the early controllers used a combination of switches and dials. The Intellivision console had a controller with a dial and a numeric keypad, which can cause headaches when emulating on modern systems. You have to remember, bat and ball games such as Pong and a version of tennis were the main hits that those first systems were trying to emulate. In all fairness, if it’s tennis on a TV that we’re talking about, two dials is an accurate system for X and Y control.

On the home computer front, before long the joystick soon started to dominate. Acorn’s home computers lacked much of a joystick culture for some reason and keyboard controls tended to be the default. Any veteran of that platform would quickly go to Z,X,’,/ and RETURN/SPACE during a play session, as quickly as a Spectrum owner would go to the Q,A,O,P and M or SPACE, if they didn’t own a joystick and interface. In actual fact, keys offered fine control, even if you had to hunch over the machine itself while gaming out. They had their place, but a problem with joysticks is that they tended to only have a single fire button due to ergonomics, and this meant that they lacked a dedicated jump button for platform games.

Enter the d-pad controller of consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Mega Drive. This combined the accuracy of using keys with the convenience of more than one button and the luxury of a nice long cable. These days, the main thing you have to remember when controlling a game is to press both shoulder buttons at once, while pressing up on the left analog stick, while sticking your tongue out, hopping on one foot, and blinking three times.

20. Platformers

Why we miss it: Escapism into a surrealistic world and jumping around, like an Amstrad owner at the school disco. What’s not to like?

Lately, there’s been talk of people buying into a system just to get the latest Zelda game. Crazy. Back in the 1980s, things weren’t as excessive as that – people were buying into a system just to get the latest Mario game. Oh, and to get the latest Zelda game, too. For a while, in the classic era, platformers were the headline platform sellers. The character of Mario had gradually risen to fame. He was, first, the protagonist in early arcade platform game Donkey Kong. That game was a success, as was the first true Mario game, Mario Bros., an arcade game that was later ported to the home platforms. This first Mario game has most of the elements that we now think of as intrinsic to platform games, as it’s a scrolling game world was made up levels to be traversed to completion. It even featured the little fellas that you jump on top of to kill without actually killing.

This non-violent form of violence would also go to be a signature of platform gaming in the 1980s and 1990s. By the beginning of the latter decade, Sega realized that it needed a recognizable mascot and platform character too, hence the arrival of rival platformer franchise, Sonic. None of these games could be called adventure games, but they evoked a sense of exploration mixed in with the flow of the main gameplay which was, itself, more of a reflex task, and in terms of tone, cute was king.

Of course, while Mario and Sonic grabbed the headlines, home computers embraced platforming too. Manic Miner (1983) is a good example of a home computer, rather than console or arcade, platform game. Here, the mechanics were similar, but there was more of an emphasis on exploration, non-linearity, and even puzzle solving. In fact, many home computer platformers were considered to be “arcade adventures” for that reason. Oddly, the atmosphere of exploration was fostered by the fact that most early home computers weren’t as good at scrolling around a title-based landscape as consoles were. That meant that as you progressed, you would stumble into entirely new rooms, aesthetically at odds with the others.

Ultimately, as with most gaming, platformers transitioned from their 2D side-on roots to the world of 3D. Sonic and Mario survived the transition into the world of backwards and forwards as well as up, down, left, and right, but they, and the gaming genre of platformers, don’t rule the world like they once did.

21. The end of the era

Why we miss it: A bittersweet farewell that led to other things.

The computers that mesmerized us, educated us, and in many cases, bankrupted us were out-evolved by a species of supposedly better computers and consoles. In the early days, we were amazed to see a few colored blobs flitting around the screen. In those days, we worried that the other guy had eight colors on screen at times when we only had four. A smile would come over our faces when we’d experience something genuinely new. It might be the gameplay or the graphics, or it might be the exciting new burning smell from an external power supply that was way under-specced. We were the first generation that had seen these amazing new things. Yup, we surmised, computers are going to take off.

Okay, it’s easy to feel a bit sad, looking back at the crazy, innovative early days, but why be sad? One thing that computers are certain to do is to continue to improve. After that first wave of machines and concepts, things seemed to die down a bit, though. The thing is, most people reached a point when they had to give up on the machine that they had loved. Yeah, you could spend a fortune upgrading, but beyond a certain point, you’d realize it was time to get a grey box that was much more powerful and able to do the new things you wanted to do. Our grey boxes serve us well, but do we even remember them when we move onto the next one? Are we genuinely surprised by anything a new one does? You move on, but you never fully get over your first love. However, let’s not get too melancholy, as what came next was pretty amazing, quite frankly: the early days of the internet, games with better graphics and bigger worlds, and applications that surpassed the predictions of science fiction.