Technological leaps were huge
The difference between the Atari 2600 and the NES in terms of visual fidelity is pretty stark. Where Atari’s machine could only render vague shapes at best, Nintendo’s, by comparison, offered immersive, colorful worlds to get lost in. Indeed, you can trace the NES’ legacy of increasing graphical fidelity all the way to today’s consoles, which not only offer excellent 3D graphics but also the opportunity to use built-in web browsers to hunt for 2020 hidden coupons for Springbok Casino. That ability started with the NES and its range of quite brilliant peripherals and add-ons. Thanks to the NES, video games as we know them today can exist.The games were excellent
Pick a classic franchise and the chances are it got its start in the 1980s. Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, and even Resident Evil all have their beginnings in this decade. Of course, upstarts like Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty would define a generation of gaming, but even as they established dominance over the gaming landscape, Mario and Zelda continued to enthrall gamers around the world. Many franchises from the 80s have now sadly died or faded away, but not before they started entire movements in and of themselves; games like Koji Igarashi’s Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night couldn’t exist without 1986’s Castlevania.Multiplayer was easy
Thanks to the NES’ support for multiple controllers (which, to be fair, the Atari 2600 also offered), multiplayer gaming enjoyed a massive boom in the 1980s. The NES had an absolute smorgasbord of multiplayer games that you could experience with friends, and even some of the most popular games of the time, like Super Mario Bros. 3, could be enjoyed multiplayer. In Japan, Nintendo even pioneered the Famicom Network System, an early online gaming prototype that could be used to access cheats for games as well as stock reports, weather updates, and more. The 1980s truly provided the blueprint for gaming as we know it today.Creativity reigned supreme
Today’s triple-A video games can feel like committee-designed projects that don’t bear the stamp of a single creative vision. That was not the case in the 1980s. Granted, games like Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda were the results of creative teams working in tandem, but those teams tended to be relatively small thanks to the meager graphics '80s gaming machines could muster. Today, creative or progressive ideas can be left out of games because of a fear they wouldn’t help the product sell, but in the '80s the gaming landscape was more of a wilderness and resembled the modern indie scene. This wasn’t necessarily better, but it certainly made big-budget productions more interesting.First-person shooters were born
Some point to Software’s Doom or Wolfenstein 3D as the progenitors of the first-person shooter genre, but there was another game that could lay claim to this title. 1987’s MIDI Maze was a Pac-Man style maze game viewed from a first-person perspective. It offered local area network multiplayer via a MIDI interface and was the first game to do so. In this way, MIDI Maze predates modern shooters more closely than Doom or Wolfenstein do. True FPS games wouldn’t come around until the aforementioned titles in the early 90s, but without MIDI Maze, it’s hard to imagine modern stalwarts like Halo or Call of Duty having the vice grip they do.PC gaming enjoyed a renaissance
