As I sat outside with my family watching the beautiful (and illegal) fireworks light up the sky, it got me thinking about how beautiful are games are nowadays. Before they were just tiny sprites on a screen forever stuck in a side scrolling motion. Now we have full blown massive open world games. They have beautiful trees, buildings and skies. It's truly marvelous how well detailed and real looking these seem. So I thought I would go ahead and give you an example of a game from a certain time period up until today. This is video games and graphics compared throughout time. (Viewers beware! Happy Fourth to you!)
1970's
Pong was one of the first games ever made. In fact it is an offspring off of the very first actual game. Sadly I could not find any images of it, so this is all I could do. The items on screen are all blocky and very much simple shapes. The screen showed little else besides this. This was the start of video games for how we know them today.
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1975
Five years later and video games are still a fairly new concept. They were fun but not something that immersed you for hours. One game from the year 1975 is Gun Fight. Gun Fight looks very similar to Pong, however there are more defined shapes. Things actually resembled things from real life. This itself was a massive improvement from the games before.
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1980
Fast forward another five years and we welcome one of the first memorable games to ever exist. In the year 1980 Pac-Man was introduced to the world. It was an addicting games that became a hit in arcades everywhere. More important than this was the advanced AI ghosts that each had their own move sets. This made the game extremely challenging. The games at this point in time started to show a extremely diverse color spectrum and even better sprites.
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1985
While it is true Pac-Man became a smash hit, another game came a few years after and blew it and anything before it out of the water. Super Mario Bros. came out in 1985 and wowed the world with its bright colors and amazing game play. The main character was movable in seemingly impossible ways and the levels were diverse and fun to play through. Anyone who had this game at the time was the cool kid. More importantly video games were becoming even closer to what they are today with the colors and shapes.
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1990
This is the year that Final Fantasy 3 came out to the public. No longer were games simple side scrollers. Now they gave the player complete open freedom to explore a world as they wanted. They had a color cast of characters and scaring looking beasts. You could see details on trees and what clothes each character wore. It was an amazing product of technology at the time.
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1995
Chrono Trigger is a wonderful game that I would recommend to anyone who is a fan of rpgs. It has a wonderful cast and story, but it also has a beautiful world. It looks like a further updated version of Final Fantasy 3 that came five years before. Everything was more detailed and you could see water and cliffs extremely well. This game is a must play not only for it's wonderful story, but it's colorful world as well.
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2000
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was a sequel to it's predecessor Ocarina of Time. It is another game that I say is a must play. It was a full 3D open world with plenty of monsters and puzzles to fight through. The story is something that is worth the time as well. Games at this point in time had finally made the switch to 3D realms. Everything continued to look more real and people were doubting games could get more realistic.
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2005
Video games during this stage in time started to show a slow down in graphics improvement. They were becoming so realistic it was impossible to foresee it come this far from 35 years ago. In such a short time we went from sprites to full worlds. Shadow of the Colossus is a game that truly proved how far we came at that time. It was a land mark in how far we could push games.
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2010
In the year 2010, we got a view into a post apocalyptic world. Fallout New Vegas came out as one of the best in its series. People say this is where it evolved itself and set the stride for its successor Fallout 4. (I myself feel that it was indeed Fallout 3 that did this. I do agree that New Vegas did set up everything for a better game in general though.) This world that it showed us was a barren, destroyed one. It's mountains and people felt real and it scared us about the thoughts of an actual nuclear war. It would probably look similar to that.
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2015
The Witcher: Wild Hunt 3 is one of the most recent open world games to come out. It is a game that many praise for it's beautiful world. I want you to stop and go back to the 1970's. Look at the game Pong then come back here. Look how far we have come in only 45 years. In such a short time we have games that went from literal blocks to a game as real and beautiful as this. You can see the individual hairs on his horses tail. It really is amazing once you try to comprehend it.
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Now
This is the peak of gaming now. The graphics are literally becoming hard to tell from real life. We are heading into the age of virtual reality. Soon we will be able to dive into games fully and actually be apart of the games we love. Don't believe me? Look at this image form 2017's Prey. Look at the detail in his eye. How much closer can we get before it is considered real? We are at the point of pushing games to becoming something that is hard to tell apart from real life.
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I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane. It is a way to look back and appreciate landmarks in gaming history. Everything here is truly art that gets more and more beautiful with time. It will soon become indistinguishable to real life. I hope you can look back like me and awe about how far we have come. That's all for now, and have a wonder Fourth with your families.
Thanks to the wonderful companies and workers who put countless hours into these games! The effort you put into them to entertain us is astounding and really touching. Thank you for reading this post of mine! If you liked my post please up-vote, resteem, and follow me for future content! I really appreciate the support.