The bullfight begins, the start of the video game industry in Spain.
To make an analysis on a subject like video games in my country is somewhat chaotic because there is no specific beginning where I can put a starting line, but as the industry and technology advanced and took hold in homes is that you began to see a certain interest of the average public in the video game, some entrepreneurs understood very well that the technology had potential in the future and invested in the first exporting companies of arcades, Although the arcades looked very good from a distance, the truth is that the first records of video games made by Spanish developers came a little later but it would launch an industry that to this day demonstrates the passion for video games and is one of the countries that plays the most video games.
The technology that would cause an explosion in terms of development and investment in video games in Spain and practically all of Europe would be the microprocessors that would become the precursors of modern personal computers, they did not have much use apart from being first an educational tool
In one of these exchanges, a Spanish company decided to publish an advertisement where they encouraged local developers to send them video games to market them, at this time the new video game developers were not employees in a company but simply most made their game at home and then put it on a disc and send it to the company to market them and depending on sales was that they would make a profit, in this informal way in 1983 is that the first developments made in spain were put on sale, The Spectrum which was at that time the gateway for many to the computer became a phenomenon for young people who saw in the newspapers as the years passed more and more developers embarked on the adventure of developing video games and sell it to Publishers and although most of them did not come to fruition, it was a solid start to the fever of development in Spain.
Although this is not the beginning of an industry as such, it is a very relevant basis for the coming years, the company Dynamics was one of the first to define a business model around video games and national developments, thus born the formal Publishers, who hired employees to make video games for the company while signing developers to publish their work, Dinamics had an overwhelming development from the beginning, coinciding with the opening of the first specialized video game media in the country, which although most of them covered the industry in the United States, had an important role in the massification of video games in the country.
These are only the first steps of the video game in the country, as I said before, arcades had not yet arrived in Europe, so a second wave is coming where the foreigner is the one that sets the pace and leaves the national developers to absorb all the game modalities from abroad, Japanese companies like Nintendo and Sega are coming to make their way in these sides, which in first instances are not very successful but titles like Mario Bros or Zelda would eventually tip the balance and develop an attractive market for many competitors of the company, there is still a long way to go for that, Spain is a territory where the video game has had many faces so I hope to make a second part of this post discussing the later years, until then I leave you with some interesting information!
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