1985-1989
Here come
the new challengers

After the crash of 1983, video game consoles had become a dirty word in the US – neither retailers nor parents were willing to spend money on one. But where people saw a dead fad, SEGA and Nintendo saw an opportunity to cross the seas and conquer a new market.

Nintendo's solution was to sell their Famicom console not as a video game console, but as a toy – a “Nintendo Entertainment System” (aka NES), bundled with a Zapper Light Gun and ROB, a plastic robot that would assist players in some games (and was quickly abandoned after release).

Still, Nintendo's masterstroke was the “Nintendo Seal of Quality”, the company's answer to the countless bad, buggy and sometimes even obscene “shovelware” games that flooded the market. Now Nintendo guaranteed the quality of each game they published, and a lockout chip prevented other companies from releasing unlicensed NES games. This would reshape the console industry and become the new norm, with developers now being forced to sign deals with console companies.

These tactics, together with a library of titles like Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, Mega Man and Final Fantasy made the NES a cultural phenomena, resurrecting game consoles.

Meanwhile, computers were also facing a change of guard. A new generation of personal computers arrived, led by the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. They brought in massive improvements in performance, audio and graphics, but the outstanding revolution was the adoption of the mouse and Graphical User Interfaces. This allowed home computers to become more intuitive and accessible, as even a child could drag the mouse across the screen to click on objects and icons.

While IBM PC-Compatibles remained the most popular platform, they also faced several changes. In 1985, Intel released its i386 processor and Compaq quickly incorporated it in its DeskPro 386, gaining market by producing an IBM clone more advanced than IBM's own machines.

IBM tried to recover its throne with the PS2 family in 1987. It was an innovative machine, with an all-new operational system (OS/2), new ports and a new VGA graphics card that allowed it to rival the Amiga and ST. However, IBM doomed itself by trying to enforce a proprietary architecture in order to regain control over the clones. Simply put, IBM's new machine wasn't IBM PC-Compatible. It faced severe backlash and only further increased the dominance of clones, who managed to replicate its features without relying on IBM.

Overall, the second half of the 80s brought in a wave of innovation that revitalised the whole industry, setting the foundations for the creative explosion that would follow in the 90s.