1980 In Video Games
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1980 In Video Games
1980 saw the release of a number of games with influential concepts, including '' Pac-Man'', '' Battlezone'', ''Crazy Climber'', ''Mystery House'', ''Missile Command'', ''Phoenix'', ''Rally-X'', ''Space Panic'', '' Stratovox'', ''Zork'', ''Adventure'', and '' Olympic Decathlon''. The year's highest-grossing video game was Namco's arcade game ''Pac-Man'', while the best-selling home system was Nintendo's Game & Watch. The Atari VCS (later called the Atari 2600) also grew in popularity with a port of ''Space Invaders'' and support from new third-party developer Activision. Financial performance * The arcade video game market in the US generates $2.81 billion in revenue ($ adjusted for inflation). * Home video games sell ( adjusted for inflation) in the United States, with the Atari VCS leading the market with a 44% share. Highest-grossing arcade games The following titles were the highest-grossing arcade games worldwide in 1980. Japan and United States In Japan and the Unite ...
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Pac-Man
originally called ''Puck Man'' in Japan, is a 1980 maze action video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called "Power Pellets" causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points. Game development began in early 1979, directed by Toru Iwatani with a nine-man team. Iwatani wanted to create a game that could appeal to women as well as men, because most video games of the time had themes of war or sports. Although the inspiration for the Pac-Man character was the image of a pizza with a slice removed, Iwatani has said he also rounded out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi ( ja, 口). The in-game characters were made to be cute and colorful to appeal to younger p ...
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Space Invaders
is a 1978 shoot 'em up arcade game developed by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan, and licensed to the Midway division of Bally for overseas distribution. ''Space Invaders'' was the first fixed shooter and set the template for the shoot 'em up genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser to earn as many points as possible. Designer Nishikado drew inspiration from North American target shooting games like '' Breakout'' (1976) and ''Gun Fight'' (1975), as well as science fiction narratives such as the novel ''The War of the Worlds'' (1897), the anime ''Space Battleship Yamato'' (1974), and the movie ''Star Wars'' (1977). To complete development of the game, he had to design custom hardware and development tools. Upon release, ''Space Invaders'' was an immediate commercial success; by 1982, it had grossed $3.8 billion (equivalent to over adjusted for inflation ), with a net profit of $ ...
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Asteroids (video Game)
''Asteroids'' is a space-themed multidirectional shooter arcade game designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg released in November 1979 by Atari, Inc. The player controls a single spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy the asteroids and saucers, while not colliding with either, or being hit by the saucers' counter-fire. The game becomes harder as the number of asteroids increases. ''Asteroids'' was conceived during a meeting between Logg and Rains, who decided to use hardware developed by Howard Delman previously used for '' Lunar Lander''. Asteroids was based on an unfinished game titled ''Cosmos''; its physics model, control scheme, and gameplay elements were derived from '' Spacewar!'', '' Computer Space'', and ''Space Invaders'' and refined through trial and error. The game is rendered on a vector display in a two-dimensional view that wraps around both screen axes. ''Asteroids'' was one ...
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CRC Press
The CRC Press, LLC is an American publishing group that specializes in producing technical books. Many of their books relate to engineering, science and mathematics. Their scope also includes books on business, forensics and information technology. CRC Press is now a division of Taylor & Francis, itself a subsidiary of Informa. History The CRC Press was founded as the Chemical Rubber Company (CRC) in 1903 by brothers Arthur, Leo and Emanuel Friedman in Cleveland, Ohio, based on an earlier enterprise by Arthur, who had begun selling rubber laboratory aprons in 1900. The company gradually expanded to include sales of laboratory equipment to chemists. In 1913 the CRC offered a short (116-page) manual called the ''Rubber Handbook'' as an incentive for any purchase of a dozen aprons. Since then the ''Rubber Handbook'' has evolved into the CRC's flagship book, the '' CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics''. In 1964, Chemical Rubber decided to focus on its publishing ventures ...
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Mango Publishing
Mango Publishing is an American book publisher founded in 2014. Company history Mango Publishing was founded by Christopher McKenney in 2014 as an independent book publisher in Miami, Florida. In both 2019 and 2020, Mango was named the fastest growing independent publisher in the United States by ''Publishers Weekly''. The company has a revenue sharing model with its authors, where it provides up to 50% of net sales to its writers. Books and imprints The company publishes books in a variety of genres including non-fiction, young adult, children, self-help, business, science, pop-culture, social justice, LGBTQ, feminism, fiction and poetry. It publishes more than one hundred titles per year. It also partners with companies like Franklin Covey to create add-on books products like themed playing card decks. In 2019 the company acquired Conari Press Red Wheel Weiser Conari, also known in different periods in its history as RedWheel/Weiser, LLC and Samuel Weiser, Inc., is a book pub ...
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McGill–Queen's University Press
The McGill–Queen's University Press (MQUP) is a joint venture between McGill University in Montreal, Quebec and Queen's University at Kingston in Kingston, Ontario. McGill–Queen's University Press publishes original peer-reviewed works in most areas of the social sciences and humanities. It currently has more than 2,500 books in print. For more than twenty-five years, the publishing house has been under the direction of executive director Philip Cercone, a former director of Canada's Awards to Scholarly Publishing Program, the governmental agency that funds scholarly books published in Canada. Under Cercone's guidance, the list has grown to the point where MQUP is sometimes claimed to be Canada's leading academic publisher. For many years, one of its senior editors was the historian and author Donald Akenson. Publications Among the best-known academics to have published with the press are Jacob Neusner, Margaret Somerville, Stéphane Dion, Charles Taylor, Bruce Trigger and ...
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Maze Game
A maze is a path or collection of paths, typically from an entrance to a goal. The word is used to refer both to branching tour puzzles through which the solver must find a route, and to simpler non-branching ("unicursal") patterns that lead unambiguously through a convoluted layout to a goal. The term "labyrinth" is generally synonymous with "maze", but can also connote specifically a unicursal pattern. The pathways and walls in a maze are typically fixed, but puzzles in which the walls and paths can change during the game are also categorised as mazes or tour puzzles. Construction Mazes have been built with walls and rooms, with Hedge maze, hedges, Turf maze, turf, Corn maze, corn stalks, Straw maze, straw bales, books, paving stones of contrasting colors or designs, and brick, or in fields of crops such as cereal, corn or, indeed, maize. Maize mazes can be very large; they are usually only kept for one growing season, so they can be different every year, and are promoted ...
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Midway Games
Midway Games Inc., known previously as Midway Manufacturing and Bally Midway, and commonly known as simply Midway, was an American video game developer and publisher. Midway's franchises included ''Mortal Kombat'', ''Rampage (series), Rampage'', ''Spy Hunter'', ''NBA Jam (series), NBA Jam'', ''Cruis'n (series), Cruis'n'', and ''NFL Blitz''. Midway also acquired the rights to video games that were originally developed by WMS Industries, Williams Electronics and Atari Games, such as ''Defender (video game), Defender'', ''Joust (video game), Joust'', ''Robotron 2084'', ''Gauntlet (series), Gauntlet'', and the ''Rush (video game series), Rush'' series. The company was founded as Midway Manufacturing in 1958, as an amusement game manufacturer. The company was then purchased by Bally Manufacturing in 1969, and used the Bally Midway name in the 1980s. In 1973, Midway moved into the interactive entertainment industry, Video game developer, developing and video game publisher, publishing ...
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Arcade Cabinet
An arcade cabinet, also known as an arcade machine or a coin-op cabinet or coin-op machine, is the housing within which an arcade game's electronic hardware resides. Most cabinets designed since the mid-1980s conform to the Japanese Amusement Machine Manufacturers Association (JAMMA) wiring standard. Some include additional connectors for features not included in the standard. Parts of an arcade cabinet Because arcade cabinets vary according to the games they were built for or contain, they may not possess all of the parts listed below: *A display output, on which the game is displayed. They may display either raster or vector graphics, raster being most common. Standard resolution is between 262.5 and 315 vertical lines, depending on the refresh rate (usually between 50 and 60 Hz). Slower refresh rates allow for better vertical resolution. Monitors may be oriented horizontally or vertically, depending on the game. Some games use more than one monitor. Some newer cabinets h ...
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Arcade Games
An arcade game or coin-op game is a coin-operated entertainment machine typically installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are presented as primarily games of skill and include arcade video games, Pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games or merchandisers. Types Broadly, arcade games are nearly always considered games of skill, with only some elements of games of chance. Games that are solely games of chance, like slot machines and pachinko, often are categorized legally as gambling devices and, due to restrictions, may not be made available to minors or without appropriate oversight in many jurisdictions. Arcade video games Arcade video games were first introduced in the early 1970s, with ''Pong'' as the first commercially successful game. Arcade video games use electronic or computerized circuitry to take input from the player and translate that to an electronic display such as a monitor or telev ...
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Nintendo Of America
is a Japanese multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It develops video games and video game consoles. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produced handmade playing cards. After venturing into various lines of business during the 1960s and acquiring a legal status as a public company, Nintendo distributed its first console, the Color TV-Game, in 1977. It gained international recognition with the release of ''Donkey Kong (video game), Donkey Kong'' in 1981 and the Nintendo Entertainment System and ''Super Mario Bros.'' in 1985. Since then, Nintendo has produced some of the most successful consoles in the video game industry, such as the Game Boy, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Nintendo DS, the Wii, and the Nintendo Switch, Switch. It has created numerous major franchises, including ''Mario (franchise), Mario'', ''Donkey Kong'', ''The Legend of Zelda'', ''Pokémon'', ''Kirby (series), Kirby'', ' ...
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Video Gaming In The United States
Video gaming in the United States is one of the fastest-growing entertainment industries in the country. According to a 2020 study released by the Entertainment Software Association, The yearly economic output of the American video game industry in 2019 was $90.3 billion. supporting over 429,000 American jobs. With an average yearly salary of about $121,000, the latter figure includes over 143,000 individuals who are directly employed by the video game business. Additionally, activities connected to the video game business generate $12.6 billion in federal, state, and local taxes each year. World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025 the American gaming industry will reach $42.3 billion while worldwide gaming industry will possibly reach US$270 billion. In statistics collected by The ESA for the year 2013, a reported 58% of Americans play video games and the average American household now owns at least one dedicated game console, PC or smartphone.
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