If you haven’t seen this video, it’s the entire history of video games, every twenty years, done entirely in one constantly rotating shot. And it’s awesome. But how historically accurate is it? Let’s take it by decade.
1950s: Pinball
It’s easy to forget that pinball has a nearly hundred year history, especially since it’s dying fast. But in 1950, it was literally the only game in town. That or pinochle, we guess, but have you ever played pinochle? There’s a reason even old people hate it.
Not that video games weren’t starting to be developed, but they were limited to enormous mainframe computers, and they made “Pong” look complex. Pinball was everywhere and had been since the 1930s. By the ’50s, flippers had been added, meaning it was actually a game of skill now instead of firing the ball as hard as you could up a chute.
How accurate is the video? Mystery Guitar Man actually bothered to find a machine that was properly designed with electromechanical relays instead of solid-state electronics. It’s “State Fair,” first manufactured in 1948.
1970s: Atari
Yeah, this pretty much sums the ’70s in gaming. It’s easy to forget now, in light of the, well, constant failures Atari has experienced since the early ’80s (Jaguar, anyone?), but during the ’70s, they were the single biggest company in video games. They built the first arcade games, introduced the first home console … and triggered the first market crash in gaming.
But this is all about the happy times, not bad corporate decisions, and the fact that MGM is playing what seems to be a version of “Breakout,” i.e. a video game that almost everybody owns and plays (you might know it better as “Arkanoid”, or “Alleyway”, or any of a dozen ripoffs) just adds to the nostalgia factor.
We kinda wish he’d been playing ET, though.
1990s: Super Nintendo and Mario
This is actually weirdly precise: 1990 is both the year the Super Nintendo — a system that would dominate gaming for nearly ten years, came out — and also the year “Super Mario Brothers 3,” one of the greatest video games of all time, came out.
Of course, “Super Mario Brothers 3” came out of the NES, not the Super Nintendo, and didn’t come to the Super Nintendo until 1993. But, hey, at least he didn’t try to pretend to play Sonic on a Super Nintendo. Also, looking at the game, we’re pretty sure somebody got greenscreened into a Mario background, which brings back horrific memories of “motion-capture” gaming, where that was just taking photos of some stunt man and hoping it looked convincing. It didn’t.
2010s: Rock Band
We can’t blame a musician for thinking music games define the 2010s in video gaming … but that’s not really the case. MTV is trying to sell off the Rock Band franchise after barely breaking even, and Guitar Hero has been put on “hiatus”.
We would have chosen to use the Wii, ourselves. Although since that’s been sinking like a rock too, maybe he was right to choose one he actually liked.