Ahoy: A Brief History of...

The entire history of video games, from their earliest origins all the way up to the end of the seventh generation, in 2013. Emerging from engineering experimentation, the earliest titles such as Tennis for Two, Space War! and Pong helped to establish the roots of the industry. Early arcade classics built on this, with titles like Breakout, Space Invaders, Asteroids and Pac-Man breaking into the mainstream and remaining legendary today. Early PC titles such as Maze War, Zork and Rogue helped define new genres: and while Atari 2600 version of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial might have been disappointing, hobbyist coders continued with aplomb - giving rise to titles like Elite, Exile and Tetris. The video game crash of 1983 dampened the home market, but arcades remained strong: Donkey Kong, Dig-Dug, Pole-Position, Q*Bert and Mario Bros. all successfully sucking quarters from people's pockets. The mid-80s saw the rise of the Nintendo home console, starting with Super Mario Brothers and continuing with games like The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Metroid, Mega-Man, Metal Gear and Final Fantasy. Dragon's Lair use of laserdisc technology gave the arcade unit graphics like none other - but a new wave of 16-bit machines would wow home users, with games such as Dungeon Master, Sim City, Shadow of The Beast and The Secret of Monkey Island. The 1990s saw the 16-bit machines come into their own, with colourful sprites of a scale not seen before: Sonic The Hedgehog, Street Fighter 2, and Lemmings. Strategy games did well in this era, with the first instalment of Sid Meier's Civilization and the XCOM turn-based alien tactics of UFO: Enemy Unknown. Dune 2 saw the dawn of the RTS genre, and Wolfenstein 3D did something similar for first person shooters, and marks id's genre-defining path through Doom and Quake. Myst was a mite more sedate, Tekken was a 3D rival to Street Fighter, Marathon a Macintosh rival to Doom and Star Fox invited barrel rolls aplenty.

Bloody video games. They've caused their fair share of drama over the years, with violent action and gory killing attributed to all kinds of societal harm. These days, a certain amount of bloodshed is tolerated - but not so long ago a splash of red pixels was all it took to start a fuss. Join me as I prepare to dive knee deep into blood, guts, and video games. Covered are classic horror titles such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the Atari 2600 and torture-themed light gun game Chiller: action shooters such as the digital rendition of Charles Bronson in Death Wish 3, Ikari Warriors; Decapitation in Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior, demon slaying in Splatterhouse and exploding drug barons in the 32-bit Narc. Tecmo Knight was a decapitation-laden beat-em up, Space Gun and Beast Busters rail shooters with liberal dismemberment and copious blood. The dawn of Full Motion Video spawned games like Night Trap, and the realistic digitised sprites of Mortal Kombat: with the violent fatalities courting controversy - and leading to the formation of the ESRB. MK also spawned a number of clones, including Blood Warrior, Time Killers and Eternal Champions on the Mega Drive and Mega CD. The rise of the FPS genre in the 90s followed in the footsteps of the violent shooters of the late 80s - such titles would cement the word 'gib' into the gaming lexicon. Doom saw enemies explode into a red paste, Rise of The Triad flung eyeballs at the screen with its ludicrous gibs - and Quake features the first seen polygonal gibs. Gibbing became the hallmark of the genre, with most later examples permitting the reduction of your opponents into fleshy chunks - at least until ragdoll physics took hold. Meanwhile horror adventure games such as Phantasmagoria and Harvester took advantage of CD-ROM's storage to use realistic death scenes - and survival horror games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill saw bloody scenes to ramp up tension. Both Carmageddon and Thrill K

From naïve origins to the rise of cinematic realism: an account of graphical milestones in video games.