1980s hardware requirements video games

Well now, lemme tell ya ’bout them video games back in the 1980s. Them young’uns today, they wouldn’t even know what to do with them old machines. We didn’t have no fancy this and that, no sir. It was all simple, but boy, was it fun!

Back then, if you wanted to play a game, you had to have a machine, what they called a console, or sometimes a computer. And these machines, they weren’t like them sleek things they got now. They was big, clunky things, most of ’em. And the games, they came on cartridges, big ol’ plastic things you had to shove in the machine. None of this downloading stuff, no siree!

• The Atari 2600, that was a big one. Everyone and their brother wanted one of them. It played games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Simple games, but you could spend hours playin’ ’em.
• Then there was the Nintendo Entertainment System, the NES they called it. That came along a little later. That thing was a game changer, let me tell ya. Mario and Zelda, those games started on that old box. And they’re still makin’ ’em today, can ya believe it?

Now, about what you needed to run these games. It wasn’t like today where you need a whole heap of gigabytes and whatnots. We didn’t even know what a gigabyte was back then!

Most of them machines, they had kilobytes of memory, that’s like a tiny little bit compared to what they got now. Maybe a few hundred kilobytes, or if you were really fancy, maybe a megabyte or two. But that was enough for them games. They weren’t fancy, like I said, but they didn’t need to be. They was fun just the way they were.

And the processors, they weren’t nothing like today neither. They was slow, real slow compared to what they got now. But again, it was enough for the games. We didn’t need no fancy graphics or nothin’. Just good ol’ gameplay, that’s what mattered.

You know, them arcade games, they were a big deal too. Places packed with those machines. You’d go down there with a pocketful of quarters and play all day long. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga… all them classics. They didn’t need much hardware neither, just enough to make them lights blink and them little fellers move around on the screen. And those machines were tough, built like tanks they were, ’cause you know kids, they can be rough on things.

The thing is, back then, games were just games. We didn’t worry about all this technical stuff. We just plugged it in and played. And we had a blast doing it. It wasn’t about how many polygons or how fancy the graphics were. It was about having fun. And we sure did have fun.

The eighties, they called it the golden age of video games, and I reckon they were right. It was a special time. Things were simpler then, and the games were too. But that’s what made them so great. You didn’t need no fancy computer or a whole heap of memory. Just a machine, a game, and a little bit of imagination, and you were good to go.

And you know, a lot of them games they make today, they still based on them old games from the eighties. Mario, Zelda, all them fellers, they still around. Shows you how good them games really were, don’t it? They stood the test of time, they did.

So yeah, that’s what it was like back in the eighties. Simple machines, simple games, but a whole lot of fun. And you didn’t need much to get ‘em running, just a little bit of this and that, and a whole lotta heart.

Tags：[1980s, video games, hardware, Atari, NES, arcade, memory, processor, gaming history, retro gaming]