Evolution of Game Design: Prehistory to the late 1980s

Embark on a captivating journey through gaming history with this online course, tracing the evolution from ancient board games to modern board and arcade games.

This course explores the captivating history of game design, examining the features and applications of the earliest video games, as well as the development of second-generation video game consoles from the 1970s and 1980s.

You will also discover how the American video game industry crash of 1983 paved the way for game developers and game companies around the world—particularly Nintendo and Sega from Japan—to dominate the video game market of the late 1980s and develop the third generation of consoles.

Topics covered include:

• Pre-electronic games
• Birth of an industry
• Explosion and crash
• Rebirth of an industry

This course is based on the Game Design & VFX School at LaSalle College’s Vancouver campus, crowned the #1 undergraduate school in Canada for video game design by the Princeton Review 10 years in a row.

Module 1: Pre-electronic games

• Ancient games
• Commercialization
• The dawn of computers

Module 2: Birth of an industry

• Early computer games
• The Magnavox Odyssey
• Atari
• The Pong era
• Computer games of the 1970s

Module 3: Explosion and crash

• 1976–1983 in video games
• Second-generation consoles and games
• Arcade boom
• The rise of the personal computer
• The crash of 1983

Module 4: Rebirth

• 1984–1989 in video games
• Rumblings overseas
• The 8-bit era
• Ground-breaking console games