The Video Game Newsroom Time Machine is a weekly retro gaming podcast in which we travel back in time to see what was making headlines 40, 30, and 20 years ago in the arcade, video game, and computer gaming business and interview industry veterans.
We try to put those events into historical context to understand how the industry of today came to be.
It's fun and educational! (in case you need to justify listening to it to a significant other)
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Feb 15, 2019
AMD wants in on the hot new microcomputer action
The GDC is born
PCs are coming to rescue the arcade
These stories and many more on this month's episode of the Video Game Newsroom time Machine
We look back at the biggest stories in and around the video game
industry in February of 1979, 1989, 1999.
As always, I'll mostly be using magazine cover dates for the 20 and
30 year jumps, while relying on newspaper articles and historical
documents for the 40 year jump, as there weren't many dedicated
gaming publications on the market yet.
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Or
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1979:
AMD profiled in NYT
Arcades start accepting credit cards
Atari wants to know if local laws are limiting arcades
1989:
Dragon's Lair gets released on 16 bit computers
The Sam Coupe is announced
SNES/Super Famicom is revealed and is to be backward compatible
Top Rider has an amazing peripheral
The first Game Developes Conference is held
1999:
Dreamcast launch numbers come in from Japan
Arcade sales are down
The Arcade-PC is the great white hope
Daikatana gets delayed... again
Microsoft buys up FASA and kills Shadowrun: Assassin
Diamond launches the Rio MP3 player
Corrections: Super Hang-On was released in 1987
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/25/archives/the-metamorphosis-of-a-salesman-sanders-is-taking-amd-beyond.html
http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/a-fairchild-story/
https://archive.org/details/Atari_Coin_Connection_Volume_3_Number_2_February_1979
https://archive.org/details/Computer_Video_Games_Issue_088_1989-02_EMAP_Publishing_GB
https://gamingreinvented.com/uncategorized/the-snes-was-supposed-to-be-backwards-compatible/
https://archive.org/details/crash-magazine-61
https://www.retrogamer.net/profiles/hardware/sam-coupe/
https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_56
https://archive.org/details/NEXT_Generation_50
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1085243/000133248907000015/asoriginallyfiledmodified.htm
https://www.virtra.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20000619155817/http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg-daikatana/index.html
https://archive.org/details/PCJoker0299
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300