Context Through The Years - Notes on Other People's Presentations

Important things during those years.

1984

• AIDS
• AT&T broken up
• First Apple Mac
• Sony and Phillips CD players and 3 and a half inch floppy disks
• Video Games Crash 1983-1985. Due to the popularity of home computers there was a drop of 97% revenue, 70 top banks went into liquidation, the saturation of poor games lost confidence in consumers.
• Bob Geldoff - Do They Know It's Christmas - Band Aid
• Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Primus and Soundgarden formed
• Spitting Image, Terminator, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Nightmare on Elm Street, Spinal Tap and Nausicaa came out
• Miners strike caused 100,000 job losses
• Brighton hotel bombing, attempt by the IRA to assassinate Margaret Thatcher
• Womens peace camp
• TETRIS - first entertainment software imported from the USSR to the US
• Kings Quest, NES Zapper, 1942, Paperboy and Punch-Out released
• ET Game - took six weeks to make, 2.5 - 3.5 million copies were left unsold

1986

• Zelda, Metroid, Arkanoid and Castlevania were released
• Ubisoft, Bethesda and Codemasters were founded, also Square becomes independent 
• Technological butterfly effect
• First chipset, IMB chip - IBM
• Atari 7800, 101 keyboard and the CDi player were released
• US air strike against Libya
• Nuclear arms race - USSR v US
• Chernobyl crisis happened
• AIDS awareness campaign
• First around the world flight
• Duran Duran and Guns N' Roses formed
• M25 was completed
• Sex Discrimination Act and Race Relations Act
• Economic uncertainty

1989

• 4th generation of gaming 1985-1989
• Gameboy and Master System came out
• Nightmare on Elm Street on the PC dos, Prince of Persia and Back to The Future came out
• Home and Away debuts
• Rain Man came out
• Lockerbie memorial
• Disney MGM studios theme park
• Kegworth air disaster, HIllsborough disaster
• John Cleese won libe case
• Unemployment level below 7%
• Salman Rushdie - satanic verses - assassination attempts, Hitoshi Igarashi died
• Margaret Thatcher's 10th year as PM
• November 9th, Berlin wall falls

1990

• Still in keeping with 80's fashion
• Ice Ice Baby and U Can't Touch This in charts
• Railway Tycoon started the genre of 'Tycoon' games
• Civilisations was released
• Clive Barker, Church of Satan, Jurassic Park
• Mr. Bean, Law and Order, Lord of The Flies, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands and Jacobs Ladder were released
• Poll tax riots, Margaret Thatcher resigned, John Major came in
• Nelson Mandella was released, Gorbachov wins nobel peace prize
• Germany was reunited
• WWW launched - went public in 1993
• SNES came out, as did the Super FX chip
• Hubble telescope launched

2000

• Progression in technology - games cost more to produce
• Reminiscing on past and future
• (Big think)
• Millennium dome
• Socialnomics - The need to interact with each other, work with technology not just use it
• Hip Hop popular in 2000 - music made for ringtones