Bringing the games home: the console revolution

The migration of gaming from the arcade to the lounge-room caused a huge sensation during the early 80s, although it wasn’t until the middle of the decade that the movement stabilised and began to grow into the billion dollar industry we know it as today. Leading the charge at the start of the decade was Atari, and their flagship console the 2600, which boasted game titles and industrial design superior to its dozens of imitators and competitors. The design that most people would be familiar with is the third generation of the console, released in 1980.

The casing was fairly minimalist, predominately black with wood-grain paneling and featured four switches and a cartridge port (the first to do so). In these pre-control pad years, the 2600 came with a joystick that featured one big bright orange button that was able to withstand furious thumb thrashings. While the console received numerous design refreshments and system upgrades during its time, this classic casing remains one of the most iconic from the decade.

The Atari logo was a carry-over from the 70s and is still one of the most instantly recognizable in the industry. It is made up of one straight line running down the middle and a curved line on either side, both joining the centre line at the end. The Atari font, which was also used on the majority of their game packaging is a bespoke design, largely influenced by the Bauhaus family of typefaces. It has that quasi-futuristic feel of science fiction books and films of the period. Packaging for the 2600 carries many of the hallmarks of the decade including the use of a rainbow motif. In the case of the 2600, it’s a fairly restrained single block line beneath the logo, however if you look at any console packing or advertising from the decade, you’re bound to see rainbow colours used (and overused) in some way.

Atari rose to prominence with their console adaptation of Pac Man, still one of the most recognisable and successful game franchises of all time. Pac Man became a cultural phenomenon and helped the Atari 2600 reign at the top of the console heap. While the Atari 2600 dominated the first half of the decade, it met its demise during the video games crash of 1983, a commercial disaster that Atari played a huge hand in. Ultimately the combination of rushed, poorly designed titles, such as the colossal flop E.T – an almost unplayable adaptation of the film – and a market which had become flooded by consoles, lead to the industry effectively coming to a screeching halt.

It wasn’t until two years later when Japanese company Nintendo released their breakthrough device, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), that the industry began to roar back to life. This next generation of consoles were remarkably different beasts to those that came earlier in the decade, making those forerunners look like relics in just a few short years. Designed by Masayuki Uemura, the NES featured a much more futuristic look than the 2600, with the black and woodgrain superseded by grey, white and red, and the cumbersome, inflexible joystick replaced with a more logical flat control pad.

It was a little Italian plumber named Mario who helped Nintendo cement their place in video game history, and to continue as one of the world’s most successful console and game development studios to this day. Following his modest but unforgettable first appearance in the original Donkey Kong arcade game, the character and his universe was expanded into the game Super Mario Brothers, the first of many breakthrough hits for Nintendo. The graphic and sound design of this and other new titles blew away anything that came before. While still primitive by today’s standards, they featured sprites and animation that actually began to resemble real life objects and interactions. These developments combined with advances in plot and characterisation were ultimately more immersive and enjoyable for the gamer.

Numerous studios and developers soon jumped on this new wave, with even Atari introducing new consoles in an attempt to climb back to the top. Their 7800 model, the result of thousands of focus groups and market studies, featured much sleeker design, expansion ports, and the ability to play 2600 games. Newcomers Sega would release no less than three major consoles before the end of the decade, the Master System, it’s successor the Mega Drive and finally the Genesis. While all three units were technically superior to the NES, boasting better graphics and sound quality, they simply didn’t have the blockbuster titles of Nintendo. Sega also seemed to lack the design finesse and clear vision of Nintendo, and both systems looked considerably more dated than the NES.

Both Sega and Nintendo launched highly desirable accessory upgrades over the years, including steering wheels, 3-D glasses and laser guns. Most famous (or infamous) of these was the disastrous Power Glove, a cumbersome, imprecise and hard to use controller that was literally worn as a glove. Despite the poor critical and commercial reception of the glove, the technology behind it paved the way for the revolutionary Nintendo Wii.

While the start of the decade was all about funky colour and cartoony design, the second half seemed more concerned with presenting a vision of the future. Nintendo had a particularly active and aggressive campaign, which featured bolts of lightning, exploding televisions, eerie mists and the message that you the gamer could harness the power of new technology. It may seem incredibly cheesy now, but ultimately it must have worked, as the company continued to dominate the Japanese, American and world markets well into the early 90s.

Want to play some games now?

Play classic NES games online
Play classic Atari (and arcade) games online

Australian album art in the 80′s part 1: the illustrated band

80s illustration in Australia was dominated by artists such as Reg Mombasa, Ken Done, Alex Stitt and Michael Leunig, all bringing their unique, expressionistic take on Australian life to the world stage. There seems to be a genuine attempt to try and create an ‘Australian style’ of illustration during this time. You can see the influence of the colours and shapes of the Australian landscape, as well as the movement and cultural diversity of the cities throughout the illustrations of this period. It’s all brilliantly rendered with the use of strong palettes, bold line work and rich texture.

While it might not be the aesthetic most commonly associated with 80’s album covers, you don’t have to search too hard to find some incredible examples of illustrated art created for some of our biggest musical exports. With their simple concepts, honest design, and masterful illustrations, these are some truly unforgettable covers.

The classic Icehouse record ‘Man of Colours’ (1987) has one of the decade’s most iconic and striking covers, featuring a barely-there outline of a man holding three coloured flowers. Designed by band mates Iva Davies and Robert Kretschmer, it’s a striking example of both minimalist design and illustration.

In contrast there’s all the beautiful detail, complexity and theatricality of Crowded House’s self-titled debut (1986), with illustration and design by bassist Nick Seymour. Seymour went on to illustrate all future Crowded House records, creating one of the most original and beloved identities for an Australian band.

Little River Band’s ‘Monsoon’ (1998) and the Hunters & Collectors 1984 album ‘Jaws of Life’ both compliment each other nicely, respectively taking their visual inspiration from the outback’s extreme wet and dry seasons. There’s an almost primitive approach to the illustration, with simple forms drawn in a rough, raw style. The texture of the materials used becomes part of the illustration itself.

Illustrated typography is also a strong feature on most of these covers and is beautifully integrated on both the Crowded House and Little River Band covers.

Designing the 80s: arcade machines

The history of the arcade machine spans nearly 100 years, with its roots in coin-operated, turn-of-the-century amusement park midway games. By the 1950s pinball machines (sans electronics) had well and truly become a phenomenon, setting the foundations for both the burgeoning youth gaming culture and the billion-dollar games industry. While the revolution had been slowly gathering momentum, it become a juggernaut by the end of the 70s following the introduction of the computer chip and Nolan Bushnell’s revolutionary cabinet design.

Attempts to harness the seemingly limitless potential of computerized gaming began in earnest in the early 80’s. Leading the charge was PacMan, not only a massively popular game but a worldwide cultural phenomenon spawning every conceivable form of spin-off merchandise. While the graphics and gameplay had evolved only slightly from 70’s classics like Pong and Space Invaders, the real jump in evolution was character design. In many ways PacMan set the template for the game franchise.

Following PacMan was another gaming legend, Donkey Kong. Again only a small step forward in both graphics and gameplay, but a leap ahead in storytelling and character development. Donkey Kong also featured the first appearance of Mario, then known simply as Jumpman. From these humble beginnings, Mario went on to become a fully realized character, arguably the most endearing in gaming history, with his own universe and cast of supporting characters. Mario continues to to sell dozens of his own titles, and has appeared in an endless stream of merchandise tie-ins, including a feature film.

The enormous success of these early arcade pioneers saw massive developments in all areas of game design. The limitations of the early games, which largely consisted of pushing a joystick around to move a pixelated character around the screen and out of danger, soon became far more sophisticated and immersive. Games such as Pole Position, Street Fighter & Dragon’s Lair all contributed to revolutionizing every aspect of gameplay. The minimalist, two button machines of the 70’s with their Bauhaus inspired typography and monochrome interface swiftly became antiques, replaced by bold and brash game franchises, with rich pixelated worlds to explore and joysticks, guns and steering wheels with which to explore them.

Arcade cabinets also received numerous design revisions. Hoods became recessed, screens became larger, and more sophisticated controls were added. By the end of the decade there were entirely new game machines including ride on bikes as well as ski and boxing emulators. More attention was also given to graphic design and illustration, with cabinets literally covered in game franchise art. While these advancements in design and technology were fully embraced by gamers, a great part of the arcade experience was standing before one of the more traditional machines with a crowd of people behind you cheering you on.

The culture of arcade gaming exploded throughout the decade. Arcade machines were everywhere – shopping centres, take-aways, bars, movie theaters and of course in their own arcade stores. It became a social sport, with high scores as the ultimate goal. Towards the middle of the decade, the console revolution began to take gamers out of the arcades and back into the lounge-room, however the massive popularity of arcade machines and amusement centres like Playtime continued into the early 90s. While the home gaming experience offered numerous advantages, anyone who stood in front of an arcade machine during the 80s with a pocket full of change will fondly recall the sensory overload of flashing lights, buzzing noises, and the thrill of getting your three-letter name abbreviation in the high score charts.

Links:
Build your own arcade kit
See an amazingly tiny homemade arcade

No hairspray, just riffs: the 80s underground metal scene

Ask someone who wasn’t really into heavy metal in the 1980s what’s the first thing they think of when they think of 80s metal and they’ll usually say hair bands, Bon Jovi, Europe or Poison. Fair enough. All these bands, correctly or not, were referred to as metal in much of the press. Ask an 80s metal head the same question and none of these bands will get a mention.

Heavy metal in the early 1980s in Australia was rare commodity. Certainly the only records in the hard rock section of a suburban record store would be Deep Purple, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and if you were lucky maybe some Rainbow or Whitesnake. Once hearing these bands though, if your proclivity was for big riffs, a deep, driving rhythm section, un-subtle vocals, then you knew you had to find more than the scant mainstream offerings.

Finding like-minded bangers was the key. Once you had a denim jacket, and started growing your hair, other headbangers would call out to you in the street. You were part of a brotherhood (unfortunately, particularly in the early 80s, not many females were into metal), and all that mattered was that you dug the music.

Tape trading was big. Records were expensive, so sharing music was the best way to expand your metal universe. And the more obscure the better. Very little was happening in Australia in the early 1980s, but in the UK and Europe there was an explosion. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal, as the UK music press termed it, saw a mess of bands taking the aggression and rawness of the punk movement, and meshing it with the technicality of earlier prog rock. Iron Maiden, Saxon, Samson, Motorhead, Girlschool, Diamond Head, Judas Priest, and Tank are just a small example of this movement. Of course most of these bands were not on major labels, and certainly not locally released, so the only place to get their records was at import record stores. Utopia, which opened in Sydney in 1978, was one that catered specifically to the metal market. Impact Imports came pretty close for Canberra headbangers. Both these stores became hangouts of metal heads, keen to get hold of new releases, rarities, and to hangout with other metallers.

Bands started to come onto the live circuit in Australia. Venues such as the St James Tavern, Seven Hills Inn, and The Royal Sutherland in Sydney hosted regular metal nights. Most of the bands in the early to mid 1980s were more hard rock than metal, and lacked the impact that was on a lot of the albums coming out of the UK and Europe (and even some of the LA bands – Van Halen, Motley Crue, WASP, Ratt).

Then two American underground metal bands’ releases found their way to Aussie headbangers: Slayer and Metallica. Everything changed. These bands, and others that soon came (Anthrax, Death Angel, Exodus, Testament, Megadeth) had harnessed all the heavy music that had come before and smashed into something that was the quintessence of metal music. There was a lot more of the punk element there. Totally raw, no more singing about girls and cars, super fast blast-beats, down-stroked riffing, and no regard for the commercial market. Local scenes responded. In Sydney, Slaughter Lord, Death Mission, Mortal Sin, and later Addictive, Enticer, Detriment and Cromok all started playing what was termed thrash metal at local venues. The scene grew, and many more bands entered the scene: Frozen Doberman, Tribe Maelstrom, White Trash, Netherhyde.

Meanwhile in the States, another scene was burgeoning. Quick of the heels of the success of Motley Crue, Ratt, Dokken, WASP and the like, glam – a throw-back to the 1970s rock genre – bands started springing up putting more emphasis on image than on music. This was getting attention from record companies. Unlike thrash, glam metal had commercial appeal. Band members groomed themselves – albeit to look as feminine as possible – and itched for publicity. The music was basic, and back to singing about girls and cars. Many got signed though, and MTV was keen to put music clips on heavy rotation. Poison, Cinderella, and of course, Bon Jovi.

Because these bands were essentially rock, and juxtaposed with the pop music of the time, their music was considered quite heavy, and because they had long hair, the bands were put in the metal basket. But for those who were actually into heavy metal, these bands just didn’t fit. Metal was about being different. Wanting nothing to do with the mainstream. Sharing no common ground with middle-of-the-road popular culture. Metal was a reaction to commercialised and sanitised music. But many a headbanger was subjected to idiotic taunts of ‘Bon Jovi’ from groups of naïve Triple M listeners as they walked down the street in the 1980s.

The real metal scene responded by delving deeper into the underground. Hardcore – a scene that had come out of the US with bands like Black Flag, Bad Brains, and DRI – began to impact on heavy metal. The punk elements of metal had begun to wear through the proggy riffs, and solo breaks made way for naked aggression. Punks and headbangers hung out at gigs as one scene, and bands such as the Hard Ons and Massappeal shared line ups with thrash metal bands.

But hair metal forged on, selling millions of albums, and making cool bands like Whitesnake re-invent themselves as a bunch of silly old men wearing make-up and giant hair-sprayed coiffures.

And making headbangers wince.

Guns n Roses eventually killed off the glam thing in the 80s. They came out of the same scene as Poison, Cinderella and Warrant, but they (after a short while) did away with the hair and make-up. They could write and play, and they knew their punk, rock and blues roots. On the whole though, they were really too commercial to be massively popular in the actual metal scene.

It was the blending of the underground scenes that saw the end of the real 80s metal scene in Sydney. Underground music became diverse and fused, and liked by people from many different scenes: metal, punk, goth, indie.

And then there was grunge…

Collecting the 80s

Before anyone can get into collecting a decade it is necessary to form an impression of its character. What makes it distinctive and interesting? Why are its objects still important? For the 80s this has taken a long time, but I’m starting to sense the beginning of a collector-era. One of the problems with the 80s is that it never settled on a distinctive look and feel that distinguished, say, the 50s or 60s. In fact one of its distinctive features was to abandon the search for a particular look and it certainly abandoned all attempts to follow ‘design principles’.

The 1980s also cut loose from attempts to perfect a highly controlled modern society and instead, freedom broke out everywhere. Particularly the freedom to make a lot of money, to spend it all on yourself without guilt and to be as distinctive and individualised as you want. It was the decade that gave us the novelist Martin Amis and his masterpiece, Money. It was the decade of the yuppy and it was the decade of ‘designerism’. This freedom began with its music that has created an enormous collector following. It was very political, eclectic, dance orientated and experimental. It was also the last true decade of vinyl records. The music industry was very confident in the 1980s and created some fantastic things for the collector: a return to the picture-sleeve single, new punk-coloured vinyl and additional marketing artwork. I made a mental note the other day that Madonna’s 1984 single ‘Borderline/Think of Me’ (with its fold out poster sleeve) is valued at $100. Those beautiful New Order and Cocteau Twins album covers are superb.

This is also the golden era of music posters, those cheaply made street corner adverts for live music that flourished among all that anger and cash. The young ones of the 80s frothed at the mouth as conservative governments took aim at the modern world and in addition to the music reaction there was a badge reaction. When political parties caved in and sold out, the individual was left to express their political beliefs through badges and the somewhat loose and vague social movements that produced them. These are now worth looking out for and collecting, alongside posters for political rallies. Curiously they were both furious and fun.

The 80s also makes me think of Star Wars and Star Trek figures and many other Cult TV collectables. So start looking in the toy section of garage sales for there is gold to be had there. An ERTL figure of Captain Kirk from 1984 is worth around $100. Figures from the film Alien are now worth close to $500! A 1981 K9 from Dr Who? $150! But the individualism of the 1980s drove its most distinctive collector-word: ‘designerism’. Designerism in fashion, furniture, jewellery and even perfume is definitely something that could drive a well-themed collection of the 1980s. You could go for ‘designer’ trainers from Adidas, Nike and Reebok. You could start your own collection of hyper-designed ‘ghetto blasters’ or post-punk wear. Then there was the affordable designer revolution for things such as Swatch watches and Sony Walkmans – produced in such huge design ranges that everyone seemed to own their own brand. Some Walkmans fetch in excess of $600. But designerism also ushered in some fabulous top-end products and here the ceramics, glass and furniture collectors can get interested. Topping my list are the various designs for the Milan-based Memphis Group. If I had unlimited money I would collect their star designer Ettore Sottsass, beginning with his VERY 80s ‘A Casablanca Sideboard’.

An increasing number of people are getting interested in collecting the 80s – and for good reason. This ten year period will go down in history as the ‘designer decade’, a time when we became more sophisticated consumers, where individualism drove a market for designs with greater diversity and sensitivity towards different sub-cultures and niche markets.

Adrian Franklin.

This is an edited excerpt from Adrian Franklin’s new book ‘Collecting the 20th Century’, published by University of NSW Press in association with the Powerhouse Museum. Featuring 150 illustrations in colour, the majority sourced from the Powerhouse Museum Collection, it is available from the Powerhouse Museum Shop or online.

Back to the Future – Craig Schuftan on the neo-80s revival

‘The 80s revival has almost exhausted itself’ warned the editors of an Australian fashion magazine in 2004, ‘get ready for the 90s revival’. We know now that this advice was a little premature. The 80s revival has turned out to be very much like an unstoppable robot assassin in an 80s sci-fi blockbuster – every time you think it’s dead, it comes back, looking weirder and scarier.

Last year, Australian hip hop crew TZU released an 80s electro-styled single called ‘Computer Love’. over a loping breakbeat and vocoderised chants, MC Joelistics made his way through neon game-grids ‘like a modern day blade runner’. in the video, Joelistics was unexpectedly ‘scanned’ into the hard drive of a 1980s portable computer. We saw him having lo-res adventures on spaceships, visiting alien planets, and trading rhymes with ET.

But while they were happy to enthuse over Michael J Fox’s hoverboard in interviews, the members of TZU were also at pains to point out that they were no nostalgia act. ‘It’s not a retro record’ Joelistics told Triple J. ‘It’s not even an 80s record, it’s just we all grew up in the 80s’. It might seem like a fine distinction, but it’s one worth making. Having grown up with Spielberg movies, Mattell toys and Commodore 64 computers, the members of TZU are as little able to avoid their cultural heritage as Dali was the Catalan coastline or Kurt Cobain the 70s soft-rock he grew up hearing on the radio. But their music is much more than the sum of its influences. listen again to ‘Computer Love’, try to pick one artist or track from the 80s it resembles, and you’ll soon find that you can’t. It seems to refer to something, but the original is impossible to locate.

This is the case with a great deal of music in the charts and on the radio today. Like their labelmates Cut Copy and The Midnight Juggernauts, The Presets are often described as an 80s-influenced group. But try to imagine them playing at a blue-light cisco in 1985. No doubt, some moments on their 2008 album Apocalypso might go down well. But others – the heavy 90s rave sounds, the unsettling mix of pub-rock dynamics with distorted synth-pop textures – would clear the dancefloor in a flash. We can imagine the motionless crowd staring open-mouthed at Julian Hamilton as he mumbles, apologetically – like Marty McFly in Back To The Future – ‘I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet…’

In Back To The Future Part II, Marty and Doc Brown travel from 1985 to the 21st century. Marty walks into a themed restaurant – the café 80s. ‘one of those nostalgia places’ explains the Doc, ‘but not done very well’. we see what he means – everything in the Café 80s looks familiar, but none of it looks quite right. Marty is terrified. He’s suffering the vertigo of having aged 30 years in a day – of finding that the stuff of his childhood is now old enough to be considered retro-chic. But far worse is the feeling he gets, looking at this mismatched assortment of 80s
paraphernalia – that his memories have been tampered with.

For those who lived through the decade as adults, the 80s revival inspires exactly this sense of temporal panic. They watch 21-year olds dancing to synth pop in high-waisted jeans, feeling that they have been teleported back to a parallel 1985 which – despite some familiar reference points – is nothing like their memories. That’s because the 80s revival is not really a revival at all. It’s a giant junk-sculpture made from the fragments of a lost civilisation, undertaken by artists and musicians who are old enough to have had the music and films of the 80s form part of their upbringing, but young enough to treat this heritage with a healthy combination of disrespect and curiosity.

But why should it be necessary to look to the past at all? Some critics believe that the existence of the neo-80s – and of pop revivals in general – proves there are no new ideas in rock and roll today. They forget that some of the most important and moving works of art in history have come to us from artists who wanted to turn back the clock. The Gothic revival was retro. The Pre-Raphaelite movement was retro. Tolkein, Star Wars and Phil Spector were all retro. Even punk was retro. It began with Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy, and their mission to destroy the bombast and boredom of the 70s by drawing on the power of an earlier, simpler era of rock and roll.

in many cases, the neo-80s begins from exactly this premise. Australian synth-rockers The Galvatrons named themselves after a character in Transformers: The Movie – which came out in 1987, when singer Johnny Galvatron was four years old. When he saw it again a few years ago, Johnny realised that this film contained an antidote to the crippling illness which threatened the life of rock and roll in 2007. He saw that everything 21st century pop lacked – ambition, imagination, synth-pads and shoulder pads – could be found in the music and movies of the 80s.

UK singer Elly Jackson – who blends Vince Clarke-style electro-pop with spooky Siouxsie vocals on her group La Roux’s self- titled debut – feels the same way. ‘There’s too much normality at the moment’, she said, speaking of the present state of pop. That’s why she looks beyond the ordinary stars of today, to the extraordinary stars of the 80s – Annie Lennox, Grace Jones, Prince, Bowie. Here, the past is a stick to beat the present with – to correct its excesses and make it admit to its failings.

For La Roux, as for Cut Copy, The Killers, Daft Punk, The Midnight Juggernauts, Ladyhawke and many more of the artists featured in the Powerhouse Museum’s The 80s are back exhibition, history is exactly what it has been for artists through the centuries. it’s a yardstick by which we can measure our own achievements, and a reminder of what we may have left behind in our hurry to get to the next big thing. artists today understand – as Doc and Marty did back in the real 1985 – that sometimes you have to go back to the past in order to save the future.

Craig Schuftan
Originally published in Powerline, Summer 2009

« Previous Page