History of video games/Second generation of video game consoles

Trends

Flooded Market

A huge number of consoles and video games flooded the market. Many of these consoles and games were low quality, and made it difficult for consoles offering innovative features or quality games to compete. This was one factor which lead to the video game crash of 1983.

Digital programmable computers

This generation, many game consoles contained basic 8-bit computers. Rarely 4-bit and 16-bit computers would be used, like in the Game & Watch platform (4-bit) or the Intellivision (16-bit), though this had minimal impact on console graphics which were primarily constrained by other factors. Cartridge based systems became normal during this generation, and the introduction of digital programmable computers allowed game consoles to run software, which permitted more varied games than what the console designers originally intended.

Representative Graphics

This generation saw increased graphical capabilities of home game consoles, leading to less reliance on simple squares and rectangles in conjunction with overlays, and evolving to simple pixel artwork and rarely vector art. The pivotal choice between industry support for raster or vector graphics technology would hugely affect the industry going forward, with many genres of games favoring one or the other. The ultimate success of the use of raster graphics this generation would lead to their dominant use until the fifth generation of consoles. While these graphics would quickly be considered quite outdated by the mid to late 1980's, this step was a huge leap in quality and allowed more arcade style games to be played on home consoles.

This generation saw the first handheld consoles with basic screens. The displays were typically not visible in the dark and were monochrome only, but they still offered an improvement over the previous approach of using a few basic single color lights as output.