Ahoy me mateys Captain Cats here, and today I’m going to talk about the year 1989 and how important it was in video game history. I’m going to break it down into two sections and you will see why this was a critical year.

Hardware

  • The PC-Engine was released in the USA as the TurboGrafx-16 or T16 for short
  • Atari released the Lynx
  • Sega released the Mega Drive, better known as the Genesis in the USA
  • The Power Glove is released
  • Nintendo released the Game Boy, which was created by Gunpei Yokoi

Game Release

  • Sega released Phantasy Star II, Golden Axe, The Revenge of Shinobi and Altered Beast.
  • The Game Boy had six-game released, and one of them was Super Mario Land, which was also created by Gunpei Yokoi and introduced us all to Princess Daisy.
  • Prince of Persia and Will Wright’s Sim City was released. Prince of Persia was released for the Apple II and then ported to everywhere else. Sim City was the first ever Sim game.
  • Microsoft first introduced Solitaire and Minesweeper to the world in the 3rd version of Microsoft Windows.
  • Shadow of the Beast was released for the Amiga and help sales.
  • Capcom released both DuckTales and Mega Man 2
  • Dragon Quest was released in the US but rebranded to Dragon Warrior
  • Konami released Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, which would be the last game of this series to be released for the NES.
  • Nintendo sues Tengen for releasing unlicensed version of Tetris and other games as well.

As you can see 1989 had a lot going on for the video game industry but also showing us where it was going to lead us all to for the years to come.