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Of course, there was great creativity at play among those programming for systems like the Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the NES, and more—otherwise we'd never have had Elite, Back to Skool, or Football Manager (which began in 1982). But from what I recall, many a hit followed in familiar footsteps, echoing archetypes already established as commercially successful.So: Wolfenstein 3D begat Doom before the first-person shooter genre exploded into a cacophony of clones; an abundance of side-scrolling platformers followed the format laid down by the mascot-level likes of Mario, Dizzy, and Alex Kidd (alas, poor Zool, nobody knew you well), and several role-play adventures stuck close to the fantasy of the Zelda series. Columns might not have been Tetris, quite, but the influence of Alexey Pajitnov's Soviet puzzler is undeniable.Someone from New York was never going to sound like someone from Florida, or Atlanta. That distinctiveness is kinda gone now. Today, there is more uniformity, and a more pronounced homogenization. So it was a "golden era"—but there was a lot of bad shit going on that nobody would want to happen again.
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