Early Computer Game Genre Preferences (1980-1984)

Between 1980 and 1984, computer game genre preferences were shaped by two distinct audiences, and the sales data reveal a split that later accounts of video game culture tend to flatten. Drawing on Softalk's monthly "Top Thirty" best-seller charts, which focus on the Apple II, and on Computer Gaming World's reader ratings from 1982 to 1984, the analysis finds that arcade games dominated commercial sales, accounting for roughly 61 percent of Softalk's chart entries, while strategy games dominated the preferences of CGW's readers, at about 52 percent. This divergence points to a hardcore hobbyist readership whose tastes differed markedly from the broader consumer market. Wizardry and Choplifter! were the strongest performers across both datasets, though the heavy presence of SSI titles in CGW's lists and the near absence of graphic adventures there stand out as notable departures from the sales picture.

The arcade genre peaked around 1982 and then declined as publishers redirected resources toward strategy, fantasy, and adventure titles and as new home computer platforms reshaped the market. The shifts suggest that genre popularity is not a fixed property of games but reflects a combination of community taste, hardware availability, and commercial strategy. Genre categories themselves are treated here as historically constructed discursive labels rather than natural divisions, and the analysis builds its genre palette from the categories contemporary publications actually used.

The study's scope is deliberately bounded. Softalk's data are specific to the Apple II platform, and CGW's reader sample is voluntary and self-selected, so neither can stand in for the market as a whole. The analysis also finds that CGW's broad strategy category conflates wargames, simulations, and strategy proper, a distinction that would sharpen future classification. Based on the CGW ratings, the study hypothesizes growing interest in adventure, fantasy and role-playing, and strategy genres. Its central conclusion is that players of computer games and Atari 2600 console players in this period shared little genre vocabulary, so any claim of a unified "video game culture" for 1980 to 1984 is highly problematic.