Back in the 1980s-1990s, there was a boom of video game television shows and movies, with things like Sonic The Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros Super Show, as well as a ton of movies about Street Fighter, Pokemon, and Mortal Combat.

Video games were a relatively new thing around this time, and these two decades are known for over marketing everything (see: Ghostbusters juice boxes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Parmesan cheese, etc.) and video games experienced a similar boom in products.

Thus was born the first golden age of video game media. A lot of these things are very substantial to the culture we live in currently, however, the golden age only exists as nostalgia. If someone were to watch these today, they often are not up to par with what the younger audience sees daily. And some of the movies, like Super Mario Bros. even went down in infamy for being a terrible movie.

I think that what we are experiencing now, the second golden age, is only happening because of the time the theses video games have been around and have been able to be developed into something more than what we used to have. These old cartoons and movies flop now because there simply was not enough material to work with, but things like the animated Super Mario Bros. movie rose to stardom because it had more material to work with. Sonic the Hedgehog now has decades of games, cartoons and comics to work off of to make three movies and a TV show centering around one character. Five Nights at Freddy’s was able to develop as a video game for years, as well as letting the lore develop, before releasing a huge movie.

I also want to call this the second golden age, because the movies have significantly gotten better, even in the breaks between sequels. Sonic compared to Sonic 2 has a huge jump in quality of writing and connects much better to fans of the video games and Sonic 3  is promising to pull even more from cult classic  video games. The 2000s and 2010s were definitely a break from the two golden ages, with more little-known movies, flopped movies, and cartoons that weren’t taken as seriously as older versions came out. This also gave time to develop more games and give video game movies a chance.

I believe that video game media is only going to get better as long as video games keep devolving their stories and I hope that this golden age isn’t as short-lived as the original.