Video games are back bigger and more inventive after being nearly zapped from the market, popularity peaked in 1983 but this industry was bloated with hundreds of firms producing thousands of games.

It became the best-selling computer RPG of the '80s, selling 407,000 copies, and The Bard's Tale went on to spawn a trilogy.

Top: Don Gilman, a pioneer of early computer games, holds up an "antique" Radio Shack laptop used widely in the Õ80s. The piece belongs to "Computer Game Making in the '80s," an exhibit on display at ...