Dreamteam67: I would push the date for when gaming went mainstream back by about 5 years. In the mid-90's, the Nintendo console with the various Mario titles was huge. In the PC market titles like Myst, Sid Meier's Civilisation, Prince of Persia, Ultima (that series has been around since 1980) came bundled for free on new PC's. Tomb Raider and Quake both made big impacts among the first widespread FPS's. In 1997 Ultima Online solidly established the MMO as a successful money-cow, while sequels like Riven, Warcraft 2, Quake 2, Tomb Raider 2 and Super Mario did the same for PC games/consoles. By the time such titles as Diablo, Starcraft and Baldur's Gate came out in 1998, gaming was recognized as potentially as big as the movie-industry with big companies like Microsoft and Sony trying to get into the action. In 2000 Tomb Raider hit the theaters, and you know where it all went from there.
But make no mistake, there was big money in mass market Arcade games and consoles in the late 70's and throughout the 80's as well in Video Arcades. I am sure you have heard of such games as Pong, Space Invaders, Dragon's Lair, Pacman, Donkey Kong, Missile Command, Asteroids, Battlezone et al. Atari dominated the early console market starting around 1980 for over a decade till Nintento booted them. After all, the original Tron movie was made about 1983, so that is pretty "mainstream".
I'm guessing we have different thoughts on what exactly qualified gaming to go mainstream. The reason I didn't say early 90's was because back then, people thought gaming was a kids thing, gamers were depicted as anti social nerds and people who thought those things weren't the most tech savvy. I'm not sure where you grew up but I grew up in an area of Canada inhabited by ignorant hicks and what I mentioned above reflected the thoughts of the people around me at that time. You are right that there was a lot of innovation in gaming at that time and companies did realize it was a profitable market (again) but considering peoples views on gaming at the time (or at least the area I lived in), I wouldn't say that it was mainstream and accessable as a whole. Consoles were considered kids toys and god forbid computer illiterates having to use a command line OS to play Doom. Windows 95 also had it's fair share of problems on release as well (frequent BSODs anyone?) and it took a while before it caught on. Not to mention in the late 90's, we had to upgrade our PC's pretty frequently because of the rapidly changing hardware requirements for games, especially RAM (which wasn't cheap back then) and 3D cards. Would anyone who isn't tech savvy be willing to open up their computer cases to swap parts around in order to play the latest 3D games? Some of these people were afraid to even turn the damn thing on because if you get an "illegal error" message if windows crashes, the police will be knocking at your door for your "crime" (no, that is no joke, I actually did hear that). That is one of the more extreme examples but there was also rampant ignorance about computers, viruses and the internet. I won't say them all, in fact I'm sure you already know what some of these things are. I am going to say just one because I found it funny. Using a webcam is dangerous because that means the person on the other end in "inside" your computer, he can see everything and hack you!!! *sigh*, once again, that happened too. Back then, my dad gave me shit for visiting Interplays website because gaming sites could be attacked by hackers, only sites like Airline companies are safe and won't be hacked. It's these factors why I wouldn't consider gaming mainstream in the mid 90's but with the tech advancements and innovation in games that happened at that time, it was definately one of the catalysts that got the ball rolling.
You statement in your second paragraph is half true but there's a bit of info missing. When the titles you mentioned came out, there was little to no innovation in gaming and industry standards towards workers were crap. Companies (especially Atari) decided that game authors were not allowed to put their names in the credits of whatever game they wrote and the programmers worked alone under tight deadlines (sometimes only a few weeks) to churn out a copycat clone of a game that was released already. Comparing Space Invaders to Gorf for example. The only difference in Gorf was instead of shooting neatly lined rows of alien ship / bug things, you had a level where you could shoot at a mothership that still went left to right until it got to the bottom of the screen (among a few other minor changes). The differences between the games was minimal. Then there was Missile Command and some eel shooting game (forget the name). The games were practically identical, if you were playing the former, just turn the TV upside down and then you have the latter. These games pretended to be something new but people didn't buy into it. Atari was sucking the industry dry with it's sweatshop working policies and shoddy knock off products that confidence in gaming fell. Then Atari annouced a certain game / movie tie in that would be so great it would revitalize the gaming industry and bring back the confidence it lost. I'm sure you already know what that game was and its results :P. Nintendo didn't kick Atari out, Atari destroyed the industry and itself in the process, Nintendo just moved in and picked up the pieces. Yeah, back then there was interest in gaming but it didn't last so I'm not sure that qualifies as mainstream. "Fad" might have been a more appropriate word for what happened back then.
