There's no way that anyone alive and gaming at the end of the 80s could have predicted how videogames would evolve over the next two decades. We know because we were there. Sure, it was pretty safe that graphics would get more better and consoles would get an ass-load more powerful, but besides that we were pretty clueless as to what gaming in the 21st Century would really be like. Now that we've arrived in the future, here's some of the things we could never have seen coming 20 years ago.

The sheer amount of stuff consoles can do
While gamers fully expected that consoles 20 years into the future would have plenty more awesome crammed into their sexy little CPUs, inferior 1980s brains were unable to compute the possibility of consoles being so much more than just a box for playing games.

In 1989, a gamer was able to summarise the complete feature set of his chosen console pretty much like so:

Today, however, it's a bit more along these lines:

The Boss would be releasing new music through videogames
The only example of games and rock colliding 20 years ago was the Atari 2600 effort, Journey Escape, which featured mullet-haired denim rockers, Journey. It was complete gash (see image below) and convinced a generation of players that pixels and tabard wearing musicians should never mix.

So who would have dared believe that, one day, videogames would be used by such immense legends of rockery as Def Leppard (Guitar Hero III), Motley Crue (Rock Band), Guns N' Roses (Rock Band 2) and Bruce Springsteen (Guitar Hero World Tour) to debut songs? That's Bruce Springsteen. Born in the USA. The Boss. So massive the whole of the 80s could barely contain him and now, in the 21st Century, he's harnessing the power of games to release new music.

That games got so full of blood
Our desensitized eyes barely blink at the messy downpour of gore and splatter that games eagerly chuck at us nowadays. Killing baddies 20 years ago was a much cleaner, kid-friendly business - even the most 'violent' games had a distinct lack of icky red pixels and there was no such thing as a rating system for video games.

Never mind that it was the decade that gave us blood-fetish movies like Hellraiser, Re-Animator and Bad Taste, it's difficult to imagine that 80s dorks could have believed games ever getting so gratuitously gut thirsty as they are today. For example, slicing an enemy in Ninja Gaiden on the NES in 1989 looked like this:

Now compare that with the gushing arteries and casual dismemberment of last year's Ninja Gaiden 2:

As you can see, the quota of violently plumbed organ fluids has increased dramatically.

A Nintendo console would be used for playing Sega and NEC games
Pretend you're a gamer from the 80s, look at the picture below and see if you can spot what's offensively wrong with it.

Yes, if you were a gamer from the 80s there would be abso-friggin'-lutely no way you'd be playing Alex Kidd on a NES. That would be bad meaning bad. Not bad meaning good. Even the mental image of such a thing would cause a Sega fan boy of 20 years ago to vomit over his sappy Reebok high-tops.

But now the games of these one time fierce console rivals can be merrily bought and played on Nintendo's newest console. No one could've seen it coming.