It honestly probably started in earnest with the Sega Genesis in the early 1990s. That's when console gaming started to shift away from being more a of "family entertainment" type device and more towards something marketed primarily to male teenagers on MTV.

Contrary to popular belief too, it was the Genesis that popularized the Madden NFL, FIFA, NBA Live, NHL, etc. franchises not Sony. Mortal Kombat was probably the original "dudebros blockbuster".  I think Mortal Kombat is really probably the start of "dudebros culture". That was the "Call of Duty" of its day, no question.

Then it went up a notch with the introduction of the Playstation brand and up another notch with the rise of the XBox brand which brought a lot of games that probably would've otherwise been on PC (like Halo) to the console side.

It's been developing for a while.

I would actually say that the original Playstation was the first system to take off with the beer drinking jocks. The would go on about how cool the PS was and how Nintendo and Sega were for dorks. Damned right. Gaming was for dorks up until that point until is started to be marketed to the cool kids who thought that epic cut scenes were all the rage.

I still think it's the Sega Genesis that pioneered it. The Genesis is the platform that popularized sports games like Madden NFL and FIFA.

People also maybe were too young to remember, but the 16-bit wars were incredibly brutal, lol:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZqNxv8NofY

But I think partially a lot of this had less to do with the companies themselves and simply with kids getting older.

If you were 10 years old when you got an NES, and pretty much every 10 year old in North America had a NES in their living room, that made you 12/13 when Mortal Kombat hit the Genesis, and 16/17 as the Playstation started to rise. It's really not a coincidence that your tastes in music/TV/clothing would start to change a little, why not gaming as well?

Mortal Kombat too IMO put hyper-violence in video gaming on the map and was the first violent gaming blockbuster.

I'm going to throw myself under the bus and say that it was the Xbox's fault. Personally, I don't see it as a bad thing, gaming is for everyone but if you have a problem with gaming becoming synonymous with broskis, it's all on the xbox for its hardcore, high-octane, gun slinging, rootin-tootin library. Again, to me, it isn't a bad thing honestly.

All these comments are so funny. I can remember going to a pool hall in the 80's to play games like Joust or later Double Dragon or Bad Dudes, breathing in waves of second hand smoke and trying not to make eye contact with the scary older guy with spiked hair and a studded leather vest. Video games have been cool among guys since their inception. Computer games and RPGs have been the domain of geeks but the cool guys have loved PacMan, Donkey Kong, Super Mario, Double Dragon, Street Fighter, EA Sports, Halo, COD and on and on. This is absolutely nothing new.

That's true, though I think the Sega Genesis was the first home game console to be heavily marketed oustide of the context of a game console either for the little kid in the family or the family itself.

To compete with Nintendo, Sega had to market more towards the growing population of teenage gamers. Then along came the popularization of two important game genres -- the fighting game genre and the sports simulation genre. After that, things changed.

"When was it that gaming became synonymous with dude-bro culture?"

It's not. That's a rather silly oversimplification, to be honest. Gaming has simply expanded to include a ton of different demographics. I don't see how it's synonymous with any one subculture at all. Ask an average non-gamer and they'll probably still answer that games are for kids, or nerds, or perhaps for everyone.

As for when the "dude-bro" crowd came in, it's really just that kids grew up and joined different social groups, which is natural. A friend of mine that I used to always play Nobunga's Ambition with on the NES ended up getting hooked on Medal of Honor and SOCOM. He was crazy over them, had the headset and everything. His path in gaming just ended up being different than mine. I'm certainly not going to condemn him for that.

The sports franchises were huge about bringing in non-gamers, as well. At the video store where I worked, we'd get massive rushes of sports fans every year who rented pretty much nothing else except sports games and GTA.

People really need to get over this idea that they are somehow superior because they like a different genre of video-games, or that other people should be mocked if they play something mainstream. I know regular people who play nothing but CoD because their coworkers pulled them into it. Who cares? They're playing games and having fun. The "dude-bro" gamer is just a small, overly-vocal representation that's mostly limited to competitive multi-player games.

Plus por la referencia a Vaya Semanita.

But they have evolved. Now they are "canis"

For those who doesn't understand it says Ones in danger of extinction. Regarding the others... here I have my shotgun.

Oh, and "gilipollas" is something like asshole

OT: I don't know when it started, probably when games like CoD or others started to gain popularity.

this right here might have a lot to do with it, but honestly I feel like the second that Sony lost their marketing skills and nintendo monoploized on casual, Microsoft had some free reign to choose there own market, and Americans love microsoft...

I sure do hate swag derps.