History of Video Game

How the First Video Games Was Created

The history of video games began in the 1950s and 1960s as computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations on mainframe computers, with MIT’s Spacewar! in 1962 as one of the first such games to be played with a video display.

The early 1970s brought the first consumer-ready video game hardware: the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, and the first arcade video games from Atari, Computer Space and Pong, the latter which was later made into a home console version.

Numerous companies sprang up to capture Pong’s success in both the arcade and the home by creating clones of the game, causing a market contraction in 1978 due to oversaturation and lack of innovation.

By the mid-1970s, low-cost programmable microprocessors replaced the discrete transistor–transistor logic circuitry of the early hardware, and the first ROM cartridge-based home consoles arrived, including the Atari Video Computer System. Coupled with rapid growth in a golden age of arcade video games with titles such as Space Invaders and PacMan, the home console market also flourished.

A major crash of the United States home video game market occurred in 1983 as the market was flooded by too many poor-quality games, consumers lost confidence in the major companies involved, and the sector saw competition from inexpensive personal computers and new types of games being developed for them.

The crash set the stage for Japan’s video game industry to take leadership of the market, which had only suffered minor impacts from the crash.

Nintendo released its Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States and other Western markets in 1985, helping to rebound the failing video games sector. The latter part of the 1980s and early 1990s saw video games

The first major handheld video game consoles appeared in the 1990s, led by Nintendo’s Game Boy platform.

The early 1990s saw two major shifts in technology, the introduction of optical media via CD-ROMs, and the ability to perform real-time polygonal 3D graphic rendering from further advancements in computer microprocessors.

Both aspects were readily incorporated into personal computers and creating a market for graphics cards, while Sony used both in its fledgling PlayStation console line, pushing Sega out of the console hardware market while diminishing Nintendo’s role.

By the late 1990s, the Internet also gained widespread consumer use, and video games began incorporating online elements.

Microsoft entered the console hardware market in the early 2000s with its Xbox line, fearing that Sony’s PlayStation positioned as both a game console and entertainment device would displace personal computers.

Spacewar!

the first widely influential computer game.

The First Arcade Video Games and Home Consoles

Magnavox Odyssey,

the first home console. Space Invaders,

popular in arcades back in the arcade era

The start of the modern video game industry grew out of concurrent development of the first arcade video game and the first home video game console in the early 1970s in the United States.The arcade video game industry grew out of the pre-existing arcade game industry, which was previously dominated by electro-mechanical games.

Following the arrival of Sega’s EM game Periscope (1966), the arcade industry was experiencing a “technological renaissance” driven by “audio-visual” EM novelty games, establishing the arcades as a healthy environment for the introduction of commercial video games in the early 1970s.

In the late 1960s, a college student Nolan Bushnell had a part-time job at an arcade where he became familiar with EM games such as Chicago Coin’s driving game Speedway (1969), watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery, while learning how it worked and developing his understanding of how the game business operates In 1966. While working at Sanders Associates, Ralph Baer came up with an idea for an entertainment device that could be hooked up to a television monitor.

Presenting this to his superiors at Sanders and getting their approval, he along with William Harrison and William Rasch refined Baer’s concept into the “Brown Box” prototype of a home video game console that could play a simple table tennis game.

The three patented the technology, and Sanders, not in the business of commercialization, sold licenses to the patents to Magnavox to commercialize.

With Baer’s help, Magnavox developed the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home console,In 1972 Concurrently, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney had the idea of making a coin-operated cabinet housing a small, low-cost microcomputer to run Spacewar! By Associates, the first arcade video game.