History of video games
The history of video games began in the 1950s and 1960s as computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations on minicomputers and mainframes. Spacewar! was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology student hobbyists in 1962 as one of the first such games on a video display. The first consumer video game hardware was released in the early 1970s. The first home video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, and the first arcade video games were Computer Space and Pong. After its home console conversions, numerous companies sprang up to capture Pongs success in both the arcade and the home by cloning the game, causing a series of boom and bust cycles due to oversaturation and lack of innovation.
By the mid-1970s, low-cost programmable microprocessors replaced the discrete transistor–transistor logic circuitry of early hardware, and the first ROM cartridge-based home consoles arrived, including the Atari Video Computer System. Coupled with rapid growth in the golden age of arcade video games, including Space Invaders and Pac-Man, the home console market also flourished. The 1983 video game crash in the United States was characterized by a flood of too many games, often of poor or cloned qualities, and the sector saw competition from inexpensive personal computers and new types of games being developed for them. The crash prompted 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 in 1985, helping to rebound the failing video games sector. The latter part of the 1980s and early 1990s included video games driven by improvements and standardization in personal computers and the console war competition between Nintendo and Sega as they fought for market share in the United States. The first major handheld video game consoles appeared in the 1990s, led by Nintendo's Game Boy platform.
In the early 1990s, advancements in microprocessor technology gave rise to real-time 3D polygonal graphic rendering in game consoles, as well as in PCs by way of graphics cards. Optical media via CD-ROMs began to be incorporated into personal computers and consoles, including Sony's 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 a game console and entertainment device, would displace personal computers. While Sony and Microsoft continued to develop hardware for comparable top-end console features, Nintendo opted to focus on innovative gameplay. Nintendo developed the Wii with motion-sensing controls, which helped to draw in non-traditional players and helped to resecure Nintendo's position in the industry; Nintendo followed this same model in the release of the Nintendo Switch.
From the 2000s and into the 2010s, the industry has seen a shift of demographics as mobile gaming on smartphones and tablets displaced handheld consoles, and casual gaming became an increasingly larger sector of the market, as well as a growth in the number of players from China and other areas not traditionally tied to the industry. To take advantage of these shifts, traditional revenue models were supplanted with ongoing revenue stream models such as free-to-play, freemium, and subscription-based games. As triple-A video game production became more costly and risk-averse, opportunities for more experimental and innovative independent game development grew over the 2000s and 2010s, aided by the popularity of mobile and casual gaming and the ease of digital distribution. Hardware and software technology continues to drive improvement in video games, with support for high-definition video at high framerates and for virtual and augmented reality-based games.
Early history (1948–1970)
The term "video game" was originally used only for games that sent a video signal to a screen, such as a cathode-ray tube or oscilloscope. Over time, the definition broadened to include any interactive electronic game that displays visuals for the player. The earliest known attempt at such a game was the cathode-ray tube amusement device, patented in 1947, which simulated missile fire on an oscilloscope. However, it was never mass-produced. In 1948, Alan Turing and David Champernowne designed Turochamp, a chess program, but it was too complex to run on the computers available at the time.In the 1950s, games began to appear alongside early digital computers like Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator. For example, Josef Kates built Bertie the Brain in 1950, a tic-tac-toe machine intended for exhibition rather than personal use. The following year, the Ferranti company demonstrated Nimrod, a computer programmed specifically to play the game of Nim. In 1952, Christopher Strachey created a Checkers game for the Ferranti Mark 1 computer, inspiring Arthur Samuel to develop one of the first checkers-playing artificial intelligence programs on IBM hardware. Military and research simulations, like CARMONETTE, which modeled ground combat scenarios, were also developed, though most of these games were dismantled or forgotten once their immediate purpose was completed.
By the early 1950s, interactive visual games started to emerge. By the summer of 1952 the program 'Bouncing Ball', which ran on MIT's Whirlwind I computer, had been converted from a simple demonstration on the computer's CRT display into a game, by the addition of a hole in the 'floor' through which the eponymous ball might be made to pass. Also in 1952 Sandy Douglas created OXO on the EDSAC, allowing players to play tic-tac-toe on a CRT screen. Around the same time, Strachey and Stanley Gill experimented with visual games, while the Whirlwind I computer at MIT featured an early real-time ball simulation. The University of Michigan developed a pool game using MIDSAC, one of EDSAC's successors, in 1954, which continuously updated graphics on screen. In 1958, William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two at Brookhaven National Laboratory, displaying a simplified tennis match on an oscilloscope; this is considered one of the first games created specifically for entertainment rather than research.
In 1962, Spacewar! was developed for the PDP-1 minicomputer at MIT by Steve Russell and colleagues. It became the first widely shared video game, circulating across universities that had PDP-1 computers. Modifications introduced features like a moving starfield, simulated gravity, and external controllers. Despite the PDP-1’s high cost and rarity, Spacewar! inspired others in programming communities to create their own games. During the 1960s, other games also appeared on mainframes, including The Sumerian Game by Mabel Addis and early simulations written in general-purpose languages like BASIC. In 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, Ralph Baer began developing a television-based interactive game system. With a small team, he created the "Brown Box" prototype by 1968. It could run multiple games, including forms of table tennis and volleyball, directly on a TV set.
1970s
Mainframe computer games
In the 1960s, a number of computer games were created for mainframe and minicomputer systems, but these failed to achieve wide distribution due to the continuing scarcity of computer resources, a lack of sufficiently trained programmers interested in crafting entertainment products, and the difficulty in transferring programs between computers in different geographic areas. By the end of the 1970s, however, the situation had changed drastically. The BASIC and C high-level programming languages were widely adopted during the decade, which were more accessible than earlier more technical languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL, opening up computer game creation to a larger base of users. With the advent of time-sharing, which allowed the resources of a single mainframe to be parceled out among multiple users connected to the machine by terminals, computer access was no longer limited to a handful of individuals at an institution, creating more opportunities for students to create their own games. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of the PDP-10, released by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1966, and the portable UNIX operating system, developed at Bell Labs in 1971 and released generally in 1973, created common programming environments across the country that reduced the difficulty of sharing programs between institutions. Finally, the founding of the first magazines dedicated to computing like Creative Computing, the publication of the earliest program compilation books like 101 BASIC Computer Games, and the spread of wide-area networks such as the ARPANET allowed programs to be shared more easily across great distances. As a result, many of the mainframe games created by college students in the 1970s influenced subsequent developments in the video game industry in ways that, Spacewar! aside, the games of the 1960s did not.In the arcade and on home consoles, fast-paced action and real-time gameplay were the norm in genres like racing and target shooting. On the mainframe, however, such games were generally not possible due both to the lack of adequate displays and insufficient processing power and memory to update game elements in real time. While 1970s mainframes were more powerful than arcade and console hardware of the period, the need to parcel out computing resources to dozens of simultaneous users via time-sharing significantly hampered their abilities. Thus, programmers of mainframe games focused on strategy and puzzle-solving mechanics over pure action. Notable games of the period include the tactical combat game Star Trek by Mike Mayfield, the hide-and-seek game Hunt the Wumpus by Gregory Yob, and the strategic war game Empire by Walter Bright. Perhaps the most significant game of the period was Colossal Cave Adventure, created in 1976 by Will Crowther by combining his passion for caving with concepts from the newly released tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Expanded by Don Woods in 1977 with an emphasis on the high fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien, Adventure established a new genre based around exploration and inventory-based puzzle solving that made the transition to personal computers in the late 1970s.
While most games were created on hardware of limited graphic ability, one computer able to host more impressive games was the PLATO system developed at the University of Illinois. Intended as an educational computer, the system connected hundreds of users all over the United States via remote terminals that featured high-quality plasma displays and allowed users to interact with each other in real time. This allowed the system to host an impressive array of graphical and/or multiplayer games, including some of the earliest known computer RPGs, which were primarily derived, like Adventure, from D&D, but unlike that game placed a greater emphasis on combat and character progression than puzzle solving. Starting with top-down dungeon crawls like The Dungeon and The Game of Dungeons, more commonly referred to today by their filenames, pedit5 and dnd, PLATO RPGs soon transitioned to a first-person perspective with games like Moria, Oubliette, and Avatar, which often allowed multiple players to join forces to battle monsters and complete quests together. Like Adventure, these games ultimately inspired some of the earliest personal computer games.