History of video games

Video games were introduced as a commercial entertainment medium in 1971, becoming the basis for an important entertainment industry in the late 1970s/early 1980s in the United States, Japan, and Europe. After a disastrous collapse of the industry in 1983 and a subsequent rebirth two years later, the video game industry has experienced sustained growth for over two decades to become a $10 billion industry rivaling the motion picture industry as the most profitable entertainment industry in the world.

Origins

The video game industry as it exists today primarily sprang from two independent sources. The first of these was the coin-operated amusement business that began in the late nineteenth century at amusement parks, boardwalks, bars, and bowling allies and consisted of mechanical contraptions operated by patrons who inserted coins to make the machines work. Starting in 1948, the jukebox became the most profitable and important coin-operated amusement device, but the most important game was pinball. Beginning in 1931 when David Gottlieb created the Baffle Ball machine, the second pinball machine and the first to be mass produced successfully, the pinball industry really took off in the 1950s during the post-World War II American economy boom. The pinball business was responsible for the creation of the production, distribution, and consumer channels used by the new video game industry in its early days, and important American video game companies such as Bally Manufacturing (est. 1932), Williams Manufacturing (est. 1943), and Midway Games (est. 1958 and purchased by Bally in 1969) were all established for the creation of pinball and other coin-operated devices. In addition to pinball, these companies created mechanical sports games, driving games, and shooting games using light guns that were all forerunners of video game genres.

Following the Korean War, the strong American military presence in Japan also served to expand the coin-operated amusement industry into that country. Because World War II had greatly depleted Japan’s manufacturing infrastructure, the early coin-operated companies in Japan were generally established by foreigners and imported American products. As the Japanese economy recovered and coin-operated amusements became popular, a large number of native Japanese companies entered the business as well. Taito, founded by Russian Jew Michael Kogan in 1953, was the first important company to enter the business in Japan, and it was soon joined by Service Games, founded in 1952 by American Marty Bromley to bring coin-operated amusements to American servicemen in Japan and later the biggest name in jukeboxes in Japan under the name Sega, and Rosen Enterprises, established by American Korean War veteran David Rosen as an instant photo booth importer in 1954 and a manager of arcades beginning in 1956. In 1964, Rosen instigated the merger of Sega and Rosen Enterprises into Sega Enterprises, which began creating its own mechanical games in 1966 with Periscope, which due to the high cost to import to the United States and Europe, set the long-standing standard play price in the arcade of twenty-five cents.

At the same time the arcade business was taking hold, important advances in electronics led to the creation of the first computers between 1937 and 1945 in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The early computers were giant mainframes that could take up whole rooms and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and, as a result, were only found at top university research facilities and government institutions. As the transistor replaced the vacuum tube and the integrated circuit allowed for easier mass production, computers began to shrink in size and come down in price, spreading across universities and being adopted by businesses in the 1950s and 1960s. It was on these mainframe machines that university students in the 1960s and 1970s would design some of the first electronic games and establish most of the basic genres still popular today.

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Tennis for Two

The first known concept for an electronic game was a device called the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device patented in the United States by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1948. The proposed device would have used eight vacuum tubes to simulate a missile firing at a target and would use knobs to adjust the curve and speed of the missile. The earliest programs created to run a game on a computer appear to be a checkers program created by Christopher Strachey in 1951 on the Pilot ACE and Manchester Mark I and a tic-tac-toe program called OXO created by A.S. Douglas in 1952 on the EDSAC computer to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. Also in 1951, at the Festival of Britain the NIMROD computer, designed to play the game Nim, made its public bow. Perhaps the first true electronic game not a representation of a pen-and-paper or board game was created in 1958 on an oscilloscope by William Higinbotham and named Tennis for Two. Designed to entertain visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory at its annual visitors day, the game displayed a tennis court in side view and required controllers with a knob and a button. In this simple tennis game, the first player chooses an angle and serves the ball after which the second player must choose an angle and attempt to return the ball over the net. While popular at the visitor day, Higinbotham never attempted to patent or market the device, which was taken apart in 1959. Whether one of the concepts above, or another one entirely, counts as the first video game, none of them received wide distribution or had an impact on the industry.

The birth of the industry

Spacewar! is credited as the first widely available and influential computer game.

While the video game industry did not become firmly established until 1972, the three major facets of the market, computer games, home console games, and arcade games were all in place by the beginning of the 1970s. The landmark game that eventually led to the launch of both the college mainframe tradition and the video arcade game was conceived at MIT in 1961 by a group of friends including Steve Russell, Wayne Witanen, and J. Martin Graetz, members of an organization called the Tech Model Railroad Club, interested in science fiction novels and movies. When MIT replaced its aging TX-0 mainframe computer with a DEC PDP-1, which had a built-in monitor, Russell, Witanen, and Graetz wanted to create a program that would test and tax the new computer’s capabilities and drew on their love of science fiction in deciding to make a game involving spaceships. Russell was primarily responsible for the design of the game, which was finished in 1962. Called Spacewar!, the final product featured two ships dubbed the "Wedge" and the "Needle" for their shapes that two players controlled and moved around the screen while firing torpedoes at each other until one ship was destroyed. The game became more complex as Russell’s friends continued to modify it, the most important additions being accurate gravity effects centered around a sun and a hyperspace function that would teleport the ship to a random part of the screen. DEC decided to distribute Spacewar! as a demo program with each PDP computer it sold, exposing university students across the country to the game. After Spacewar!, there was little advancement in computer games for the rest of the 1960s. While it is likely that other innovative games were created during this time period, no reliable method existed to distribute them across the country, as there was little standardization across computers and no good way to port games from one system to another. Spacewar! itself would likely not have become a national phenomenon (in university computer labs at least) if not for DEC’s decision to bundle the game with its computers. In the end, these games disappeared into oblivion as old machines broke down and old tape was erased.

In 1971, two Stanford University Students exposed to Spacewar! became the first individuals to release a commercial video game product when they hooked up a PDP-11 computer running Spacewar! to a monitor and a coin slot, named it Galaxy Game, and placed it in the student union with a cost of ten cents per game. After being briefly pulled for fixes, the game was in continuous operation from 1972 to 1979 when it was dismantled after the monitor began acting up. A far more important Spacewar! clone was created in 1971 by Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell had been exposed to Spacewar! at the University of Utah in the 1960s and also had a vision of arcades full of video games rather than mechanical ones developed after working a summer at an amusement park arcade. Through parts obtained from his employer, Ampex Corporation, Bushnell constructed a custom dedicated system that played Spacewar! called Computer Space and then entered into a deal with a small coin-op company called Nutting Associates to create a production run of 1,500 units. The game had pages of instructions and complex controls and did not translate well from the computer lab to a mainstream audience, ending up a failure. Undaunted, Nolan Bushnell joined with co-worker Ted Dabney to found Atari Corporation on June 27, 1972 to continue making video arcade games.

While Nolan Bushnell was still in school, Ralph Baer, the head of the Equipment and Design Division of defense contractor Sanders Associates was able to pursue an idea he came up with during the early 1950s - the idea of playing a game on a television set. In 1966 he assembled a small team to make his concept a reality, and in 1967 they came up with a chase game in which a player represented by a dot chases another player represented by a dot through a maze. Next, a light gun was designed to shoot at a dot on the screen, and then paddles were added to manipulate the dot to create a tennis game. The final prototype was soon created that could play several games by using a series of switches to change the screen output and demonstrations were held for all the major television companies. Magnavox ended up buying the system and distributed it as the Magnavox Odyssey starting in 1972. Like the prototype, the system could play multiple games, mostly variations on the chase, shooting, and paddle games developed during design, but instead of switches, the Odyssey used circuit cards, which did not have the actual games programmed on them but controlled screen output. The system could not produce sound, had black-and-white graphics, and only contained enough processing power to create dots, paddles, and a few lines, so color overlays and accessories such as cards and dice were provided for some games. The controller consisted of three dials for horizontal movement, vertical movement, and spin, and a light gun shaped like a rifle was also sold separately. Retailing for around $100, the system was marketed poorly by Magnavox, which left consumers with the false impression that the system only worked on Magnavox televisions, and sold around 100,000 units over its lifetime, failing to carve out a meaningful place for itself in the market.

Early arcade games

Shortly after founding Atari, Bushnell and Dabney hired Al Alcorn as the company’s first game engineer. At the time, Bushnell was working on a racing game using the physics of Computer Space and was attempting to interest pinball giant Bally Manufacturing in the game. Bushnell told Alcorn Atari had a contract from General Electric for a ping-pong game and told him to design it. No such contract actually existed, but Bushnell considered a ping-pong game something easy to design to get Alcorn’s feet wet in the business. What Alcorn came back with was a tennis game in which the paddle was divided into segments to vary the angle of return and which sped up during long rallies to make them more exciting. Bushnell decided the product was good enough to release and tried to talk Bally into taking it. Bally would not do so without a test run, so Bushnell set up a prototype in a bar. At one point, the machine stopped working because it was overstuffed with coins, and when Bushnell learned about this, he decided to sell it himself instead, a departure from Atari’s business model, which was to create the games and then license them to other companies for manufacturing and distribution. Named PONG, the game featured simple yet entertaining game play and therefore became an immediate success upon release in 1972, unlike the complex Computer Space. Atari sold at least 8,000 units of the game, more than the most popular pinball machines of the time could boast, and began the rise of the video game into mainstream culture. Those 8,000 machines represented only a third of the ball-and-paddle games on the market, however, as coin-op companies small and large soon released their own versions of PONG as well. Magnavox also took note of PONG, specifically the similarities between the game and its own tennis game on the Odyssey, and threatened to sue. Alcorn almost certainly did not steal from Magnavox when designing PONG, but it does appear that Bushnell attended a trade show and was exposed to the Odyssey before he assigned Alcorn the project. The companies soon settled, with Atari becoming the official arcade distributor of PONG in return for a modest fee. Soon after the release of PONG, Bushnell bought out Dabney to become sole owner of the company.

In 1973, Atari founded a rival company called Kee Games headed by Bushnell’s second-in-command at Atari, Joe Keenan, that created clones of Atari products. Atari did so because arcade distributors of the day required exclusivity contracts for their areas of operation, limiting the reach of Atari’s products. Kee Games created the next big hit in video games in 1974, Tank, designed by Steve Bristow, who interned at Ampex while a student and originally joined Atari to collect coins from its pinball route. Tank was a dueling game in which each player controlled a tank and had to negotiate a maze to destroy the tank of the other player and set off another wave of imitation when many other companies released one-on-one dueling games featuring both tanks and airplanes. The Atari/Kee Games relationship was kept a secret until uncovered in December of 1974. Tank was such a big hit, however, that everyone wanted to carry it and distributor exclusivity came to an end. The companies merged, with Joe Keenan becoming president of Atari. The Kee Games label was used by Atari for some games for a while longer, with the most notable game being the 1975 release Indy 800, a driving game with a massive cabinet that was the first arcade game with color graphics and the first to allow eight players to take part simultaneously. Atari was also responsible during this time for the first game to allow four-players (1973, Pong Doubles), the first game released as a waist-high "cocktail" cabinet (1974, Quadra Pong), the first arcade game involving pursuit in a maze (1973, Gotcha), the first driving/racing game (1974, Gran Trak 10), and the first first-person driving game (1976, Night Driver, also the first game with a sit-down cabinet). Atari’s first big hit after PONG, however, was Breakout, essentially a single-player version of PONG in which the paddle is at the bottom of the screen and the player bounces a ball off the paddle to destroy bricks arrayed at the top of the screen. Released in 1975, Breakout sold 15,000 units.

While nearly every pinball company released a Pong clone in 1972 or 1973, very few companies remained dedicated to video game creation after that. The most important company was Bally Manufacturing, which released arcade games under its Midway label. Midway had its first big hit in 1975 with Gun Fight. Gun Fight was also the first Japanese video game imported into the American market, with Taito being the original creator of the game, which involved two cowboys on opposite sides of the screen dueling each other. Dave Nutting at Midway improved the graphics and added obstacles to the game, using the first microprocessor in an arcade game in the process, to create Midway’s hit version. In 1976, Nutting designed a submarine game called Sea Wolf, giving Midway a second hit that sold 10,000 units. Another company to tap into video games in the early days was Sega, which purchased an American coin-op company called Gremlin to be its American outlet and had one of its first successes in 1976 with Blockade, in which each player controlled a vehicle that drew lines on the screen and attempted to force the other player to crash into these lines. 1976 also saw the first major protest against video game violence when a company called Exidy released Death Race in which the player had to run over "gremlins" that resembled human stick-figures. After an initial period of success, the video game market began to decline in late 1976 as the novelty of the games wore off.

The golden age of arcade games

After a brief period of decline, the arcade industry entered its greatest period of creativity and popularity in 1978 to begin what has commonly been dubbed the golden age of arcade games. Fueling this new growth were two very different games from companies Atari and Taito. Toshihiro Nishikado was supposedly inspired by a dream in his creation of Space Invaders, but whatever the origin, the game created a new craze with its simple, yet addicting game play in which the player controlled a gun battery at the bottom of the screen and had to destroy aliens advancing down the screen in rows one line at a time. While the player could never "win" the game, as destroying all the aliens led to the game starting over at greater difficulty until the player finally died, Space Invaders introduced the high score, providing a new social dimension to the video game as players tried to top each others' performances (Space Invaders did not, however, allow the player to enter his initials next to his score; this practice began with the 1979 Exidy game Star Fire). A slow seller at first in Japan, the game eventually sold over 100,000 units and caused a phenomenon as small stores switched to housing rows of Space Invader cabinets and a shortage of the 100 Yen coins required to play the game resulted in the Japanese government having to increase production of the coin. Taito released the game through Midway in the United States, where the game sold 60,000 units and cemented the place of the Shoot 'em up genre in video games. At the same time, Atari released a revolutionary new sports game, Atari Football, that was both the first game to feature a smooth-scrolling screen and the first which used the trackball as a controller. Released initially in a two-player version and followed up with a four-player model, Atari Football required the player on offense to spin the trackball to advance his runner down the field while the defender attempted to tackle him and nearly matched Space Invaders quarter for quarter in the United States until early 1979 when the football season ended.

The golden age was remarkable not only for its game play advances, but also for its technical innovations. One of the most important was the implementation of vector graphics, created by an electron beam drawing lines on a black screen. The use of vector graphics allowed designers to animate many more objects on the screen at the same time at a sharper resolution then raster graphics allowed at the time as well as create better-defined shapes and even wire frame 3D models. Vector graphics were pioneered by Larry Rosenthal, who wrote his master’s thesis on Spacewar! and created a vector graphics system that would allow the game to be accurately modelled in the arcade. Rosenthal took his system to Cinematronics, a small arcade game company founded in 1975, which produced his Spacewar! clone Space Wars in 1977, which sold 30,000 units, established Cinematronics as a leading arcade game producer and led to the creation of several important games using vector graphics. These games include Cinematronics own Warrior (1979, a top-down view swordfighting game that was the first fighting game) and Rip Off (1980, a tank combat game that was the first important game in which two players played cooperatively, preceded only by an obscure 1978 Atari game called Fire Truck), as well as landmark Atari games Asteroids (1979 by Ed Logg, a space shooter in which the player must destroy asteroids that became Atari’s best-selling arcade game with 70,000 units sold in the U.S. and another 30,000 sold abroad), Battlezone (1980 by Ed Rothberg, a tank combat game that was the first commercial game with 3D graphics and the first with a first-person perspective), Tempest (1981 by Dave Theurer, a tube shooter that was the first game to allow the player to continue from the point of death by inserting another coin), and Star Wars (1983, a first-person space shooter that was one of the first successful movie tie-in games). Vector graphics machines could be temperamental and prone to break downs, however, causing vector games to virtually disappear after 1983 as raster graphics became more advanced.

Another advance late in the golden age was the use of the laserdisc to store game data. While Sega released the first such game in early 1983, the shoot 'em up Astron Belt, it was once again Cinematronics that was on the cutting edge of a new technology. Conceived by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth, the 1983 release Dragon's Lair made use of the increased capacity of the laserdisc to feature lavish animated sequences, create the first true story in a video game, and pioneer what would later be called the interactive movie. While the graphics were extraordinary, the game play merely consisted of choosing which path the hero should take at branching points in the story, leading to a game that could take many quarters to conquer the first time, but which had virtually no replay value once the proper sequence was known. Dragon's Lair sold 16,000 units and created a brief demand for laserdisc games, but they ended up being merely a passing fad.

After the success of Space Invaders, a large number of established coin-op companies that had avoided video games altogether or pulled out after releasing a PONG clone or two chose to fully embrace the new medium including pinball giants Williams and Gottlieb and Japanese coin-op companies such as Konami (est. 1969 as a jukebox rental and repair business) and Namco (est. 1955 as a mechanical rocking-horse manufacturer and operator). Space shooters, whether fixed like Space Invaders or multi-directional like Asteroids, remained the hottest arcade genre into 1980 and continued to be popular long after that, with important golden age games including Namco’s Galaxian (1979, a Space Invaders clone that was the first shoot 'em up with color graphics) and its sequel, Galaga (1981), Williams' Defender (1980 by Eugene Jarvis, a complex game that required the player to rescue astronauts being snatched by aliens that sold 55,000 units and was the first shooter with a scrolling screen), Amstar’s Phoenix (1980, another Space Invaders clone that was the first arcade game to include multiple stages and a boss fight), Konami’s Scramble (1981, a horizontally-scrolling shooter that established what became the basic parameters of the scrolling shoot 'em up in which the player is propelled though several stages while dodging obstacles and dispatching enemies), Namco's Xevious (1982, the first shoot 'em up to scroll vertically), and Sega’s Zaxxon (1982, a scrolling shooter that was the first video game of any genre to make use of the isometric perspective).

While Space Invaders reinvigorated the arcade market, it was a 1980 game from Namco that elevated the video game firmly into American popular culture. Namco hired Toru Iwatani, a pinball enthusiast, in 1977 to design games. Iwatani was somewhat put off by the shoot 'em ups dominating the market after Space Invaders and wanted to create a non-violent game that would appeal to both sexes. Deciding to base the game around taberu, the Japanese word meaning "to eat," Iwatani came up with a maze game in which the player had to collect all 240 dots in the maze while avoiding a group of enemy ghosts. In perhaps the first instance of a video game power-up, the player could eat one of four "power pills" in the maze to briefly gain the ability to eat the ghosts, which then leave the maze for a brief period. The shape of the protagonist came to Iwatani in a pizzeria when he removed the first slice from a pizza and was struck by the resulting circle with a missing slice that looked like a mouth. Both protagonist and game were named Puck-Man in reference to the shape, but for the U.S. release, Namco was afraid vandals might change the "P" to a "F" and gave the game the title it is more widely recognized by today, Pac-Man. An immediate hit in the United States, Pac-Man became the best-selling arcade game in that country to date with over 100,000 units sold, created a new craze for maze games that partially displaced the shoot 'em up, resulted in video games moving out of the arcades to locations such as convenience stores, drug stores, hotels, and airports, and resulted in Pac-Man himself becoming the first identifiable video game character and mascot, appearing on the cover of Time, being featured in the hit song Pac-Man Fever, and appearing in a number of products from bed sheets, dolls, penny banks, and stickers, to a Saturday morning cartoon. In 1981, MIT students Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran started a business called General Computer to produce enhancement kits for existing arcade games and ended up working with Midway, Pac-Man's American distributor, to create a sequel by applying such a kit to the Pac-Man board to create Ms. Pac-Man, which improved on the original by having four mazes instead of one, faster game play, and random enemy movement rather than fixed patterns and became the best-selling arcade game of all time in the United States with 115,000 units sold.

Circa 1970

At this time, computer and video game development split to many areas, such as arcade machines, university computers, handhelds, and home computers.

University mainframe computers

University mainframe game development blossomed in the early 1970s. There is little record of all but the most popular games, as they were not marketed, or regarded as a serious endeavor. The people, generally students, writing these games often were doing so illicitly, making questionable use of very expensive computing resources, and thus were not anxious to let very many people know what they were doing. There were, however, at least two notable distribution paths for the student game designers of this time.

PLATO was an educational computing environment designed at the University of Illinois and which ran on mainframes made by Control Data Corporation. Games were often exchanged between different PLATO systems.

DECUS was the user group for computers made by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and distributed programs, including games, that would run on the various types of DEC computers.

A number of noteworthy games were also written for Hewlett Packard minicomputers such as the HP2000.

Highlights of this period, in approximate chronological order, include:

• 1971: Don Daglow wrote the first Computer Baseball game on a DEC PDP-10 mainframe at Pomona College. Players could manage individual games or simulate an entire season. Daglow went on to team with programmer Eddie Dombrower to design Earl Weaver Baseball, published by Electronic Arts in 1987.
• 1971: Star Trek was created, probably by Mike Mayfield on a Sigma 7 minicomputer at MIT. This is the best-known and most widely played of the 1970s Star Trek titles, and was played on a series of small "maps" of galactic sectors printed on paper or on the screen. It was the first major game to be ported across hardware platforms by students. Daglow also wrote a popular Star Trek game for the PDP-10 during 1971-72, which presented the action as a script spoken by the TV program’s characters. A number of other Star Trek themed games were also available via PLATO and DECUS throughout the decade.
• 1972: Gregory Yob wrote Hunt the Wumpus for the PDP-10, a hide-and-seek game, though it could be considered the first text adventure. Yob wrote it in reaction to existing hide-and-seek games such as Hurkle, Mugwump (game), and Snark.
• 1974: Both Maze War (on the Imlacs PDS-1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California) and Spasim (on PLATO) appeared, pioneering examples of early multi-player 3D first person shooters.
• 1975: Will Crowther wrote the first text adventure game as we would recognize it today, Adventure (originally called ADVENT, and later Colossal Cave). It was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. The player controls the game through simple sentence-like text commands and receives descriptive text as output. The game was later re-created by students on PLATO, so it is one of the few titles that became part of both the PLATO and PDP-10 traditions.
• 1975: Before the mid-1970s games typically communicated to the player on paper, using teletype machines or a line printer, at speeds ranging from 10 to 30 characters per second with a rat-a-tat-tat sound as a metal ball or belt with characters was pressed against the paper through an inked ribbon by a hammer. By 1975 many universities had discarded these terminals for CRT screens, which could display thirty lines of text in a few seconds instead of the minute or more that printing on paper required. This led to the development of a series of games that drew "graphics" on the screen.
• 1975: Daglow, then a student at Claremont Graduate University, wrote the first Computer Role Playing Game on PDP-10 mainframes, Dungeon. The game was an unlicensed implementation of the new role playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Although displayed in text, it was the first game to use line of sight graphics, top-down dungeon maps that showed the areas that the party had seen or could see, allowing for light or darkness, the different vision of elves and dwarves, etc.
• 1975: At about the same time the RPG dnd, also based on Dungeons and Dragons first appeared on PLATO system CDC computers. For players in these schools dnd, not Dungeon, was the first computer role-playing game.
• 1977: Kelton Flinn and John Taylor create the first version of Air, a text air combat game that foreshadowed their later work creating the first-ever graphical online multi-player game, Air Warrior. They would found the first successful online game company, Kesmai, now part of Electronic Arts. As Flinn has said: "If Air Warrior was a primate swinging in the trees, AIR was the text-based amoeba crawling on the ocean floor. But it was quasi-real time, multi-player, and attempted to render 3-D on the terminal using ASCII graphics. It was an acquired taste."
• 1977: The writing of the original Zork was started by Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Tim Anderson, and Bruce Daniels. Unlike Crowther, Daglow and Yob, the Zork team recognized the potential to move these games to the new personal computers, and they founded text adventure publisher Infocom in 1979. The company was later sold to Activision. In a classic case of "connections", Lebling was a member of the same D&D group as Will Crowther, but not at the same time. Lebling has been quoted as saying "I think I actually replaced him when he dropped out. Zork was 'derived' from Advent in that we played Advent... and tried to do a 'better' one. There was no code borrowed... and we didn’t meet either Crowther or Woods until much later."
• 1980: Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman and Ken Arnold released Rogue on BSD Unix after two years of work, inspiring many roguelike games ever since. Like Dungeon on the PDP-10 and dnd on PLATO, Rogue displayed dungeon maps using text characters. Unlike those games, however, the dungeon was randomly generated for each play session, so the path to treasure and the enemies who protected it were different for each game. As the Zork team had done, Rogue was adapted for home computers and became a commercial product.

Early handhelds

Microvision was the first handheld videogame with interchangeable cartridges.

The first handheld electronic game was called OXO which is like the game Tic Tac Toe, made in 1972 by a company called Waco (Toymaker). The display consisted of a grid of nine buttons, that could turn red or green when pushed. The first handheld game console with interchangeable cartridges was the Microvision designed by Smith Engineering, and distributed and sold by Milton-Bradley in 1979. Crippled by a small, fragile LCD display and a very narrow selection of games, it was discontinued two years later. Although neither would prove popular, they paved the way for more advanced single-game handhelds, often simply called "LED games" or "LCD games" depending on their display system.

Mattel had seen car-race games in arcades, and wanted to mass-produce something similar, but a video-game version would have been too costly. In 1974, Mattel engineers George Klose and Richard Cheng contracted with John Denker to write the Mattel Auto Race game as we know it, played on a 7x4 array of LED dots. Mark Lesser at Rockwell International Microelectronics Division ported the code to a calculator chip. The program was 512 bytes long. Subsequently, the same team produced Mattel Football I, which sold well over one million units and ushered in a short golden age of LED handheld games, especially sports games. At first composed of simple arrangements of LEDs, later games incorporated vacuum fluorescent displays allowing for detailed graphics in bright colors. The heyday of LED and VFD would last until the early 80s, when LCD technology became cheap and durable enough to be a viable alternative.

Home computers

While the fruit of development in early video games appeared mainly (for the consumer) in video arcades and home consoles, the rapidly evolving home computers of the 1970s and 80s allowed their owners to program simple games. Hobbyist groups for the new computers soon formed and game software followed.

File:Trs80 2.jpg

The Tandy TRS-80, the first Tandy computer and one of the machines responsible for the personal computer revolution.

Soon many of these games (at first clones of mainframe classics such as Star Trek, and then later clones of popular arcade games) were being distributed through a variety of channels, such as printing the game’s source code in books (such as David Ahl’s Basic Computer Games), magazines (Creative Computing), and newsletters, which allowed users to type in the code for themselves. Early game designers like Crowther, Daglow and Yob would find the computer code for their games -- which they had never thought to copyright -- published in books and magazines, with their names removed from the listing. Early home computers from Apple, Commodore, Tandy and others had many games that people typed in.

Another distribution channel was the physical mailing and selling of floppy disks, cassette tapes and ROM cartridges. Soon a small cottage industry was formed, with amateur programmers selling disks in plastic bags put on the shelves of local shops, or sent through the mail. Richard Garriott distributed several copies of his 1980 computer role-playing game Akalabeth in plastic bags before the game was published.

First generation (1972–1977)

See also: History of first generation video game consoles

Ralph Baer’s 1969 video game console prototype was finally sold to Magnavox and released in May, 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey as the first commercial video game console. As the first console and holder of a number of landmark patents, other companies with similar products (including Atari) had to pay a licensing fee for some time. It wasn’t until the introduction of Atari’s home version of PONG (at first under the Sears Tele-Games label) for Christmas of 1975 that home video games really took off. The success of PONG sparked hundreds of clone games, including the Coleco Telstar, which went on to be a success in its own right, with over a dozen models.

Second generation (1977–1983)

See also: History of second generation video game consoles

In the earliest consoles, the computer code for one or more games was hardcoded into microchips using discrete logic, and no additional games could ever be added. By the mid-1970s video games were found on cartridges. Programs were burned onto ROM chips that were mounted inside plastic cartridge casings that could be plugged into slots on the console. When the cartridges were plugged in, the general-purpose microprocessors in the consoles read the cartridge memory and ran whatever program was stored there. Rather than being confined to a small selection of games included in the box, consumers could now amass libraries of game cartridges.

Three machines dominated the second generation of consoles in North America, far outselling their nearest rivals:

• In 1977, Atari released its cartridge-based console called the Video Computer System (VCS), later called Atari 2600. Nine games were designed and released for the holiday season. It would quickly become by far the most popular of all the early consoles.

• Intellivision, introduced by Mattel in 1980. Though chronologically part of what is called the "8-bit era", the Intellivision had a unique processor with instructions that were 10 bits wide (allowing more instruction variety and potential speed), and registers 16 bits wide. The system, which featured graphics superior to the older Atari 2600, rocketed to popularity.

• Colecovision, an even more powerful machine, appeared in 1982. Its sales also took off, but the presence of three major consoles in the marketplace and a glut of poor quality games began to overcrowd retail shelves and erode consumers' interest in video games. Within a year this overcrowded market would crash.

In 1979, Activision was created by disgruntled former Atari programmers. It was the first third-party developer of video games. Many new developers would follow their lead in succeeding years.

By 1982 a glut of games from new third-party developers less well-prepared than Activision appeared, and began to overflow the shelf capacity of toy stores. In part because of these oversupplies, the video game industry crashed, starting from Christmas of 1982 and stretching through all of 1983. See the main article: Video game crash of 1983.

The 1980s

In the early 1980s, the computer gaming industry experienced its first major growing pains. Publishing houses appeared, with many honest businesses (and in rare cases such as Electronic Arts, successfully surviving to this day) alongside fly-by-night operations that cheated the games' developers. While some early 80s games were simple clones of existing arcade titles, the relatively low publishing costs for personal computer games allowed for many bold, unique games, a legacy that continues to this day. The primary gaming computers of the 1980s emerged in 1982: the Commodore 64, Apple II (although the Apple II started in 1977) and ZX Spectrum. The ZX Spectrum was mostly used and known only in the UK, whilst the USA had the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari 800. Over the run of 15 years, the Apple II had a total of almost 20,000 programs, making it the 8-bit computer with the most software overall.

The Golden age of arcade games reached its full steam in the 1980s, with many technically innovative and genre-defining games in the first few years of the decade. Defender (1980) established the scrolling shooter and was the first to have events taking place outside the player’s view, displayed by a radar view showing a map of the whole playfield. Battlezone (1980) used wireframe vector graphics to create the first true three-dimensional game world. 3D Monster Maze (1981) was the first 3D game for a home computer (meanwhile a 3D game for the PET computer was discovered, dating back to 1977), while Dungeons of Daggorath (1982) added various weapons and monsters, sophisticated sound effects, and a "heartbeat" health monitor. Pole Position (1982) used sprite-based, pseudo-3D graphics when it pioneered the "rear-view racer format" where the player’s view is behind and above the vehicle, looking forward along the road with the horizon in sight. The style would remain in wide use even after true 3D graphics became standard for racing games. Pac-Man (1979) was the first game to achieve widespread popularity in mainstream culture and the first game character to be popular in his own right. Dragon's Lair (1983) was the first laserdisc game, and introduced full-motion video to video games.

With Adventure establishing the genre, the release of Zork in 1980 further popularized text adventure games in home computers and established developer Infocom’s dominance in the field. As these early computers often lacked graphical capabilities, text adventures proved successful. When affordable computers started catching up to and surpassing the graphics of consoles in the late 1980s, the games' popularity waned in favor of graphic adventures and other genres. The text adventure would eventually be known as interactive fiction and a small dedicated following has kept the genre going, with new releases being nearly all free.

Also published in 1980 was Roberta Williams' Mystery House, for the Apple II. It was the first graphic adventure on home computers. Graphics consisted entirely of static monochrome drawings, and the interface still used the typed commands of text adventures. It proved very popular at the time, and she and husband Ken went on to found Sierra On-Line, a major producer of adventure games. Mystery House remains largely forgotten today.

The Commodore 64 system

In August of 1982, the Commodore 64 was released to the public. It found initial success because it was marketed and priced aggressively. It had a BASIC programming environment and advanced graphic and sound capabilities for its time, similar to the Colecovision console. It also utilized the same port popularized by the Atari 2600, allowing gamers to use their old joysticks with the system. It would become the most popular home computer of its day in the USA and many other countries and the best-selling single computer model of all time internationally.

At around the same time, the ZX Spectrum was released in the UK and quickly became the most popular home computer in many areas of Western Europe, and later the Eastern bloc due to the ease with which clones could be produced.

SuperSet Software created Snipes, a text-mode networked computer game in 1983 to test a new IBM PC based computer network and demonstrate its capabilities. Snipes is officially credited as being the original inspiration for Novell NetWare. It is believed to be the first network game ever written for a commercial personal computer and is recognised alongside 1974’s Maze War (a networked multiplayer maze game for several research machines) and Spasim (a 3d multiplayer space simulation for time shared mainframes) as the precursor to multi-player games such as Doom and Quake.

The true modern adventure game would be born with the Sierra King's Quest series in 1984. It featured color graphics and a third person perspective. An on-screen player-controlled character could be moved behind and in front of objects on a 2D background drawn in perspective, creating the illusion of pseudo-3D space. Commands were still entered via text. Lucasarts would do away with this last vestige feature of text adventures when its 1987 adventure Maniac Mansion built with its SCUMM system allowed a point-and-click interface. Sierra and other game companies quickly followed with their own mouse-driven games. For more on the history of adventures games, see Adventure games, history of

With Elite in 1984, David Braben and Ian Bell ushered in the age of modern style 3d graphics in the home, bringing a convincing vector world with full 6 degree freedom of movement and thousands of visitable planetary systems into the living room. Initially only available for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, the success of this title caused it eventually to be ported to all popular formats, including the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and even the Nintendo Entertainment System, although this version only received a European release.

The IBM PC compatible computer became a technically competitive gaming platform with IBM’s PC/AT in 1984. The new 16-color EGA display standard allowed its graphics to approach the quality seen in popular home computers like the Commodore 64. The primitive 4-color CGA graphics of previous models had limited the PC’s appeal to the business segment, since its graphics failed to compete with the C64 or Apple II. The sound capabilities of the AT, however, were still limited to the PC speaker, which was substandard compared to the built-in sound chips used in many home computers. Also, the relatively high cost of the PC compatible systems severely limited their popularity in gaming.

The Apple Macintosh also arrived at this time. It lacked the color capabilities of the earlier Apple II, instead preferring a much higher pixel resolution, but the operating system support for the GUI attracted developers of some interesting games (e.g. Lode Runner) even before color returned in 1987 with the Mac II.

In computer gaming, the later 1980s are primarily the story of the United Kingdom’s rise to prominence. The market in the UK was primely positioned for this task: personal computer users were offered a smooth scale of power versus price, from the ZX Spectrum up to the Amiga, developers and publishers were in close enough proximity to offer each other support, and the NES made much less of an impact than it did in the United States, being outsold by the Master System.

The arrival of the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga in 1985 was the beginning of a new era of 16-bit machines. For many users they were too expensive until later on in the decade, at which point advances in the IBM PC’s open platform had caused the IBM PC compatibles to become comparably powerful at a lower cost than their competitors. The VGA standard developed for IBM’s new PS/2 line in 1987 gave the PC the potential for 256-color graphics. This was a big jump ahead of most 8-bit home computers but still lagging behind platforms with built-in sound and graphics hardware like the Amiga, causing an odd trend around '89-91 towards developing to a seemingly inferior machine. Thus while both the ST and Amiga were host to many technically excellent games, their time of prominence proved to be shorter than that of the 8-bit machines, which saw new ports well into the 80s and even the 90s.

The Yamaha YM3812 sound chip.

Dedicated sound cards started to address the issue of poor sound capabilities in IBM PC compatibles in the late 1980s. AdLib set an early de facto standard for sound cards in 1987, with its card based on the Yamaha YM3812 sound chip. This would last until the introduction of Creative Labs' Sound Blaster in 1989, which took the chip and added new features while remaining compatible with AdLib cards, and creating a new de facto standard. However, many games would still support these and rarer things like the Roland MT-32 and Disney Sound Source into the early 90s. The initial high cost of sound cards meant they would not find widespread use until the 1990s.

Shareware gaming first appeared in the late 1980s, but its big successes came in the 1990s.

Early online gaming

Dialup bulletin board systems were popular in the 1980s, and sometimes used for online game playing. The earliest such systems, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, had a crude plain-text interface, but later systems made use of terminal-control codes (the so-called ANSI art, which included the use of IBM-PC-specific characters not actually part of an ANSI standard) to get a pseudo-graphical interface. Some BBSes offered access to various games which were playable through such an interface, ranging from text adventures to gambling games like blackjack (generally played for "points" rather than real money). On multiuser BBSs (where more than one person could be online at once), there were sometimes games allowing the different users to interact with one another; some such games of the fantasy role-playing variety were known as MUDs, for "multi-user dungeons". These games eventually evolved into what are known today as MMORPG.

Commercial online services also arose during this decade, starting with a plain-text interface similar to BBSs (but operated on large mainframe computers permitting larger numbers of users to be online at once), and moving by the end of the decade to fully-graphical environments using software specific to each personal computer platform. Popular text-based services included CompuServe, The Source, and GEnie, while platform-specific graphical services included Quantum Link for the Commodore 64, AppleLink for the Apple II and Macintosh, and PC Link for the IBM PC, all of which were run by the company which eventually became America Online; and a competing service, Prodigy. Interactive games were a feature of these services, though until 1987 they used text-based displays, not graphics.

Handheld LCD games

File:Game and watch-fire.jpg

One of the Game & Watch handhelds. This look was recreated as a playable stage in Super Smash Bros. Melee.

Nintendo’s Game & Watch line began in 1980. The success of these LCD handhelds spurred dozens of other game and toy companies to make their own portable games, many being copies of Game & Watch titles or adaptations of popular arcade games. Improving LCD technology meant the new handhelds could be more reliable and consume less batteries than LED or VFD games, most only needing watch batteries. They could also be made much smaller than most LED handhelds, even small enough to wear on one’s wrist like a watch. Tiger Electronics borrowed this concept of videogaming with cheap, affordable handhelds.

Video game crash of 1983

Main article: Video game crash of 1983

The video game crash of 1983 was the year long crash of the video game industry and the bankruptcy of a number of companies producing home computers and video game consoles in North America in late 1983 and early 1984. It brought an end to what is considered the second generation of console video gaming. Some causes of this are believed to be poor games such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. It was found out that there were in fact more Pac-Man cartridges manufactured than there were systems made. So many E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial cartridges were left over that they had to be buried in a hole in New Mexico.

Third generation (1985–1989)

Main article: History of video game consoles (third generation)

In 1984, the computer gaming market took over from the console market following the crash of that year; computers offered equal gaming ability and since their simple design allowed games to take complete command of the hardware after power-on, they were nearly as simple to start playing with as consoles.

The Nintendo Entertainment System or Famicom

In 1985, the North American video game console market was revived with Nintendo’s release of its 8-bit console, the Famicom, known outside Asia as Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was bundled with Super Mario Bros. and instantly became a success. The NES dominated the North American market until the rise of the next generation of consoles in the early 1990s. Other markets were not as heavily dominated, allowing other consoles to find an audience like the PC Engine in Japan and the Sega Master System in Europe, Australia and Brazil (though it was sold in America as well).

In the new consoles, the gamepad took over joysticks, paddles, and keypads as the default game controller included with the system. The gamepad design of an 8 direction D-pad with 2 or more action buttons became the standard.

The Dragon Quest series made its debut in 1986 with Dragon Quest, and has created a phenomenon in Japanese culture ever since. Also at this time, SquareSoft was struggling and Hironobu Sakaguchi decided to make their final game, titled Final Fantasy (1987), a role-playing game (RPG) modelled after Dragon Quest, and the Final Fantasy series was born as a result. Final Fantasy saved Squaresoft from bankruptcy, and would later go on to become the most successful RPG franchise. At around the same time, the Legend of Zelda series made its debut on the NES with The Legend of Zelda (1986). Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear series also made its debut with the release of Metal Gear (1987) on the MSX2 computer, giving birth to the stealth-based game genre. Metal Gear was ported to the NES shortly after. In 1989, Capcom released Sweet Home (1989) on the NES, which served as a precursor to the survival horror genre.

In 1988 Nintendo published their first issue of Nintendo Power Magazine.

The 1990s

If the 1980s were about the rise of the industry, the 1990s were about its maturing into a Hollywood-esque landscape of ever-increasing budgets and increasingly consolidated publishers, with the losers slowly being crushed or absorbed. As this happens, the wide variety of games that existed in the 1980s appears to fade away, with the larger corporations desiring to maximize profitability and lower risk.

With the increasing computing power and decreasing cost of processors like Intel 386, 486, and Motorola 68030, the 1990s saw the rise of 3D graphics, as well as "multimedia" capabilities through sound cards and CD-ROMs.

In the early 1990s, shareware distribution was a popular method of publishing games for smaller developers, including then-fledgling companies such as Apogee (now 3D Realms), Epic Megagames (now Epic Games), and id Software. It gave consumers the chance to try a trial portion of the game, usually restricted to the game’s complete first section or "episode", before purchasing the rest of the adventure. Racks of games on single 5 1/4" and later 3.5" floppy disks were common in many stores, often only costing a few dollars each. Since the shareware versions were essentially free, the cost only needed to cover the disk and minimal packaging. As the increasing size of games in the mid-90s made them impractical to fit on floppies, and retail publishers and developers began to earnestly mimic the practice, shareware games were replaced by shorter demos (often only one or two levels), distributed free on CDs with gaming magazines and over the Internet.

Shareware was also the distribution method of choice of early modern first-person shooters (FPS) like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Following Doom, the retail publishers and developers began to earnestly mimic the practice of offering demos, which had the effect of reducing shareware’s appeal for the rest of the decade. During this time, the increasing computing power of personal computers began to allow rudimentary 3D graphics. 1993’s Doom in particular was largely responsible for defining the genre and setting it apart from other first-person perspective games. The term FPS has generally come to refer to games where the player has full control over a (usually humanoid) character and can interact directly with the environment; almost always centering around the act of aiming and shooting with multiple styles of weapons and limited ammunition. See main article: First-person shooters, history of.

1992 saw the release of real-time strategy (RTS) game Dune II. It was by no means the first in the genre (that being 1982’s Cytron Masters from SSI), but it set the standard game mechanics for later blockbuster RTS games like Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Command and Conquer. The RTS is characterised by an overhead view, a "mini-map", and the control of both the economic and military aspects of an army. The rivalry between the two styles of RTS play - Warcraft style, which used GUIs accessed once a building was selected, and C&C style, which allowed construction of any unit from within a permanently visible menu - continued into the start of the next millennium.

Alone in the Dark (1992) planted the seeds of what would become known as the survival horror genre. It established the formula that would later flourish on CD-ROM based consoles, with games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

Adventure games continued to evolve, with Sierra’s King's Quest series, and LucasFilms'/LucasArts' Monkey Island series bringing graphical interaction and the creation of the concept of "point-and-click" gaming. Myst and its sequels inspired a new style of puzzle-based adventure games. Published in 1993, Myst itself was one of the first computer games to make full use of the new high-capacity CD-ROM storage format. It went on to remain the best-selling game of all time for much of the decade. Myst, along with Star Wars: Rebel Assault and Trilobyte’s The 7th Guest, were among the "killer apps" that made CD-ROM drives standard features on PCs. Despite Myst’s mainstream success, the increased popularity of action-based and real-time games led adventure games and simulation games, both mainstays of computer games in earlier decades, to begin to fade into obscurity.

It was in the 1990s that Maxis began publishing its successful line of "Sim" games, beginning with SimCity, and continuing with a variety of titles, such as SimEarth, SimCity 2000, SimAnt, SimTower, and the wildly popular day to day life simulator, The Sims in 2000.

In 1996, 3dfx released the Voodoo chipset, leading to the first affordable 3D accelerator cards for personal computers. These devoted 3D rendering daughter cards performed part of the computations required for more-detailed three-dimensional graphics (mainly texture filtering), allowing for more-detailed graphics than would be possible if the CPU were required to handle both game logic and all the graphical tasks. First-person shooter games (notably Quake) were among the first to take advantage of this new technology. While other games would also make use of it, the FPS would become the chief driving force behind the development of new 3D hardware, as well as the yardstick by which its performance would be measured, usually quantified as the number of frames per second rendered for a particular scene in a particular game.

Several other, less-mainstream, genres were created in this decade. Looking Glass Studios' Thief and its sequel were the first to coin the term "first person sneaker", although it is questionable whether they are the first "first person stealth" games. Turn-based strategy progressed further, with the Heroes of Might and Magic (HOMM) series (from 3DO) luring many main-stream gamers into this complex genre.

The 90s also saw the beginnings of Internet gaming, with MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) in the early years. Id Software’s 1996 game Quake pioneered play over the Internet in first-person shooters. Internet multiplayer capability became a de facto requirement in almost all FPS games. Other genres also began to offer online play, including RTS games like Microsoft’s Age of Empires, Blizzard’s Warcraft and StarCraft series, and turn-based games such as Heroes of Might and Magic. MMORPGs (Massively Multiplay Online Roleplaying Games), such as Ultima Online and EverQuest freed users from the limited number of simultaneous players in other games and brought the MUD concept of persistent worlds to graphical multiplayer games. Developments in web browser plugins like Java and Macromedia Flash allowed for simple browser-based games. These are small single player or multiplayer games that can be quickly downloaded and played from within a web browser without installation. Their most popular use is for puzzle games, classic arcade games, and multiplayer card and board games.

Gamers in the 90s began to take their fates into their own hands, with the creation of modifications (or "mods") for popular games. It is generally accepted that the earliest mod was Castle Smurfenstein, for Castle Wolfenstein. Eventually, game designers realised that custom content increased the lifespan of their games, and so began to encourage the creation of mods. Half-Life spawned perhaps the most successful (or, at the very least, one of the most widely played) mods of all time, with a squad-based shooter entitled CounterStrike. Since CounterStrike, many games have encouraged the creation of custom content. Other examples include Unreal Tournament, which allowed players to import 3dsmax scenes to use as character models, and Maxis's The Sims, for which players could create custom objects.

Few new genres have been created since the advent of the FPS and RTS, with the possible exception of the third-person shooter. Games such as Grand Theft Auto III, Splinter Cell, Enter The Matrix and Hitman all use a third-person camera perspective but are otherwise very similar to their first-person counterparts.

Decline of arcades

With the 16-bit and 32-bit consoles, home video games began to approach the level of graphics seen in arcade games. By this time, video arcades had earned a reputation for being seedy, unsafe places. An increasing number of players would wait for popular arcade games to be ported to consoles rather than going out. Arcades had a last hurrah in the early 90s with Street Fighter II and the one-on-one fighting game genre. As patronage of arcades declined, many were forced to close down. Classic coin-operated games have become largely the province of dedicated hobbyists.

The gap left by the old corner arcades was partly filled by large amusement centres dedicated to providing clean, safe environments and expensive game control systems not available to home users. These are usually based on sports like skiing or cycling, as well as rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution, which have carved out a large slice of the market. Dave & Busters and GameWorks are two large chains in the United States with this type of environment. Aimed at adults, they feature full service restaurants with full liquor bars and have a wide variety of video game and hands on electronic gaming options. Chuck E. Cheese is a similar type of establishment focused towards children.

Handhelds come of age

In 1989, Nintendo released the Game Boy, the first handheld console since the ill-fated Microvision ten years before. The design team headed by Gunpei Yokoi had also been responsible for the Game & Watch systems. Included with the system was Tetris, a popular puzzle game. Several rival handhelds also made their debut around that time, including the Sega Game Gear and Atari Lynx (the first handheld with color LCD display). Although most other systems were more technologically advanced, they were hampered by higher battery consumption and less third-party developer support. While some of the other systems remained in production until the mid-90s, the Game Boy remained at the top spot in sales throughout its lifespan.

Fourth generation (1989-1996)

Main article: History of video game consoles (fourth generation)

The Sega Mega Drive (known in the North America as the Sega Genesis) proved its worth early on after its debut in 1989. Nintendo responded with its own next generation system known as the Super NES in 1991. The NEC TurboGrafx-16 debuted early on alongside the Genesis, but did not achieve a large following in the U.S. due to a limited library of games and excessive distribution restrictions imposed by Hudson.

Mortal Kombat, released in both SNES and Genesis consoles, was one of the most popular game franchises of its time.

The intense competition of this time was also a period of not entirely truthful marketing. The TurboGrafx-16 was billed as the first 16-bit system but its central processor was an 8-bit HuC6280, with only its HuC6260 graphics processor being a true 16-bit chip. Additionally, the much earlier Mattel Intellivision contained a 16-bit processor. Sega, too, was known to stretch the truth in its marketing approach; they used the term Blast Processing to describe the simple fact that their console's CPU ran at a higher clock speed than that of the SNES (7.67 MHz vs 3.58 MHz).

In Japan, the 1987 success of the PC Engine (as the TurboGrafx-16 was known there) against the Famicom and CD drive peripheral allowed it to fend off the Mega Drive (Genesis) in 1988, which never really caught on to the same degree as outside Japan. The PC Engine eventually lost out to the Super Famicom, but retained enough of a user base to support new games well into the late 1990s.

CD-ROM drives were first seen in this generation, as add-ons for the PC Engine in 1988 and the Megadrive in 1991. Basic 3D graphics entered the mainstream with flat-shaded polygons enabled by additional processors in game cartridges like Virtua Racing and Star Fox.

SNK's Neo-Geo was the most expensive console by a wide margin when it was released in 1990, and would remain so for years. It was also capable of 2D graphics in a quality level years ahead of other consoles. The reason for this was that it contained the same hardware that was found in SNK's arcade games. This was the first time since the home Pong machines that a true-to-the-arcade experience could be had at home.

Fifth generation (1994 - 1999)

Main article: History of video game consoles (fifth generation)

File:N64 Super Mario 64 shifting sand land.jpg

Super Mario 64

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This file may be deleted at any time. became a defining title for 3D platformers

In 1994-1995, Sega released Sega Saturn and Sony made its debut to the video gaming scene with the PlayStation. Both consoles used 32-bit technology; the door was open for 3D games, though the Sega Saturn launch in the US started with a controversial advert launch which saw a PlayStation console being thrown out of a window of a tower block in an attempt to appeal that the Sega Saturn was much better than the PlayStation. Sony's PlayStation will turn out to be the worlds most sold console in the 90s era, only the PlayStation 2 topping this accolade during and beginning of the 21st century, selling even more units.

After many delays, Nintendo released its 64-bit console, the Nintendo 64 in 1996, selling more than 1.5 million units in only three months. The flagship title, Super Mario 64, became a defining title for 3D platformer games.

PaRappa the Rapper popularized rhythm, or music video games in Japan with its 1996 debut on the PlayStation. Subsequent music and dance games like beatmania and Dance Dance Revolution became ubiquitous attractions in Japanese arcades. While Parappa, DDR, and other games found a cult following when brought to North America, music games would not gain a wide audience in the market until the next decade.

Other milestone games of the era include Rare's Nintendo 64 title GoldenEye 007 (1997), which was critically acclaimed for bringing innovation to the previously lackluster realm of film-licensed games as well as being the first major first-person shooter on a console. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), Nintendo's 3D debut for the The Legend of Zelda adventure game series, is often regarded as the greatest game of all-time by various critics. The success of Metal Gear Solid (1998) for the PlayStation established stealth-based games as a popular genre.

Nintendo's choice to use cartridges instead of CD-ROMs for the Nintendo 64, unique among the consoles of this period, proved to have negative consequences. In particular, SquareSoft, which had released all previous games in its Final Fantasy series for Nintendo consoles, now turned to the PlayStation; Final Fantasy VII (1997) was a huge success, establishing the popularity of role-playing games in the west and making the PlayStation the primary console for the genre.

By the end of this period, Sony had become a leader in the video game market. The Saturn was successful in Japan but a failure in North America, leaving Sega outside of the main competition.

The 2000s

Sixth generation (1998 - 2005)

Main article: Sixth generation era

1998

• Sega released the Dreamcast in Japan. It later came out in the US in 1999
• Dance Dance Revolution was released in Japan.
• Nintendo released the Game Boy Color.
• Connectix Corporation released the Virtual Game Station, a successful PlayStation emulator. Sony went to fight the system, but Connectix won. The Bleem company released Bleem!, another PlayStation emulator.

2000

• Sony released the PlayStation 2.
• The Sims was released. It was an instant hit and became the best-selling computer (non-console) game of all time, surpassing Myst.

2001

• Nintendo released the GameCube and the successor to the Game Boy Color, the Game Boy Advance.

The Xbox, Microsoft's ticket into the videogame console industry.

• Microsoft entered the videogame console industry by releasing its home console, Xbox. Its flagship game, Halo, is also available at the system's launch.
• Sega announced they would no longer manufacture hardware and discontinue the Dreamcast. However, from that time through 2006, the DC has seen continued publication of hardcore games like arcade shooters, graphic adventures, and homebrew software.
• Grand Theft Auto III is released.

2002

• Sega became a third-party developer and publisher for all other current machines and the PC.

2003

• Infogrames, owner of the Atari intellectual properties, changed its name to Atari.
• Nintendo released the improved Game Boy Advance SP in March.
• Nokia entered the handheld market with its N-Gage game-phone hybrid on October 7.
• PS2 Linux Kit is launched

2004

• Halo 2 becomes the best selling Xbox game.

2005

• Resident Evil 4 for Nintendo GameCube becomes the most critically acclaimed game of the year.

2006

• Sony announces PSOne manufacturing ending in March
• Reggie Fils-Aime becomes President of Nintendo of America on May 25, 2006
• PlayStation is the first console to sell 103 million consoles as of March

Seventh generation (2005 - Present )

Main article: Seventh generation era

2004

• Nokia releases a re-tooled N-Gage, the N-Gage QD.
• Nintendo released the Nintendo DS in the U.S. on November 21.
• Sony released the PlayStation Portable in Japan on December 2

2005

• Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) is released to the U.S. market on March 23.
• Nintendo reveals early details of their next-generation video game console, the Wii (then codenamed Nintendo Revolution) during E3. At TGS Nintendo reveals their "revolutionary" controller. It includes tilt, position and movement sensors, and is one-handed (though an attachment can occupy the other hand for some games.)
• The Hot Coffee Mod is found on all versions of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas which includes a hidden "sex minigame." The game's rating is raised to AO in the US, which removes it from virtually all mainstream stores. Rockstar Games rereleases the game without the hidden content, bringing it back to an M rating - as well as a patch to remove the minigame from existing PC versions.
• Sony demonstrates the PlayStation 3 during a pre-E3 press conference. Anticipation for the console's release grows steadily. It is announced that it will have a MSRP of either $500 or $600 USD, depending on included features.
• Nintendo redesigns the Game Boy Advance again with the Game Boy Micro on October 2.
• In November, Nokia announces the N-Gage will be discontinued until at least 2007.
• Microsoft releases their second video game console, the Xbox 360 on November 22, with a rare simultaneous release in both America and Japan. It is well received in America, with resold units going for much higher than MSRP on the secondary market but suffered in the Japanese market, with many retailers having to go to extreme measures just to get them off the shelves. Although widely regarded as a superb console, stock shortages as well as system instability or poorly manufactured systems have marred this otherwise-successful launch.
• The video-game Spore is shown at the GDC, and is received well, due to its procedural generation and Massively Single-Player style.

2006

The Nintendo DS Lite

• The Nintendo DS Lite, a redesign of the Nintendo DS is announced on January 26, with a Japanese release set for 2006-03-02.
• Nintendo announces Wii on April 27, 2006. Wii (pronounced "we") features a new controller with an unorthodox, remote control-like shape, to encourage new users to play, which is based around the concept of direct motion control - whatever you do in real life affects what happens on the screen.
• Again, Sony demonstrates the PlayStation 3 at a pre-E3 press conference. First- and third-party games are revealed. The redesigned controller is said to have tilt-sensitivity, looks more like the DualShock controllers, and has lost rumble functionality in order to accommodate a motion sensor within the controller and comply with legal action taken against them. It is confirmed that there will be two packages. One is sold for about $499 with a 20GB hard drive, and the other $599 with 60GB and Wi-Fi. Prices in Europe and Australasia are set to be as much as 33% higher or more. The system launched with 80,000 consoles in Japan on 2006-11-11 and 400,000 consoles in North America on November 17, with Europe and Australasia (the PAL markets) following in March 2007. Originally the PAL markets were also going to have a November 2006 release, but was pushed back due to a shortage of parts.
• Envizions Computer Entertainment announced Evo: Phase One, a "next generation media hub" that "allows customers to pause, rewind and record live TV, store family photos, play 3D PC games, and access console like applications." Though noted as being a powerful system, its price tag is higher than that of any other console this generation; its RRP is set at 679.99 USD
• Sony releases the Playstation 3 on November 17, and chaos erupts at several locations in the US due to high demand and extremely limited retailer supply. Two men were shot, and many others were injured.
• Nintendo launched the Wii on November 19, boasting an 800,000 unit launch across the United States. Sales surged for the Wii and it eventually sold 2 million units by the end of December, compared to the Playstation 3's sales of less than a million.

2007

• As of mid-May, Wii remains in high demand and has been perpetually out of stock at many retailers, as PS3 supply now outstrips demand. Nintendo has also encountered supply problems with its DS Lite console due to its popularity.
• Removal of hardware based backward compatibility in European Sony PlayStation 3 units with no reduction in retail price is announced, to furor from consumers across the continent.
• In March 2007 Microsoft announces a new version of the Xbox 360 dubbed "Elite" that includes HDMI video output and upgrades the hard drive capacity to 120GB. The new version also comes in a new color: black. Microsoft also introduces existing accessories in black alongside the release of the upgraded system. First speculation thought it to be on a limited production run, but then later revealed to be added as a third SKU to the lineup.
• Sony announces the discontinuation of their 20GB version of the PS3 in America due to the Americans favoring the 60GB version.
• Despite predictions of poor sales due to its backwards-compatibility and pricing controversies, the Playstation 3 enjoyed a strong late-March launch in Europe, selling 600,000 units in the first two days. This is comparable to the sales of the Xbox 360 and Wii during their first month to market in Europe.

See also

• Golden age of arcade games
• Chronology of console role-playing games
• Video games
• Home computing (the 8-bit era)

The XBOX 360 was realeased on the following dates accross the world. The release started in the end of year 2005 and finnished in the early year 2006. These dates are:

  November 22, 2005 in the territories of United States and Canada 
  December 2, 2005 in the territory of Europe 
  December 10, 2005 in the territory of Japan 
  February 2, 2006 in the territory of Mexico 
  February 24, 2006 in the territory of South Korea 
  March 16, 2006 in the territories of Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan 
  March 23, 2006 in the territories of Australia and New Zealand

Further reading

• Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames by Leonard Herman
• The first quarter: A 25-year history of video games by Steven L. Kent
• From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games by Ed Halter
• Game Over: the maturing of mario by David Sheff
• High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games by McGraw-Hill Osborne Media.
• Joystick Nation by J.C. Herz
• Masters of Doom by David Kushner
• Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution by Dean Takahashi
• Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture by TL Taylor
• SMARTBOMB: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby.
• The Video Game Theory Reader edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron.
• Videogames: In The Beginning by Ralph Baer
• The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent
• Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life by Chris Kohler.

References

• Herman, Leonard (3rd edition - 2001). Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames. Rolenta Press. ISBN 0-9643848-5-X. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help) [1]
• Kohler, Chris (2005). Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. Brady Games. ISBN 0-7440-0424-1.
• Forster, Winnie (2005). The Encyclopedia of Game Machines - Consoles, handheld & home computers 1972-2005. Gameplan. ISBN 3-00-015359-4.
• DeMaria, Rusel (2 edition (December 18, 2003)). High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games. McGraw-Hill Osborne Media. ISBN 0-07-223172-6. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)
• Day, Walter. The Golden Age of Video Game Arcades (1998) - A 200-page story contained within Twin Galaxies' Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records. ISBN 1-887472-25-8
• The Video Game Revolution (2004) is a documentary from PBS that examines the evolution and history of the video game industry, from the 1950s through today, the impact of video games on society and culture, and the future of electronic gaming.
• Video Game Invasion: The History of a Global Obsession (2004) (Documentary. Press Release, IMDb)
• The First Video Game a description at Brookhaven National Laboratory
• Leonard Herman, Jer Horwitz, Steve Kent, and Skyler Miller (2002). "The History of Video Games". Gamespot. CNET Networks International Media.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Ars Technica's The evolution of gaming: computers, consoles, and arcade

External links

• A History of Video Games with separate sections for Arcade games and home consoles and numerous photos
• The Dot Eaters, a detailed history of various types of video games
• PONG-Story, on the history of Pong and other early video games
• COIN-OP TV interviews with classic game designers like Eugene Jarvis, Mike Hally and Keith Robinson