The history of video games goes as far back as the early 1950s, when academics began designing simple games and simulations as part of their computer science research^{[citation needed]}. Video gaming would not reach mainstream popularity until the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world.

As of 2015, there are eight generations of video game consoles, with the latest generation including Nintendo's Wii U, Microsoft's Xbox One, and Sony's PlayStation 4. PC gaming has been holding a large market share in Asia and Europe for decades and continues to grow due to digital distribution. Since the release of smartphones,mobile gaming has been a driving factor for games to reach out to people not before interested in gaming, as well as people not able to afford dedicated hardware.

 

The earliest video games originated in 1940 when Edward Condon designed a computer for the Westinghouse display at the World’s Fair that played the traditional game Nim in which players tried to avoid picking up the last match. Later named "Nimatron," tens of thousands of people played it, and the computer won at least 90% of the games.^[1][2] By the popular and most all-encompassing definition of an interactive program incorporating both electronics and a display, an outgrowth of computer research developed in fields such as artificial intelligence.^{[citation needed]}. As computer technology evolved through the 1940s from the electromechanical Z3 (1941) to the electronic Atanasoff–Berry Computer (1942) to the Turing-completeENIAC (1945) and finally to the stored-program EDSAC (1949), computers became both powerful and flexible enough to serve a variety of scientific and business functions^{[citation needed]}. In 1951, the computer was commercialized in the United States by the UNIVAC division of typewriter company Remington Rand, paving the way for the adoption of the mainframe by academic institutions, research organizations, and corporations across the developed world^{[citation needed]}. Adoption of computer technology was initially limited to only the largest such organizations, however, by prohibitive cost, expansive space requirements, enormous power consumption, and the need to employ a highly trained staff to maintain and operate the machines. This created an environment in which all computer use needed to be justified as part of a serious scientific or business endeavor. Early game creation was thus largely limited to testing or demonstrating theories relating to areas such as human-computer interaction, adaptive learning, and military strategy^{[citation needed]}.

Due to the haphazard nature of early computer game creation and the lack of concern for preservation at the time, it is difficult to pinpoint the first video game ever created. Some of the earliest known games include Bertie the Brain (1950), a tic-tac-toe game on display at the Canadian National Exhibition; the Nimrod (1951), a computer custom-built by Ferrantispecifically for display at the Festival of Britain that could play the mathematical game Nim; OXO by A.S. Douglas (1952), which he programmed as part of his master's thesis and is the earliest known game to display graphics on a monitor;Hutspiel (1955), a war game built by the United States military to simulate a conflict with the Soviet Union in Europe; IBMemployee Arthur Samuel's checkers program (1956), one of the earliest computer games demonstrated on national television in the United States and eventually capable of self-improvement through analyzing mistakes in its own play; and the NSS Chess Program developed at Carnegie Mellon University (1958), the first chess program sophisticated enough to defeat a novice human opponent^{[citation needed]}.

One program that stands out in this early period — both for its atypical subject matter and its subsequent notoriety in a series of patent lawsuits — is Tennis for Two (1958), created by physicist William Higinbotham to entertain guests at the annual visitor's day held by the Brookhaven National Laboratory. This program displayed a tennis court in side view on an oscilloscope and allowed two players to volley a ball using box-shaped controllers equipped with a knob for trajectory and a button for hitting the ball. Displayed for two seasons at Brookhaven, Tennis for Twoproved popular with the public, but was ultimately dismantled so its parts could be re-purposed for other tasks. Higinbotham never considered adapting the successful game into a commercial product. Like the other game creators in the 1950s, his focus remained on research rather than entertainment. Ultimately, the widespread adoption of computers to play games had to wait for the machines to spread from serious academics to their students on U.S. college campuses.

 

Spacewar!

By 1960, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was one of the premier centers of computer research in the world, home to both the Lincoln Laboratory and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The former provided MIT with a custom-builttransistorized computer, the TX-0, that was both smaller and more interactive than the typical mainframe, while the latter provided the institution with Steve Russell, who followed Artificial Intelligence Lab founder John McCarthy from Dartmouth College to MIT in 1958 to help him develop the LISP programming language. The TX-0 operated under fewer restrictions than MIT's more powerful IBM mainframes and could actually be operated by students during off-peak hours in the middle of the night. The computer soon attracted a group of engineering undergrads with membership in a student organization called the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) who referred to themselves as "hackers" after the word "hack" members of the club had defined to describe a particularly clever feat of ingenuity. Soon, Alan Kotok, Bob Saunders, Peter Sampson and other hackers were spending their nights punching out computer code on paper tape to create improved programming tools, music programs, and simple AI routines like Mouse in a Maze and a Tic-tac-toe program.

Steve Russell and his friends Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen were attracted to the TX-0 as well, which in 1961 was joined by a PDP-1 from the Digital Equipment Corporation, a computer company established by former Lincoln Laboratory engineers. Equipped with a high-quality vector display, the PDP-1 offered the promise of more sophisticated visual hacks than the aging TX-0. Russell and friends, who were great fans of the science fiction novels of E.E. Smith, decided to exploit the new hardware by creating a game in which two human-controlled spaceships attempted to destroy each other by firing torpedoes. DubbedSpacewar! (1962), this hack, programmed primarily by Russell with several crucial enhancements from members of the TMRC, became one of the first computer games to achieve national distribution when DEC decided to include it as a test program on every PDP-1 it sold. By the end of the 1960s, Spacewar! could be found in university computer labs across the United States and served as an inspiration for students to create their own variations of the game alongside entirely new designs. These creations remained trapped in the lab for the remainder of the decade, however, because even though some adherents ofSpacewar! had begun to sense its commercial possibilities, it could only run on hardware costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. As computers and their components continued to fall in price, however, the dream of a commercial video game finally became attainable at the beginning of the 1970s.

 

Nolan Bushnell and the commercialization of the video game[edit]

Even in 1971, the components for a system capable of running a program with the sophistication of Spacewar! were too expensive to transform the game into home entertainment. A new generation of minicomputers like the Data General Novaand the DEC PDP-11 debuted in 1969-70, however, that dropped the price of computing low enough that it could seriously be considered for the coin-operated games industry, which at the time was experiencing its own technological renaissance as large electro-mechanical driving and target shooting games like Sega Enterprises's Periscope (1967) and Chicago Coin'sSpeedway (1968) pioneered the adoption of elaborate visual displays and electronic sound effects in the amusement arcade. While this coin-op industry was controlled almost exclusively by a group of established firms in Chicago, the promise of integrating solid-state components like integrated circuits into coin-operated games attracted a small number of engineers and entrepreneurs in California's Silicon Valley, where the first commercial video game products would be introduced.

Nolan Bushnell stood uniquely between the worlds of coin-op and computers that would join forces to introduce the video game to the general public. As an electrical engineering student at the University of Utah in the mid-1960s, Bushnell received limited exposure to computer programming through his classes while gaining work experience maintaining the coin-operated games at the Lagoon Amusement Park. Upon graduation, Bushnell found employment at Ampex in Silicon Valley, where he was soon exposed to the Spacewar! game at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Bushnell immediately looked for a commercial avenue for the game and had the idea of developing a coin-operated version on a minicomputer like the Nova. Enlisting his office co-worker at Ampex, an older and more experienced engineer named Ted Dabney, Bushnell orchestrated the creation of a partnership called Syzygy Engineering to develop the game. Using a minicomputer proved prohibitively expensive, however, so Bushnell used a new concept of controlling the cathode ray tube of a television throughtransistor–transistor logic (TTL) circuits to generate and move dots around the screen. This conceptual breakthrough, which was actually implemented by Dabney, allowed the duo to create a take-off on Spacewar! called Computer Space, in which the player controls a spaceship and attempts to destroy two hardware-controlled flying saucers before they destroy him.

Released in 1971 by one of the few Silicon Valley coin-op companies, Nutting Associates, Computer Space failed to sell its entire production run due to several factors including marketing blunders by Nutting and an overly complicated physics system and control scheme that alienated the working-class bar patrons that were the primary market for coin-operated games at the time. Meanwhile, a second attempt to bring Spacewar! into the arcade market called Galaxy Game by Hugh Pitts and Stan Tuck that began market testing at roughly the same time as Computer Space failed to expand even beyond its initial location, as Pitts took the route Bushnell rejected of recreating Steve Russell's landmark hack on a PDP-11, resulting in a product that was too expensive for mass production. Both Computer Space and Galaxy Game proved popular with the sophisticated engineering crowd centered around Stanford University, but in order to gain mass market acceptance, the video game would have to evolve to be both cheaper and simpler to play.

Ralph Baer and the birth of home consoles

The development of a commercially successful video game industry resulted from military contractor Sanders Associates inNashua, New Hampshire. It was at Sanders that Ralph Baer, the head of the company's instrumentation division, began a skunk works project in 1966 with a small group of engineers to create an interactive game playable on a television set. A graduate of the American Television Institute of Technology with a degree in television engineering, Baer had long been interested in evolving television entertainment beyond passive network programming and had almost implemented a built-in game on a television he was designing for Loral Corporation back in 1951 before his boss told him to abandon the concept. Over a decade later, he tried again; working primarily with co-worker Bill Harrison, who built most of the actual hardware, Baer developed a series of prototype systems based on diode-transistor (DTL) logic circuits that would send a video signal to a television set to generate spots on the screen that could be controlled by the player. These spots were used to play a variety of simple button-mashing, quiz, and chase games as well as a target shooting game using a light gun. Originally capable of generating only two spots, the system was modified in November 1967 at the suggestion of engineer Bill Rusch to generate a third spot for use in a ping pong game in which each player controlled a single spot that served as a paddle and volleyed the third spot, which acted as a ball.

As a defense contractor struggling in a recession, Sanders Associates was unable to launch a consumer product, but management saw enough potential in the Baer prototype to allow him to attempt to find a manufacturing partner. This proved to be a difficult prospect, as no company involved in the television industry had ever shown much interest in interactive entertainment. Indeed, the only known previous attempt by a television company to use a CRT for a game, acathode ray tube amusement device developed in 1947 by DuMont Laboratories and sometimes erroneously credited as the first video game concept despite not incorporating a computer, a video signal, or a monitor, was abandoned without ever entering production. After being turned down by cable company TelePrompTer Corporation, Baer approached every important television manufacturer in the United States, but received only a lukewarm response. After rejecting an offer fromRCA due to what Sanders considered unreasonable terms, the company entered an agreement to license the system toMagnavox in 1971.

The Magnavox Odyssey was created and patented in 1968 and later released in 1972. Baer's system represented both the first home console system and the first actual video game by the original and legal definition of the term as an apparatus that transmits a video signal to a television receiver for the purpose of generating images that can be manipulated by individuals to play a game. The system launched with a dozen games included in the box, four more sold with a separate light gun, and six games sold separately. These games were largely variations on the quiz, chase, shooting, and ball-and-paddle games conceived by Baer and his team and made use of screen overlays and accessories such as cards and dice that were also included with the system for additional graphical and gameplay elements. While the games were activated using individual circuit cards inserted into the system, these devices did not contain memory and merely unlocked games already wired into the hardware. Retailing for roughly $100.00, the Odyssey sold under 100,000 units in 1972 from a production run topping 140,000, leaving tens of thousands of unsold stock and upsetting plans to expand the product line. Magnavox almost dropped the Odyssey entirely at the end of the year, but ultimately decided to do a modest second manufacturing run in 1973. Sales were hampered in part by the relatively high price of the system, advertising that implied the system was only compatible with Magnavox televisions, and limited distribution exclusively through Magnavox-authorized franchise dealers. While the system failed to catch on in a big way, however, its legacy would be the birth of a vibrant video arcade game industry when Ralph Baer's design ingenuity intersected Nolan Bushnell's entrepreneurial ambition.

 

Bushnell and Dabney founded Atari, Inc. in 1972, before releasing their next game:Pong. Pong was the first arcade video game with widespread success. The game is loosely based on table tennis: a ball is "served" from the center of the court and as the ball moves towards their side of the court each player must maneuver their paddle to hit the ball back to their opponent. Allan Alcorn created Pong as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell based the idea on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, which later resulted in a lawsuit against Atari. Surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work, Bushnell and Dabney decided to manufacture the game. Atari sold over 19,000Pong machines,^[3] spawning many imitators.

Another significant game was Gun Fight,^[4] an on-foot, multi-directional shooter,^[5]designed by Tomohiro Nishikado and released by Taito in 1975.^[6] It depicted game characters,^[7] game violence, and human-to-human combat,^[8] controlled using dual-stick controls.^[9] The original Japanese version was based on discrete logic,^[6] which Dave Nutting adapted for Midway's American release using the Intel 8080, making it the first video game to use a microprocessor.^[10] This later inspired original creator Nishikado to use a microprocessor for his 1978 blockbuster hit,Space Invaders.^[6]

Mainframe computers

University mainframe game development developed 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 by making questionable use of very expensive computing resources, and thus were not eager to let many people know of their endeavors. There were, however, at least two notable distribution paths for student game designers of this time:

• The PLATO system was an educational computing environment designed at the University of Illinois 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). It 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 interactive baseball game, computer baseball, on a DEC PDP-10 mainframe at Pomona College. Players could manage play-by-play strategy for 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 University of California. 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 1970–1972, 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 the hide-and-seek game Hunt the Wumpus for the PDP-10, which could be considered the first text adventure. Yob wrote it in reaction to existing hide-and-seek games such as Hurkle, Mugwump, and Snark.
• 1974: Both Maze War (on the Imlac PDS-1 at the Ames Research Center in California) and Spasim (on PLATO) appeared, pioneering examples of early multi-player 3D first-person shooters.
• 1974: Brand Fortner and others developed Airfight as an educational flight simulator. To make it more interesting, all players shared an airspace flying their choice of military jets, loaded with selected weapons and fuel and to fulfill their desire to shoot down other players' aircraft. Despite mediocre graphics and a slow screen refresh, it became a popular game on the PLATO system. Airfight was the inspiration for what became the Microsoft Flight Simulator.
• 1975: William Crowther wrote the first modern text adventure game, Adventure (originally called ADVENT, and laterColossal 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, and so is one of the few titles that became part of both the PLATO and DEC traditions.
• 1975: 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. The CRTs replaced the typical teleprinters or line printers that output at speeds ranging from 10 to 30 characters per second.
• 1975: Daglow, then a student at Claremont Graduate University, wrote the first role-playing video game on PDP-10 mainframes: Dungeon. The game was an unlicensed implementation of the new tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Although displayed in text, it was the first game to use line of sight graphics, as the top-down dungeon maps showing the areas that the party had seen or could see took into consideration factors such as light or darkness and the differences in vision between species.
• 1975: At about the same time, the game dnd, also based on Dungeons & Dragons first appeared on PLATO system CDC computers. For players in these schools dnd, not Dungeon, was the first computer role-playing video game.
• 1976: The earliest role-playing video games to use elements from Dungeons & Dragons are Telengard, written in 1976, and Zork (later renamed Dungeon), written in 1977.^[11][12]
• 1977: Kelton Flinn and John Taylor created 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."^{[citation needed]}
• 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.
• 1978: Multi-User Dungeon, the first MUD, was created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, beginning the heritage that culminates with today's MMORPGs.
• 1980: Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman and Ken Arnold released Rogue on BSD Unix after two years of work, inspiring manyroguelike 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.

In the earliest consoles, the computing logic for one or more games was hardwired into microchips using discrete logic, and no additional games could ever be added. In other words, these consoles were single-purpose computers, not programmable computers; there was no software, only hardware, so no change of software was possible. This was an obvious issue for developers; customers would have to buy a new device to attach to their TV sets in order to play different games. By the mid-1970s, game consoles contained general-purpose microprocessors and video games were found oncartridges, starting in 1976 with the release of the Fairchild Video Entertainment System (VES). Programs were burned ontoROM chips (ICs) that were mounted inside plastic cartridge casings that could be plugged into slots on the game console. When the cartridges were plugged in, the ROM electrically became a part of the microcomputer in the console, just as if the ROM ICs were on the same circuit board with the microprocessor inside the console, and the microprocessor would execute whatever program was stored in the ROM. Rather than being confined to a small selection of games included in the game system, consumers could now amass libraries of game cartridges. However video game production was still a niche skill. Warren Robinett, the famous programmer of the game Adventure, spoke on developing games: "In those old far-off days, each game for the 2600 was done entirely by one person, the programmer, who conceived the game concept, wrote the program, did the graphics—drawn first on graph paper and converted by hand to hexadecimal—and did the sounds."^[13]

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

• The Video Computer System (VCS) ROM cartridge-based console, later renamed the Atari 2600, was released in 1977 by Atari. Nine games were designed and released for the holiday season. While the console had a slow start, its port of the arcade game Space Invaders would become the first "killer app" and quadruple the console's sales.^[14] Soon after, the Atari 2600 would quickly become the most popular of all the early consoles prior to the North American video game crash of 1983. Notably, the VCS did this with only an 8-bit 6507 CPU,^[15] 128 bytes (i.e. 0.125 KB) of RAM, and at most 4 KB of ROM in each "Game Program"(tm) cartridge.^[16]

• The 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.
• The ColecoVision, an even more powerful machine, appeared in 1982. With its port of arcade game Donkey Kongincluded as a pack-in, sales for this console also took off. However, 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 "who realized that the games they had anonymously programmed on their $20K salaries were responsible for 60 percent of the company's $100 million in cartridge sales for one year".^[17] It was the first third-party developer of video games. By 1982, approximately 8 million American homes owned a video game console, and the home video game industry was generating an annual revenue of $3.8 billion, which was nearly half the $8 billion revenue in quarters generated from the arcade video game industry at the time.^[18] The Atari 2600 was discontinued on January 1, 1992, ending the second generation.

Golden age of arcade video games (1978–1986)[edit]

The arcade game industry entered its golden age in 1978 with the release of Space Invaders by Taito, a success that inspired dozens of manufacturers to enter the market.^[19][20] The game inspired arcade machines to become prevalent in mainstream locations such as shopping malls, traditional storefronts, restaurants and convenience stores during the golden age.^[21] The game also became the subject of numerous articles and stories on television and in newspapers and magazines, establishing video gaming as a rapidly growing mainstream hobby.^[22][23] Space Invaders would go on to sell over 360,000 arcade cabinets worldwide,^[24] and by 1982, generate a revenue of $2 billion,^[25] equivalent to $4.6 billion in 2011.^[26] In 1979, Namco's Galaxian sold over 40,000 cabinets in the United States,^[27] and Atari released Asteroids which sold over 70,000 cabinets.^[28]

The total sales of arcade video game machines in North America increased significantly during this period, from $50 million in 1978 to $900 million by 1981,^[29] with the arcade video game industry's revenue in North America reaching nearly $1 billion in quarters by the end of the 1970s, a figure that would triple to $2.8 billion by 1980.^[30] Color arcade games also became more popular in 1979 and 1980 with the arrival of titles such as Pac-Man, which would go on to sell over 350,000 cabinets,^[31] and within a year, generate a revenue of more than $1 billion in quarters;^[32] in total, Pac-Man is estimated to have grossed over 10 billion quarters ($2.5 billion) during the 20th century,^[32][33] equivalent to over $3.4 billion in 2011.^[26]

By 1981, the arcade video game industry was generating an annual revenue of $5 billion in North America,^[19][34] equivalent to $12.3 billion in 2011.^[26] In 1982, the arcade video game industry reached its peak, generating $8 billion in quarters,^[18]equivalent to over $18.5 billion in 2011,^[26] surpassing the annual gross revenue of both pop music ($4 billion) andHollywood films ($3 billion) combined at that time.