The history of video games began in the 1950s and 1960s as computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations on minicomputers and mainframes. "Spacewar!" was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student hobbyists in 1962 as one of the first such games on a video display. The first consumer video game hardware was released in the early 1970s. The first home video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, and the first arcade video games were "Computer Space" and "Pong". After its home console conversions, numerous companies sprang up to capture "Pong"'s success in both the arcade and the home by cloning the game, causing a series of boom and bust cycles due to oversaturation and lack of innovation.
By the mid-1970s, low-cost programmable microprocessors replaced the discrete transistor–transistor logic circuitry of early hardware, and the first ROM cartridge-based home consoles arrived, including the Atari Video Computer System (VCS). Coupled with rapid growth in the golden age of arcade video games, including "Space Invaders" and "Pac-Man", the home console market also flourished. The 1983 video game crash in the United States was characterized by a flood of too many games, often of poor or cloned qualities, and the sector saw competition from inexpensive personal computers and new types of games being developed for them. The crash prompted Japan's video game industry to take leadership of the market, which had only suffered minor impacts from the crash. Nintendo released its Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States in 1985, helping to rebound the failing video games sector. The latter part of the 1980s and early 1990s included video games driven by improvements and standardization in personal computers and the console war competition between Nintendo and Sega as they fought for market share in the United States. The first major handheld video game consoles appeared in the 1990s, led by Nintendo's Game Boy platform.
In the early 1990s, advancements in microprocessor technology gave rise to real-time 3D polygonal graphic rendering in game consoles, as well as in PCs by way of graphics cards. Optical media via CD-ROMs began to be incorporated into personal computers and consoles, including Sony's fledgling PlayStation console line, pushing Sega out of the console hardware market while diminishing Nintendo's role. By the late 1990s, the Internet also gained widespread consumer use, and video games began incorporating online elements. Microsoft entered the console hardware market in the early 2000s with its Xbox line, fearing that Sony's PlayStation positioned as a game console and entertainment device, would displace personal computers. While Sony and Microsoft continued to develop hardware for comparable top-end console features, Nintendo opted to focus on innovative gameplay. Nintendo developed the Wii with motion-sensing controls, which helped to draw in non-traditional players and helped to resecure Nintendo's position in the industry; Nintendo followed this same model in the release of the Nintendo Switch.
From the 2000s and into the 2010s, the industry has seen a shift of demographics as mobile gaming on smartphones and tablets displaced handheld consoles, and casual gaming became an increasingly larger sector of the market, as well as a growth in the number of players from China and other areas not traditionally tied to the industry. To take advantage of these shifts, traditional revenue models were supplanted with ongoing revenue stream models such as free-to-play, freemium, and subscription-based games. As triple-A video game production became more costly and risk-averse, opportunities for more experimental and innovative independent game development grew over the 2000s and 2010s, aided by the popularity of mobile and casual gaming and the ease of digital distribution. Hardware and software technology continues to drive improvement in video games, with support for high-definition video at high framerates and for virtual and augmented reality-based games.
Early history (1948–1970).
As early as 1950, computer scientists were using electronic machines to construct relatively simple game systems, such as "Bertie the Brain" in 1950 to play tic tac toe, or Nimrod in 1951 for playing Nim. These systems used either electronic light displays and mainly as demonstration systems at large exhibitions to showcase the power of computers at the time. Another early demonstration was "Tennis for Two", a game created by William Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958 for three-day exhibition, using an analog computer and an oscilloscope for a display.
"Spacewar!" is considered one of the first recognized video games that enjoyed wider distribution behind a single exhibition system. Developed in 1961 for the PDP-1 mainframe computer at MIT, it allowed two players to simulate a space combat fight on the PDP-1's point-plotting display. The game's source code was shared with other institutions with a PDP-1 across the country as the MIT students themselves moved about, allowing the game to gain popularity.
1970s.
Mainframe computer games.
In the 1960s, a number of computer games were created for mainframe and minicomputer systems, but these failed to achieve wide distribution due to the continuing scarcity of computer resources, a lack of sufficiently trained programmers interested in crafting entertainment products, and the difficulty in transferring programs between computers in different geographic areas. By the end of the 1970s, however, the situation had changed drastically. The BASIC and C high-level programming languages were widely adopted during the decade, which were more accessible than earlier more technical languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL, opening up computer game creation to a larger base of users. With the advent of time-sharing, which allowed the resources of a single mainframe to be parceled out among multiple users connected to the machine by terminals, computer access was no longer limited to a handful of individuals at an institution, creating more opportunities for students to create their own games. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of the PDP-10, released by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1966, and the portable UNIX operating system, developed at Bell Labs in 1971 and released generally in 1973, created common programming environments across the country that reduced the difficulty of sharing programs between institutions. Finally, the founding of the first magazines dedicated to computing like "Creative Computing" (1974), the publication of the earliest program compilation books like "101 BASIC Computer Games" (1973), and the spread of wide-area networks such as the ARPANET allowed programs to be shared more easily across great distances. As a result, many of the mainframe games created by college students in the 1970s influenced subsequent developments in the video game industry in ways that, "Spacewar!" aside, the games of the 1960s did not.
In the arcade and on home consoles, fast-paced action and real-time gameplay were the norm in genres like racing and target shooting. On the mainframe, however, such games were generally not possible due both to the lack of adequate displays (many computer terminals continued to rely on teletypes rather than monitors well into the 1970s and even most CRT terminals could only render character-based graphics) and insufficient processing power and memory to update game elements in real time. While 1970s mainframes were more powerful than arcade and console hardware of the period, the need to parcel out computing resources to dozens of simultaneous users via time-sharing significantly hampered their abilities. Thus, programmers of mainframe games focused on strategy and puzzle-solving mechanics over pure action. Notable games of the period include the tactical combat game "Star Trek" (1971) by Mike Mayfield, the hide-and-seek game "Hunt the Wumpus" (1972) by Gregory Yob, and the strategic war game "Empire" (1977) by Walter Bright. Perhaps the most significant game of the period was "Colossal Cave Adventure" (or simply "Adventure"), created in 1976 by Will Crowther by combining his passion for caving with concepts from the newly released tabletop role-playing game (RPG) "Dungeons &amp; Dragons" (D&amp;D). Expanded by Don Woods in 1977 with an emphasis on the high fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien, "Adventure" established a new genre based around exploration and inventory-based puzzle solving that made the transition to personal computers in the late 1970s.
While most games were created on hardware of limited graphic ability, one computer able to host more impressive games was the PLATO system developed at the University of Illinois. Intended as an educational computer, the system connected hundreds of users all over the United States via remote terminals that featured high-quality plasma displays and allowed users to interact with each other in real time. This allowed the system to host an impressive array of graphical and/or multiplayer games, including some of the earliest known computer RPGs, which were primarily derived, like "Adventure", from "D&amp;D", but unlike that game placed a greater emphasis on combat and character progression than puzzle solving. Starting with top-down dungeon crawls like "The Dungeon" (1975) and "The Game of Dungeons" (1975), more commonly referred to today by their filenames, "pedit5" and "dnd", PLATO RPGs soon transitioned to a first-person perspective with games like "Moria" (1975), "Oubliette" (1977), and "Avatar" (1979), which often allowed multiple players to join forces to battle monsters and complete quests together. Like "Adventure", these games ultimately inspired some of the earliest personal computer games.
The first arcade video games and home consoles.
The modern video game industry grew out of the concurrent development of the first arcade video game and the first home video game console in the early 1970s in the United States.
The arcade video game industry grew out of the pre-existing arcade game industry, which was previously dominated by electro-mechanical games (EM games). Following the arrival of Sega's EM game "Periscope" (1966), the arcade industry was experiencing a "technological renaissance" driven by "audio-visual" EM novelty games, establishing the arcades as a healthy environment for the introduction of commercial video games in the early 1970s. In the late 1960s, a college student Nolan Bushnell had a part-time job at an arcade where he became familiar with EM games, watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery while learning how it worked and developing his understanding of how the game business operates.
In 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, Ralph Baer came up with an idea for an entertainment device that could be hooked up to a television monitor. Presenting this to his superiors at Sanders and getting their approval, he, along with William Harrison and William Rusch, refined Baer's concept into the "Brown Box" prototype of a home video game console that could play a simple table tennis game. The three patented the technology, and Sanders, not in the commercialization business, sold licenses to the patents to Magnavox to commercialize. With Baer's help, Magnavox developed the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home console, in 1972.
Concurrently, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney had the idea of making a coin-operated system to run "Spacewar!" By 1971, the two had developed "Computer Space" with Nutting Associates, the first arcade video game. Bushnell and Dabney struck out on their own and formed Atari. Bushnell, inspired by the table tennis game on the Odyssey, hired Allan Alcorn to develop an arcade version of the game, this time using discrete transistor–transistor logic (TTL) electronic circuitry. Atari's "Pong" was released in late 1972 and is considered the first successful arcade video game. It ignited the growth of the arcade game industry in the United States from both established coin-operated game manufacturers like Williams, Chicago Coin, and the Midway subsidiary of Bally Manufacturing, and new startups such as Ramtek and Allied Leisure. Many of these were "Pong" clones using ball-and-paddle controls, and led to saturation of the market in 1974, forcing arcade game makers to try to innovate new games in 1975. Many of the newer companies created in the wake of "Pong" failed to innovate on their own and shut down, and by the end of 1975, the arcade market had fallen by about 50% based on new game sale revenues. Further, Magnavox took Atari and several other of these arcade game makers to court over violations of Baer's patents. Bushnell settled the suit for Atari, gaining perpetual rights for the patents for Atari as part of the settlement. Others failed to settle, and Magnavox won around $ in damages from these patent infringement suits before the patents expired in 1990.
Arcade video games caught on quickly in Japan due to partnerships between American and Japanese corporations that kept the Japan companies abreast of technology developments within the United States. The Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company (Namco) partnered with Atari to import "Pong" into Japan in late 1973. Within the year, Taito and Sega released