Early history of video games
Throughout the rest of the 1960s, digital computer games were created by increasingly numerous programmers and sometimes sold commercially in catalogs. As the audience for video games expanded to more than a few dozen research institutions with the falling cost of computers, and programming languages that would run on multiple types of computers were created, a wider variety of games began to be developed. Video games transitioned into a new era in the early 1970s with the launch of the commercial video game industry in 1971 with the display of the coin-operated arcade game "Galaxy Game" and the release of the first arcade video game "Computer Space", and then in 1972 with the release of the immensely successful arcade game "Pong" and the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, which launched the first generation of video game consoles.
History of Eastern role-playing video games
The earliest role-playing video game on a console was "Dragonstomper" on the Atari 2600 in 1982. "Bokosuka Wars", originally released for the Sharp X1 computer in 1983, was ported to the NES console in 1985, and was a commercial success in Japan, where it laid the foundations for the tactical role-playing game subgenre. Other notable early console RPGs included ports of Namco's 1984 arcade action role-playing games: "The Tower of Druaga", which was ported to the NES in 1985, and "Dragon Buster", the first video game to feature a life meter (called "Vitality" in-game), also ported to the NES in 1987.