The History of Video Games: An Evolving Community
This post was last updated on November 1st, 2020
The video games industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors on the planet. Technological advances in recent years have revolutionised the industry and opened the doors to a new generation of gamers. Today, people can play scratch cards games while having lunch at a restaurant or standing in a queue. Read on to know more about the evolution of video games.
The early years
In 1940, Dr Edward Condon unveiled the first recognised example of a game machine in the New York World Fair. The game was played by over 50,000 people in a time span of 6 months, with the computer reportedly winning 90% of the games. However, the first game system for commercial home usage called Brown Box was designed in 1967.
The Brown Box allowed two users to control cubes that chased each other on the television screen. Also, it was programmed to play a variety of games including checkers and four sports games. It was licensed to Magnavox, which released the system as Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. The Odyssey didn’t have a microprocessor and the core of the system was a board with about 48 diodes. As a result of poor computing power, it could only produce simple graphics.
The advent of arcade gaming
Atari introduced a home version of its popular arcade game Pong in 1975. The original home version was sold exclusively through Sears and it became a huge success in just a short span of time. In 1977, Atari introduced the Video Computer System (VCS) called 2600. As it used removable cartridges, it allowed gamers to play a multitude of games using the same hardware.
Systems like Atari 2600, Mattel’s IntelliVision and Coleco’s ColecoVision helped to generate interest in the home gaming systems for a few years. However, players interest in these systems began to fade as their quality lagged far behind the arcade standards. But the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985 changed everything. The NES brought an improvement in the condition of the home video game market that continues to thrive and expand even now. The website MakeWebvideo.com has a gaming intro maker.
The shift towards online gaming
Long before Nintendo and Sega started offering online gaming services, many developers and engineers tried to use telephone lines to transfer information between consoles. The release of 4th generation 16-bit-era consoles in the early 1990s brought real advances into the world of online gaming.
In recent years, internet speeds and hardware technologies have improved at such a fast rate that every new batch of games and consoles is far better than their previous versions. Also, the affordable prices of mobile gaming consoles and internet connections allow players to play their favourite games whenever and wherever they want.
Online stores such as the Wii shop channel and The Xbox Live Marketplace has totally changed the way people buy games, update software and interact with other gamers around the world. Networking services Like Sony PSN have helped online multiplayer games reach new heights in recent years.
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