Video game

HISTORY

American physicists Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann were awarded a patent on December 14, 1948 for their "Cathode-ray tube amusement device," an oscilloscope featuring a set of knobs and switches. It was the first interactive electronic game.

In 1962, University of Utah engineering student Nolan Bushnell received his first exposure to video games, playing Spacewar! on the University's mainframe computer. Bushnell spent the next seven years trying to reproduce Spacewar! on a smaller, less expensive computer. When it was finally completed in 1971, Bushnell's Spacewar variation (dubbed "Computer Space") was not a success as people found it too complicated.

Screenshot of a PDP-1 computer running Spacewar Adambro

When the first microprocessor chip became available in 1972, Bushnell quit his job at Ampex, and founded Atari. Bushnell originally wanted to name the company Syzygy, but the name was already taken by a roofing company.

The word "Atari" comes from the ancient board game Go and means "to hit the target" in Japanese.
Using the small profits from Computer Space, Bushnell constructed Pong which could be linked to a television set, and started the video game explosion.

Pong was commercially released by Atari, on November 29, 1972. The first commercially successful video game, Pong was based on table tennis. Nolan Bushnell said it was a game ‘so simple that any drunk in any bar could play’.

Pong Pixabay

The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console. First demonstrated in April 1972, it was released that August, predating the Atari Pong home consoles by three years. The system could be powered by either six C batteries or an optional AC power supply. Games used "game cards" inserted into a slot similar to a ROM cartridge slot. The system lacked sound capability. By 1974 more than 350,000 had been sold.

Magnavox had a game similar to Pong, and they later sued Atari (successfully) for "copying" it.

When the gaming industry was in its infancy during the mid 1970s, consoles were hard-wired to play one or two crude games such as Pong. Atari changed that in 1977 with the 2600, the first console to take an unlimited number of games cartridges, heralding the age of the PlayStation, Wii and the Xbox.

Back in the 1980's people were able to download video games from a radio broadcast by recording the sounds onto a cassette tape that they could then play on their computers.

Between 1983-85, there was a huge crash in the video games industry. Market saturation was a factor, with too many competing consoles and games. Revenues went from $3.2 billion to $100 million, a 97% drop. The crash ended the 80’s generation of console gaming in the US.

The 8-bit handheld video game Game Boy device was developed and manufactured by Nintendo and first released in 1989. The inventor of the Nintendo Gameboy, Gunpei Yokoi, was originally hired by Nintendo in 1965 to maintain the assembly-line machines used to manufacture its Hanafuda cards.

FIRSTS 

The world's first coin-operated video game, Galaxy Game, cost US$20,000 to make in 1971. It charged players 10 cents per game or 25 cents for three,

Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, a platform video game originally released for the Atari 2600 by Activision in 1984, was the very first video game with a full music score.

The Legend of Zelda is a fantasy action-adventure video game franchise created by Japanese game designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka and first released on February 21, 1986. It was the first console game with a save function that enabled players to stop playing and then resume later.

The Legend of Zelda on the NES. Wikipedia

In the summer of 1986 Nintendo released Metroid, the first of many successful games in the franchise. Players took on the role of Samus Aran, an ex-soldier of the Galactic Federation who became a galactic bounty hunter.  Metroid was the first ever video game to feature a female protagonist.

Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr A. Serebrov packed a Nintendo Game Boy and his personal copy of Tetris for his 1993 mission aboard the Mir space station. On January 8, 1993, he became the first person to ever play a video game in space.

When in 1998, Bruce Willis participated in the PlayStation video game Apocalypse, he became the first actor to ever "act" in a video game. No one before had ever done voice work along with having their movements digitally added to the game.

"Baba Yetu" by Christopher Tin is the first piece of video game music to win a Grammy award. Tin originally composed the piece for the 2005 game Civilization IV with lyrics from the Swahili translation of The Lord's Prayer. Four years later, Tin released a recording of "Baba Yetu" featuring Ron Ragin and the Soweto Gospel Choir that won a Grammy for best instrumental arrangement accompanying vocalists.

FAMOUS VIDEO GAMES

Pac-Man, an arcade game that became an icon of 1980s popular culture, made its debut in Japan in 1980. Pac-Man's name was inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeia "pakku-pakku," which sounds like someone opening and closing their mouth.

Tetris is the best-selling video game to date. A tile-matching puzzle video game originally released for the Electronika 60 in 1984. It was then popularised upon its Game Boy release in 1989 and has sold more than 170 million copies worldwide.

Super Mario Bros is the best selling computer game series of all time, clocking over 200 million sales. The first title in the series, Super Mario Bros., released in 1985, established gameplay concepts and elements prevalent in nearly every Super Mario game since.

Final Fantasy is a Japanese science fantasy media franchise created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, and developed and owned by Square Enix (formerly Square). The first game in the series was released on December 18, 1987. The original Final Fantasy game got its title because Square thought it would go bankrupt and the title would be its final game. It ended up saving the company from bankruptcy.

The Light Warriors battle Lich, Fiend of Earth. in Final Fantasy Wikipedia

Solitaire is without a doubt the most popular video game in history, mostly because it was offered pre-installed in Microsoft's Windows operating system. It was created by Wes Cherry, a Microsoft intern that was working for the company in 1988, who wasn't paid for the game. Bill Gates liked the idea but complained it was too difficult to win at this game. The original version also included a fake Excel spreadsheet to hide the game from your boss.

"Solitaire" actually refers to any tabletop game you can play by yourself, not just the famous playing card game that was included on Windows. The card game simply called "Solitaire" on Windows is actually named "Klondike".

SimCity is an open-ended city-building video game series originally designed by Will Wright. The first game in the series, SimCity, was published by Maxis in 1989. The inspiration for creating SimCity came when Wright was developing a helicopter shoot'em up and found that he enjoyed messing around with the tool that creates the landscape maps more than the game itself.

The first instalment of the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series was first released on June 23, 1991, transforming Sega into a leading game company. Sonic the Hedgehog's full name is actually Ogilvie Maurice Hedgehog.

Sonic Hedgehog A screenshot, taken from the first level, Green Hill Zone. Wikipedia

Sonic the Hedgehog's power sneakers were based on Michael Jackson's boots from the Bad album sleeve.

Sonic the Hedgehog would have to consume 686 chili dogs to run through a full game stage at supersonic speed.

Despite being one of the best-selling fighting games of all time, the original Mortal Kombat game was created in 1991-92 by a five-man team in eight months.

Doom is a groundbreaking first-person shooter game developed by id Software and released on December 10, 1993. It was immediately successful, selling over 10 million copies. Doom is considered to be one of the most influential games of all time, and it helped to popularize the first-person shooter genre.

Within hours of its release in 1993 Doom was banned from numerous university networks as a rush of players overwhelmed their systems with death matches.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, one of the world's most successful video games, was released on November 20, 1998.

On its initial Nintendo 64 release, the review aggregator website Metacritic ranked the original Nintendo 64 version of Ocarina of Time as the highest reviewed game of all time, with average scores of 99/100.

When the game's producer Shigeru Miyamoto was a child, he didn't have any toys or television, so he would spend his time roaming the countryside unsupervised. One day, he found a deep dark hole. Intrigued, he grabbed a lantern and discovered a miniature cave system. This experience formed the spiritual basis of The Legend of Zelda.

North American box art

Will Wright was inspired to create The Sims by the 1991 Oakland firestorm. He lost his home in the fire, and wanted to create a game that emulated his experience of rebuilding his life in the aftermath. The game was first released on February 4, 2000.

The game Myst, released in 1993, was the best-selling computer game until The Sims took it out in 2002.

The controversial video game Grand Theft Auto III was first released to critical acclaim on October 21, 2001, and went on to popularise open world and adult-content games.

Grand Theft Auto III Wikipedia

Halo is a military science fiction first-person shooter video game that was first released on November 15, 2001. Halo was originally a Mac game that Steve Jobs was going to use to prove that Macintosh computers were viable for gaming.

In 2007, when Halo 3 released it broke records on video game sales, making $170 million on the first day. Movie executives blamed Halo for a 27% drop in the box office for that week.

A small group of developers behind Medal of Honor broke away from that series due to the increasing control of its publisher EA. They instead created a new game and called it Call of Duty, which was released on October 29, 2003.

Grand Theft Auto V cost $265 million to produce, making it the most expensive video game of all time.

The highest-grossing entertainment launch of all time was in September 2013. That launch was for the video game Grand Theft Auto V, which grossed more than $1bn during its opening 72 hours on sale.

Grand Theft Auto is the highest grossing video game of all time, having made 6 billion dollars whereas Avatar, the highest grossing movie, has made only 2.7 billion dollars.

FUN VIDEO GAME FACTS 

Quaker Oats briefly owned a video game company from 1982 to 1983 that made Atari games. They released 14 of them, but nothing was even close to a hit, and they shut down the division.

Karateka is a martial arts action game, which was originally programmed in 1984 for the Apple II, then widely ported. As a joke, the Apple II release of Karateka had a full version of the game on the reverse side of the disk that rendered the game upside down prompting users to call support and ask why the game was upside down. They were told to "take the disk out, insert it right-side up, and reboot."

Michael Jackson composed the music for Sonic 3 in 1993 but chose to remain uncredited because he was unhappy with the sound capabilities of the Sega Genesis.

Game designer Sid Meier (Civilization) has a 33/33/33 rule of sequel design, 33% of the game should keep established systems, 33% should feature improved systems, 33% brand-new mechanics.

In 2011, South Korea passed a law called "Cinderella Law" prohibiting children under 16 from playing online video games between 12 am to 6 am.

In 2013, a father in China hired gamers to kill his son in video games so the son would start looking for a job and get a life.

Disney had planned on making films based on the video games Mega Man and The Sims, but canceled those plans after Assassin's Creed flopped at the box office.

In 1985, Takahashi Meijin (real name Takahashi Toshiyuki) became a celebrity in Japan when he managed the feat of pressing a button on a video game controller 16 times in one second on television. It's still a world record.

Adult women represent a larger percentage (33%) of video game players than boys under 18 (17%).

As of 2024, the gaming industry is considered bigger than both the movies and music industries combined. 

In 2023, the global gaming market was valued at around $396.2 billion, according to Newzoo.

Box office revenue for music worldwide reached $283.5 billion in 2023, as reported by The Business Research Company.

The global music industry generated around $31.2 billion in 2022, according to Statista.