History of Video Games

Video games were introduced as a commercial entertainment medium in 1971, becoming the basis for an important entertainment industry in the late 1970s/early 1980s in the United States, Japan, and Europe. After a disastrous collapse of the industry in 1983 and a subsequent rebirth two years later, the video game industry has experienced sustained growth for over two decades to become a $10 billion industry rivaling the motion picture industry as the most profitable entertainment industry in the world.




1948 – The first known concept for an electronic game was a device called the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device patented in the United States by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann

1951 - The earliest programs created to run a game on a computer appear to be a checkers program created by Christopher Strachey

1952 - tic-tac-toe program called OXO created by A.S. Douglas

1958 - Perhaps the first true electronic game not a representation of a pen-and-paper or board game was created on an oscilloscope by William Higinbotham and named Tennis for Two.

Higinbotham never attempted to patent or market the device, which was taken apart in 1959. Whether one of the concepts above, or another one entirely, counts as the first video game, none of them received wide distribution or had an impact on the industry.

3 major facets of the market, computer games, home console games, and arcade games were all in place by the beginning of the 1970s.


1961 - The landmark game that eventually led to the launch of both the college mainframe tradition and the video arcade game was conceived at MIT by a group of friends including Steve Russell, Wayne Witanen, and J. Martin Graetz, members of an organization called the Tech Model Railroad Club, interested in science fiction novels and movies.

MIT replaced its aging TX-0 mainframe computer with a DEC PDP-1, which had a built-in monitor

1962 – Space wars the final product featured two ships dubbed the "Wedge" and the "Needle" for their shapes that two players controlled and moved around the screen while firing torpedoes at each other until one ship was destroyed was finished

1966 - Ralph Baer, the head of the Equipment and Design Division of defense contractor Sanders Associates was able to pursue an idea he came up - the idea of playing a game on a television set. he assembled a small team to make his concept a reality

1967 - they came up with a chase game in which a player represented by a dot chases another player represented by a dot through a maze. Next, a light gun was designed to shoot at a dot on the screen, and then paddles were added to manipulate the dot to create a tennis game. The final prototype was soon created that could play several games by using a series of switches to change the screen output and demonstrations were held for all the major television companies

There was little advancement in computer games for the rest of the 1960s.

While it is likely that other innovative games were created during this time period, no reliable method existed to distribute them across the country, as there was little standardization across computers and no good way to port games from one system to another. Spacewar! itself would likely not have become a national phenomenon (in university computer labs at least) if not for DEC’s decision to bundle the game with its computers. In the end, these games disappeared into oblivion as old machines broke down and old tape was erased.


1971 - two Stanford University Students exposed to Spacewar! became the first individuals to release a commercial video game product when they hooked up a PDP-11 computer running Spacewar!

Magnavox ended up buying the system (refer to 1967) and distributed it as the Magnavox Odyssey starting in 1972

1972 – game named Pong, the game featured simple yet entertaining game play and therefore became an immediate success upon release (Read above details on wikipedia)

1973 - Atari founded a rival company called Kee Games headed by Bushnell’s second-in-command at Atari, Joe Keenan, that created clones of Atari products

1974 – Game named Tank was created

December 1974 – Kee games & Atari relationship uncovered. A lot of new versions of previous games was created.

1975 - Atari’s first big hit after Pong, however, was Breakout, essentially a single-player version of Pong in which the paddle is at the bottom of the screen and the player bounces a ball off the paddle to destroy bricks arrayed at the top of the screen. Released in 1975, Breakout sold 15,000 units.

1975 - Midway had its first big hit in 1975 with Gun Fight. Gun Fight was also the first Japanese video game imported into the American market, with Taito being the original creator of the game

1976 – Dave Nutting designed seawolf. (read below in wikipedia for more info on other games created)

There was a downturn in games market after protest was held for Death Race, a game that runs over Gremlins.


Golden Age of Video Gaming

After a brief period of decline, the arcade industry entered its greatest period of creativity and popularity in 1978 to begin what has commonly been dubbed the golden age of arcade games

1979 – Star fire, a game that was slow seller in Japan initially but led to an increase in demand for 100yen coins & chnaging of small shops to row houses with tons of gaming cabinets.

A new invention called trackball was used as a controller for 1 of the 1st few sport’s game, Atari Football.

Soon after, many new companies embraced video gaming & other companies joined as well.

With important golden age games including Namco’s Galaxian (1979, a Space Invaders clone that was the first game with true three-channel RGB color graphics) and a sequel.

SNK's Ozma Wars (1979, the first shoot 'em up with multiple stages or levels)

Amstar’s Phoenix (1980, another Space Invaders clone that was the first arcade game to include a final boss fight)

Taito's Front Line (1982), innovative as being one of the earliest military-themed games and the earliest in which the player kills actual humans rather than spaceships, robots, aliens, etc.

it was a 1980 game from Namco that elevated the video game firmly into American popular culture

Deciding to base the game around taberu, the Japanese word meaning "to eat," Iwatani came up with a maze game in which the player had to collect all 240 dots in the maze while avoiding a group of enemy ghosts. It is known as today’s Pac-Man.

A new craze for maze games that partially displaced the shoot them up, resulting in video games moving out of the arcades to locations such as convenience stores, drug stores, hotels, and airports, and resulted in Pac-Man himself becoming the first identifiable video game character and mascot. Also taking the attention away from Shoot em’ up games.

Namco was also responsible for the 1982 racing game, Pole Position, considered the first great racing game by providing the most realistic racing action yet seen in the arcade as well as being one of the earliest to feature full color graphics and helping to pioneer the "rear-view racer" format that became standard in the genre

1980 – Release of new genre games (Space Panic) that requires climbing of ladders & collecting items.

1981 - Donkey Kong, the continuation following Space Panic

After which, Mario came about from nintendo.