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Do you love video games? Whether it’s playing house in The Sims, destroying demons in Doom, mining to your heart’s content in Minecraft or battling it out in League of Legends, video games are a popular pastime and a number of video game ports exist for popular games these days. It’s also a multibillion-dollar industry.
However, there are some humble origins for the craze that is video games today. This article will explore the history and evolution of gaming. We’ll explain how gaming started and where it is today. So, if you’re interested in this fascinating topic, continue reading to learn more.
A Mention of Alan Turing
Without Alan Turing, the godfather of computers, there would be no video games, as the technology he pioneered during the Second World War (in addition to breaking the Enigma code) paved the way for modern video games.
Alan Turing actually invented an AI-informed chess game. It worked by assigning points to each potential move, and the algorithms Turing developed resembled a ‘logic’ to the play. The algorithms Turing and his colleague David Champernowne wrote in the 1940s were way too powerful to be run by computers at the time, so instead, the game was ‘executed’ by Turing manually. Unfortunately, Turing passed away before they executed the game on a real computer, but his work laid the foundations for decades to come.
Spacewar
The next significant event in the history of video games was when MIT professor Steve Russell built the game he called ‘Spacewar!‘ in 1962 on a massive MIT computer. This tech advancement was huge within the context of the early history of video games, as it quickly became prevalent within the small computer programming community in the 1960s. The public domain code was widely shared by geeks and nerds at the time, and it was recreated across other computer systems.
Atari and Pong, and Other Classic Titles
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One of the most important historical milestones in gaming was the development of Pong, a table-tennis-themed arcade video game, by the company Atari.
Atari created a whole new industry around the video game arcade. In 1973, when they started to sell Pong widely, arcade machines began sprouting up in shopping malls, bowling alleys and bars around the world. Other companies even cashed in on the hype and started to produce knock-off versions of Pong.
The arcade market began to stagnate due to an influx of these inferior Pong imitations, but in 1978, the release of the classic Space Invaders breathed a fresh breath of life into the emerging market. This growth was further driven by new game franchises such as Pac-Man (published in 1980) and Donkey Kong (published in 1981).
The Birth of the Video Game Console
Around a similar time that the arcade scene exploded (or perhaps even earlier), some innovators were experimenting with how games could be played on existing household television sets. In 1972, a German inventor named Ralph H. Baer released the Magnavox Odyssey, which was the world’s first commercial console platform. Atari took this idea to the next level, ran with it, and achieved mass-market success with Pong and other console games. Consoles of this era in gaming were built to come preloaded with whatever game you purchased with the set, and ‘game cartridges’ weren’t introduced for a few more years.
The Great Crash of the 1980s
Back in 1983, the North American video game sector experienced a major “crash in the market” due to a variety of factors, including an oversaturated game console market, intense competition from computer gaming, and a big surplus of over-hyped, low-quality games, including the infamous E.T., an Atari game based on the successful movie which is often considered the worst game ever created. Atari paid a staggering $25 million for the license to produce the E.T. game, which further contributed to an overall debt of $536 million (which is equivalent to $1.42 billion today). The company was carved up and sold in 1984.
This crash only lasted a few years, and the video games industry slowly began to piece itself back together during the 80s. By the turn of the decade, Japanese developers had begun to make their mark on the industry. Nintendo’s products began to land on Western shelves, gaining immense popularity for their gameplay and graphics.
PC Gaming and the First-Person Shooter
By the spring of 1994, an estimated 27% of U.S. households had a personal computer, and PC gaming was about to boom.
The first popular 3D game, Doom, launched on PC in 1993 and really pushed the boundaries of what was possible. It is still considered one of the most influential games ever published and spawned a genre of games known as First-Person Shooters. Wolfenstein followed soon after, as did a legion of lesser clones and imitations.
Multiplayer Games and Phone Gaming
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The rise of mobile phones and the Internet grew the gaming industry to billions of dollars in revenue by the turn of the millennium. In 2001, Microsoft launched the Xbox Live online gaming platform for their flagship Xbox console, and this soon became a must-have for gamers. A few years later, in 2004, World of Warcraft by Blizzard was released and peaked at 14 million monthly paying subscribers. While online multiplayer RPGs already existed, WoW truly popularised the genre, and even South Park made a WoW episode.
During this period of time, Nintendo still dominated the handheld market with their Game Boy consoles and phone companies BlackBerry and Nokia attempted to integrate game apps into their phones with some degree of success.
However, Apple’s iPhone created the transition of gaming to a mobile platform. The release of the Apple App Store was soon followed by Google’s store for Android devices, which paved the way for gaming app developers to create monetised games for a mass market.
Gaming Today
Gaming is now a multibillion-dollar industry, but by now, you’re more informed of the humble origins of the video game, thanks to Alan Turing and the company known as Atari.
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