A Brief History of Videogames
From Styleguide
[edit] Antecedents
Prehistory
- People play…with rocks and sticks.
- Sports and physical competition are born.
- Board and card games originate.
1800s A political cartoon shows Abe Lincoln playing Bagatelle, a pinball precursor.
1889 The Marufuku Company is founded in Japan to make playing cards. The company will later change its name to Nintendo.
1931 Gottlieb releases Baffle Ball and launches the pinball industry. Use of pinball by gambling and organized crime interests leads to government regulation in many locales.
1933 Williams builds Contact, the first electro-mechanical pinball machine.
1937 The first electronic computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, is built.
1947 Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company is founded by Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka. The company starts building pocket transistor radios and grows into the global consumer electronics company known today as Sony.
1954 David Rosen begins importing photo booths to Japan; his company will eventually become Sega.
1957 The Soviet Union launches Sputnik. Machines grow as entertainment devices alongside growing fears about technology.
[edit] The Dawn of Videogames
1958 Willy Higinbotham builds an oscilloscope demonstration that allows players to enjoy a form of tennis at Brookhaven National Labs. Tennis for Two is widely considered the first videogame.
1961 MIT student Steve Russell creates Spacewar on a $120,000 PDP-1 mainframe computer. Other early mainframe games include Hammurabi – a simulation game; Advent – an adventure game; and Lunar Lander – a text-based spaceship landing simulation.
1966 Sega's coin-operated mechanical game Periscope becomes a hit in Japan and is exported to the rest of the world. Players pay 25 cents per game. Although this was considered an excessive cost at the time, the quarter becomes the standard fee for arcade game play.
1968 Ralph Baer patents the idea of an "interactive television game."
1971 Nolan Bushnell ships Computer Space for Nutting Associates; the game is generally considered the first nonmechanical coin-operated arcade game. The game fails to attract an audience – many consider it to be too complicated.
1972 Magnavox releases the Odyssey, the first home videogame system, using Baer's technology.
1972 Bushnell starts Atari. Al Alcorn creates PONG, inspired by Baer’s designs. The game quickly overflows the coin box at its first test location and goes on to become a massive arcade hit.
1972 - 1977 Many companies enter the videogame market with PONG clones for the arcade and home. By 1977 the fad has died and the videogame market experiences its first “hardware crash.”
[edit] The Atari Era and the Golden Age of Arcades
1976 Mattel releases Auto Race, the first handheld videogame.
1977 Atari releases the 2600. It comes bundled with Combat, a game based on the arcade hit Tank.
1978 Taito's Space Invaders arrives in arcades. The game causes a nationwide shortage of 100-yen coins in Japan.
1978 Bushnell forced out at Atari; founds Chuck E. Cheese restaurant/arcade franchise.
1979 Ex-Atari engineers start Activision, the first third-party developer.
1979 Asteroids is released.
1979 Adventure, the first game to feature an Easter egg, is released for the Atari 2600.
1980 Battlezone, considered the original first-person shooter, is released.
1980 Defender, the first game to feature a mini-map, is released.
1980 Pac-Man is released.
1980 Tempest is released and helps start the games-as-art debate.
[edit] Personal Computers Arrive
1979 Flight Simulator released for the Apple II and TRS-80.
1979 Roberta and Ken Williams found On- Line Systems, which will eventually become Sierra Entertainment.
1980 Zork is released for the Apple II.
1980 Richard Garriott codes Akalabeth on Apple IIe; the Ultima series is born.
1982 Trip Hawkins founds Electronic Arts.
1983 EA's One-on-One featuring Julius Erving and Larry Bird becomes the first licensed sports videogame.
[edit] The End of the Atari Era
1982 Shigeru Miyamoto repurposes old Radar Scope arcade cabinets into Donkey Kong. The game is the first appearance of Mario and becomes an improbable hit for Nintendo.
1982 Retailers return millions of unsellable E.T. and Pac-man cartridges for the Atari 2600. The cost of absorbing the returns is identified as one of the causes of the second videogame crash.
1983-85 Second videogame crash. Too many low-quality games result in a rapid drop in software prices. In 1982, industry revenues sat at $3 billion; by
1985 they decline to $100 million. Atari alone loses $539 million in 1983.
[edit] The 8-Bit Era: The Return of the Consoles
1983 The Family Computer (Famicom) is released in Japan.
1984 Alexei Pajitnov creates a computer version of Tetris while working at Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR.
1985 The American version of the Famicom, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), is test-marketed in New York City. Super Mario Bros. debuts.
1986 - 1991 The NES is a huge hit worldwide, selling over 60 million units and dominating the home videogame market.
[edit] The 16-bit Era
1989 Sega launches the Genesis, the first 16-bit game console. Interest in the NES starts to decline.
1989 Nintendo launches the Game Boy with Tetris packed in. The system will go on to sell over 100 million units worldwide and dominate the handheld gaming market until the release of the Game Boy Advance in 2001.
1990 Super Mario Bros. 3 is released. It becomes a huge hit for the NES, grossing $500 million.
1991 The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super NES) is released.
1991 id Software’s first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D ships and puts computer gaming back on the map.
1991 Civilization is released for the PC.
1992 Westwood releases Dune II, establishing the real-time strategy genre.
[edit] The PC Strikes Back
1989 Will Wright creates SimCity.
1993 Myst is released for the Macintosh and becomes the first major videogame to push CD-ROM technology and high-end multimedia.
1993 Doom is released for the PC.
[edit] The Next Generation and Beyond
1994 The Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn are launched in Japan. The PlayStation goes on to become Sony’s best selling product while the Saturn quickly flops.
1995 The Saturn and PlayStation are released in North America.
1996 The Nintendo 64 launches, and is the last major cartridge-based home system.
1999 Sega launches the Dreamcast in an attempt to overcome the mistakes made with the Saturn. The system flounders in the marketplace despite critical praise for games such as Seaman and Soul Calibur. First system with a built-in modem.
2000 Sony launches the PlayStation 2. The system goes on to dominate the market with over 100 million systems sold worldwide over the next seven years.
2000 The Sims launches and goes on to become the biggest selling PC game of its era.
2001 Dreamcast pulled from the market, Sega leaves the hardware business to become a third-party software publisher.
2001 Nintendo's Game Boy Advance and GameCube are both released.
2001 Microsoft launches the Xbox and loses a reported $1.5 billion in the first 18 months. Still, the system establishes Microsoft as a viable player in the games business.
2004 Halo 2 attracts approximately 1.5 million pre-orders, gaining worldwide media attention.
[edit] The Rise of the MMO
1996 Meridian 59 is released as the first graphical massively-multiplayer online game.
1997 Ultima Online successfully expands the audience for MMOs.
1999 EverQuest and Asherons' Call released. MMO role-playing games reach new level of popularity and relevance. The slang term “Evercrack” enters the cultural vocabulary to represent the genre's addictive qualities.
2002 Microsoft launches Xbox Live; millions of gamers pay a fee for the premium online service.
2002 The Sims Online ships.
2003 Star Wars Galaxies, an MMO set in the Star Wars universe, ships.
2004 World of Warcraft ships, goes on to dominate the MMO market with over 8 million subscribers.
[edit] The High-Definition Generation (The Next Next Generation)
2004 The Nintendo DS, the first dual-screened portable, launches. The touchscreen- enabled device grows from curious gaming oddity to top-selling portable system.
2004 Sony launches its long-theorized handheld system, the PlayStation Portable. The all-purpose device plays movies, games, and music, and can connect to the Internet wirelessly.
2005 The Xbox 360 ushers in the era of high-definition console gaming with support for 720p resolution in every game.
2006 Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day on the Nintendo DS generates a new level of mainstream interest in gaming.
2006 The PlayStation 3 ships in North America.
2006 Nintendo's Wii becomes the next-gen console of choice over the 2006 holiday season, thanks in part to its novel motion-sensitive controller and the release of the first Zelda game – Twilight Princess – in three years. Still, the PlayStation 2 outsells all other consoles during the same period.
