The Story of Video Games
Video games are alive and well and they’re enjoyed by millions of people all over the world. They come with great graphics, difficult game levels and complicated storylines. But gaming wasn’t always like that. In truth, the first video games were simple and boring compared with today’s selections. To show you what I mean, let’s go back in time as we explore the history of video games.
Our forefathers didn’t have joysticks but they knew how to pass the time. Research shows that the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians enjoyed playing board games thousands of years ago. With the coming of computers in 1946, developers tried their hand at making computer games. But the early games are a far cry from what we have today. This was only natural since the old computers were bulky, slow, often broke down and had very little power.
Tennis for Two was one of the first computer games to have a graphical display. Invented by American physicist William Higinbotham when he was the head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the game entertained visitors at the facility. It was made on an analog computer in 1958 and imitated a tennis game on an oscilloscope. Players had to click a button to hit the ball and the angle was controlled by a knob. Whenever the ball was hit, a sound was made. Designed in about two hours and assembled in three weeks, it came before the popular video game Pong, but few people heard about it until 1970. It was showed only twice at the laboratory despite the fact it was popular with visitors. Sadly, Higinbotham never patented his ideas and the game disappeared.
Ralph Baer is considered “the Father of Video Games.” From him came the idea of connecting an electronic game system to a TV set. This gave birth to the “Brown Box” console video game system for the defense-electronics company Sanders Associates in New Hampshire in 1966. Baer’s invention was later refined by the TV company Magnavox which released the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. The Odyssey was crude but it triggered the development of video games.
The video game industry started with the release of Pong by Atari Inc. in 1972. This was invented by computer scientist Allan Alcorn as part of his training exercise. The concept was taken by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell on an electronic ping-pong game that was included in the Magnavox Odyssey. Atari liked Alcorn’s work and produced what became the first commercially successful video game.
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