Brief History
Cards (54)
- Computer games
- Early computer games
- Video games
- British professor Alexander Shafto "Sandy" Douglas created OXO, also known as noughts and crosses or tic-tac-toe, as part of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge
- William Higginbotham created Tennis for Two on a large analog computer and connected oscilloscope screen for the annual visitor's day at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York
- Steve Russell at Massachusetts Institute of Technology invented Spacewar!, a computer-based space video game
- Ralph Baer, an engineer had an initial idea for a game machine that could work on home TVs
- Ralph Baer
- Ralph Baer developed the "Brown Box", which evolved later into the Magnavox Odyssey and was sold public in 1972
- Nolan Bushnell, together with Teb Dabney founded Atari
- Atari's Pong that was inspired by one of the 28 games of Odyssey was released
- Atari released a home version of Pong which was successful
- Magnavox sued Atari for copyright infringement (Magnavox v. Atari)
- The case between Magnavox and Atari was settled outside of court, Atari paid a license fee of seven hundred thousand dollars. Magnavox went on to win more than 100 million dollars copyright lawsuits over the next 20 years. This marked an important moment in the video game industry, setting a precedent for the protection and licensing of IP and patents.
- Atari released the Atari 2600 (Video Computer System), a home console that featured joysticks and interchangeable game cartridges that played multi-colored games on September 11, effectively kicking off the second generation of video game consoles
- The Space Invaders arcade game was released
- Activision, the first third-party game developer (only develops software without making consoles or arcade cabinets) was launched
- The arcade game Pac-Man was introduced in the US
- Donkey Kong was released in the US in July, giving the world an introduction to Mario (known as Jumpman at that time), a known figure to most Nintendo games
- Microsoft Flight Simulator Version 1.0 was released
- The North American video game industry experienced a major "crash" due to several factors
- Factors that contributed to the Video Game Crash of 1983
- The video game home industry began to recover in 1985 when Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), called Famicom in Japan, came to the United States. The NES has improved 8-bit graphics, colors, sound and gameplay over previous consoles.
- SEGA (short for Service Games or Super Electric Game Machine) was founded on June 3, 1960, but initially focused on manufacturing coin-operated amusement machines, jukeboxes and slot machines.
- SEGA released its 16-bit Genesis console in North America as a successor to its 1986 SEGA Master System
- SEGA's first Sonic game, called "Sonic the Hedgehog" was released for the Genesis console to serve as a direct competitor to Nintendo's flagship character, Mario.
- The Genesis console made significant headway against its older rival; thus, Nintendo released its 16-bit Super NES (SNES) console in North America, launching the first real "console war"
- The sequel to 1987's Street Fighter and the second installment to the series, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was released and later became the highest-selling third-party game on the SNES
- Mortal Kombat, a fighting game developed by Midway about characters that enter a tournament with worldly consequences and was known for gory finishing moves called Fatalities was released.
- Due to the depiction of EXTREME violence and gore using realistic digitized graphics, and the increasing concerns about the content of video games, the Video Game Rating Council (VGRC) was established by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA).
- The VGRC was replaced by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) assuming the responsibility of rating video games and providing content descriptors and age ratings until today.
- The Sony PlayStation, popularly called PS1, is a video game home console developed by Sony Computer Entertainment was released in Japan on December 3, 1994, and worldwide the year after. It was the first in the PlayStation series and first in the sixth generation of home consoles. It revolutionized the industry with its CD-ROM-based format, which allowed for larger game sizes and more complex graphics compared to cartridge-based systems of its time.
- SEGA released its third console five months ahead of schedule (May 11, 1995, in North America, November 22, 1994, in Japan) following the success of Sega Genesis and Sega Master System, Sega Saturn which was the first 32-bit console that played games on CDs rather than cartridges. This was done to beat Sony's first venture in video games, PlayStation, which was sold $100 less than Saturn upon launch.
- The N64 (Nintendo 64) was released, being the successor to the SNES and was the first major console to use cartridges as a primary storage medium for games, which allowed for faster load times and better graphics.
- Sega Dreamcast (September 9, 1999) was the last console developed by Sega before the company ceased operations in the console market and focused on producing games for other platforms. It was said that the Dreamcast was ahead of its time for its capability for online gaming.
- Considered as the greatest rival of the Sega Dreamcast, the PlayStation 2 (PS2) was released on March 4, 2000. It was referred as the best-selling console of all time (until PS4 came), selling 155 million copies worldwide with a production run that lasted for 16 years.