Humans have been playing games for thousands of years. But video gaming as we know it today can trace its roots back to 1947, when a patent was filed for a cathode ray tube amusement device. Still, it wasn’t until the 1950s that people in the United States actually began to play games on mainframe systems. In order to have a better understanding of the history of gaming, read on below for a brief rundown, starting from gaming’s early formative years.
Early History
While the first recognized game machine was invented in the 1940s, the first game system that was designed for use commercially was unveiled in 1967 when Ralph Baer, along with his innovative team, released the Brown Box, a prototype that could be hooked to a television set and programmed to play ping-pong, checkers, and a variety of other games.
Licensed to Magnavox, it was eventually released in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey system, which not all people know, actually preceded the Atari by a few months. This early gaming system paved the way for digital gaming as the world knows it today.
Arcade Gaming and Atari
Taito and Sega were the first companies to draw public interest to arcade gaming, but it was Atari in 1972 that really set the benchmark for a gaming community of a larger scale.
Starting with their release of Pong, the first real electronic video game, in 1973, a whole new arcade industry was created with arcade machines popping up in bars, shopping malls, and bowling alleys all over the world. Between 1972 and 1985, companies that caught on started to develop their own video games to compete in the fast-expanding video games market.
Multiplayer and Home Gaming—as People Know It Today
From the time Atari set about to revolutionize arcade gaming, multiplayer gaming was only limited to players who played against each other on the same screen. It wouldn’t be until the invention of Intel’s first microprocessor that multiplayer gaming finally started evolving, eventually allowing for players to play at home and on separate screens (although the real evolution of multiplayer gaming would take place only in the 1990s when LAN and, eventually, the internet came to surface).
One such game was Gunfight, released in 1975, which was the first multiplayer person-to-person combat shooting game that allowed for the use of a joystick, then also the first of its kind. From the success of these early multiplayer home games, programmers were quick to catch on and started creating better and better games.
PC Gaming
However, by the 1980s, there were far too many uninteresting games and far too many gaming consoles. This led to the 1983 North American video games crash, which signaled a change in the gaming industry.
This change came about in the form of the personal computer, which had by then started to grow in popularity, being pretty much affordable for the average American household. With processors that were much more powerful, coupled with a technology that allowed gamers to build their own games, PC gaming opened the doors to a whole new level of gaming never before seen with arcade consoles.
Gaming Consoles and the Move toward Mobile
Consoles solely for gaming use took a bit longer to come to fruition, having experienced crashes and failures along the way. One such failure was Sega Dreamcast, which was released in 2000 and became the world’s first internet-ready gaming console.
Though considered a massive failure, Dreamcast has the distinction of being the one that paved the way for the consoles that exist today. But the progress didn’t stop with the gaming use of the personal computer and the console, as yet another evolution in the world of gaming came to front in 2007.
When smartphones and their corresponding app stores officially hit the market not only did this move to mobile signal another chapter in gaming. It has also brought gaming even more forward in mainstream pop culture and in the media, with new fun and challenging ways to play (such as using stealth build in Payday 2, for example), thereby bringing it more attention and more revenue.
The fast rate at which gaming technology evolves has helped the gaming community reach new heights previously never even thought of. With internet capabilities and computer processor technology consistently improving and growing since the early 2000s, the number of people playing video games both online and offline has blown up to at least a billion people all around the globe.
Nowadays, whether you prefer to use a high-end gaming PC or the latest game console out in the market, an internet connection is almost always a must to be able to enjoy the gameplay interactivity and experience to the fullest.
Throughout history of gaming, it has seen a lot of trends come and go, and new technologies arise only to be replaced by something even more innovative just a year or so later. How people play video games years down the line may be very different from how people play them now, but that inevitable change is what makes it even more exciting. The next chapter in the story of gaming is still uncertain, but it’s bound to be entertaining for sure.
