The term video game generally refers to interactive entertainment programs that are projected onto television-type screens, either by coin-operated arcade games or dedicated game-playing computers called video-game consoles. Some video-game systems feature built-in screens, such as Game Boy, a popular handheld system manufactured by Nintendo, and Vectrex, a tabletop console made by General Consumer Electronics in the early 1980s. In 1966 a small team of engineers at a military contractor called Sanders Associates produced a device for projecting rudimentary interactive games onto a television screen. The team created several shooting and sports games, including a table-tennis simulation similar to Tennis for Two. Rather than market the game itself, Sanders licensed the technology to Magnavox, a company that manufactured televisions and other home electronics. Magnavox packaged the invention as Odyssey, the first home video-game console, and released it in 1972.
After seeing a demonstration of Odyssey, Nolan Bushnell founded Atari Corporation in mid-1972. His first product was a coin-operated tennis game called Pong, a close imitation of the Magnavox game.
Pong became the first commercially successful video game. Pong and video-game technology brought new life to the amusement games industry. Prior to Pong, devices such as pinball and electromechanical games were found mostly in bowling alleys, bars, and pool halls. As video games became increasingly popular, especially among children, dedicated amusement arcades would become widespread.
In 1975 Atari released a home version of Pong, which became one of the best-selling products of the December holiday season. Several other companies decided to enter the market the following year, including Fairchild Camera and Instrument, which released the first console to use interchangeable cartridges rather than built-in games.
In 1977 Atari released its first cartridge console, the Video Computer System (also known as the 2600). Although not an immediate success, the 2600 eventually became an international phenomenon, and more than 20 million of the machines sold worldwide. Atari made games for the system but also allowed other companies to produce games under licensing agreements. In 1978 Bushnell left Atari to open Pizza Time Theaters, a chain of restaurants that featured the Chuck E. Cheese character and a vast selection of video games.
2. The Golden Age of Video Arcades
Coin-operated games such as pinball were a small and fading industry when video games completely changed the landscape. In 1978 Midway Manufacturing, one of the biggest pinball companies, imported a coin-operated video game called Space Invaders from Japan. The game was so popular in Japan that the government had to quadruple production of the 100-yen coin because so many were being used in the machines. Space Invaders became a hit in the United States, where Midway sold 60,000 of the machines, three times the sales of most popular arcade games of the time.
Midway followed this success in 1980 with another Japanese import: Pac-Man. In this game, players guided a ravenous yellow circle through a maze, while it ate dots and avoided monsters. Namco, the Japanese company that created Pac-Man, sold more than 300,000 of the game machines worldwide, making it the most popular arcade game of all time.
With Pizza Time Theaters legitimizing the idea of arcades and hits such as Ms. Pac-Man, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Tempest, Frogger, and Defender bringing new excitement to gaming, the coin-operated video game business boomed. In 1981 Americans spent 75,000 person-years and $5 billion playing video games at an estimated 4,300 arcades in the United States. Many popular arcade games also were translated for use on the Atari 2600 and its chief rivals in the home market—Mattel’s Intellivision and Coleco’s ColecoVision.
In 1982, however, interest in arcade games started to decline and revenues dropped. Many arcades closed as the entire industry retrenched. By the end of 1983 interest in home games had dried up too. Atari began selling computers and never returned to prominence in video games, Mattel dropped out of the game business, and Coleco eventually went bankrupt.
3. Nintendo and Competitors
A Japanese company called Nintendo rekindled the electronic-game business in 1985 when it introduced its Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the United States. With more powerful computer chips allowing for advanced graphics and faster game play—exhibited in games such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda—Nintendo brought new excitement to the market. Nintendo would go on to sell more than 30 million NES machines in the United States and more than 90 million worldwide.
Nintendo also brought new market savvy to the industry. Realizing that game hardware soon becomes obsolete, Nintendo pioneered the practice of releasing new consoles every five to six years. The NES, for example, was followed by the Super NES and then by the Nintendo 64. Nintendo further expanded the video-game market in 1989 by launching its Game Boy handheld system. Nintendo sold an astonishing 120 million Game Boys from 1989 to 2001.
Nintendo began to face serious rivals for the home market, however. In the late 1980s the Japanese company Sega introduced a popular system known as Genesis. In 1995 Japanese electronics giant Sony Corporation launched its PlayStation line of game consoles. Sony dominated the console market after 1995, selling more than 90 million PlayStations worldwide by 2002. The PlayStation 2, released in 2000, continued this dominance.
In 2001 Nintendo released the GameCube platform and software giant Microsoft Corporation entered the fray with its new Xbox console. These systems featured a variety of advanced capabilities such as a hard drive for saving games and the ability to connect to the Internet or local area networks (LANs). Such connections enabled players to download more advanced levels of play and additional characters, and to play with other users. Some systems even sell additional equipment so online players can speak to each other and verbally help (or taunt) other players during play. The three major console manufacturers used such technological advances to try to gain market share in this fast-paced, lucrative business.
In late 2005 Microsoft released Xbox 360, the company’s second-generation gaming platform. The new machine further developed and expanded the capabilities of game consoles, including the ability to connect digital cameras and portable music devices, interact with other gamers, play digital video discs (DVDs) and music compact discs (CDs), and download a wide variety of games or add-ons to its large internal hard drive. Sony and Nintendo were expected to release their next-generation gaming consoles with similar advanced features in 2006.
4. COMPUTER GAMES
While video-game systems are used solely for games, gaming is only one of the many uses for computers. In computer games, players can use a keyboard to type in commands, a mouse to move a cursor around the screen, or sometimes both. Many computer games also allow the use of a joystick or game controller.
In 1972 Gregory Yob of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst created the first text-based computer game, called Hunt the Wumpus. In this game players followed a narrative containing clues about the location of a creature in a series of caverns. Using clues in the text, the players’ objective was to locate the beast and shoot it.
In 1975 a programmer named Will Crowther created Adventure (also known as Advent and Colossal Cave), a highly influential text-based game later expanded by a researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In this game, players used one- and two-word commands to respond to situations in a story. For example, in a room with a treasure chest and a staircase, a player might type “open chest,” then “down stairs.” Wrong answers often resulted in an interactive death. Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s these text-based adventure games—another popular game in this mold was called Zork—dominated the field of computer games.
After playing Adventure on her husband’s computer, a California woman named Roberta Williams persuaded her husband, Ken, to help her make games. Wanting to go beyond text-based technology, Roberta created simple illustrations that Ken encoded into the game. Their game, Mystery House, released in 1980, was the first computer adventure game to combine text and graphics.
To tap into the growing excitement over video games at the time, many computer-game publishers marketed both authorized translations of arcade games and thinly disguised versions of arcade hits. Many publishers also created their own “arcade-style” action games. In 1982 Broderbund released Choplifter, a game in which players flew a helicopter over a desert to rescue hostages. Marketed shortly after the Iranian hostage crisis, Choplifter was an instant success.
