Video game history

Video game history

The history of the video game begins in 1962, with the creation of the little game SpaceWar.

For many, the first electronic game in history was developed in 1962 by Slug Russell, Wayne
Witanen and Martin Graetz, colleagues at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology),
USA. In order to create something useful for their spare time, the students conceived a
space battle game capable of running on archaic DEC PDP-1 computers: SpaceWar .

However, some historians say that the great-grandfather of the games was developed four
years earlier, in 1958, by physicist Willy Higinbotham, best known for being one of the
creators of the atomic bomb. It was a game of tennis shown on an oscilloscope and
processed by an analog computer, a kind of attraction for visitors to his laboratory.

In 1968 we have an important chapter in the history of video games, through the figure of the
German eradicated in the United States, Ralph Baer. After graduating in electronic
engineering and working in several radio and TV companies, Baer had the brilliant idea of
​creating a device capable of playing electronic games through television. This fact was of
great importance for the future of games due to the fact that, until that moment, games only
ran on computers and access to them was restricted to small groups of university students.
The German developed and patented a device called the “Brown Box”, capable of running
different types of games, a fact that made Ralph Baer the “father” of video games.

The first commercialized console in history was the Odissey , made by the Magnavox
company in 1972 in the United States. The device was sold in Brazil later, at the end of the
70's. Manufactured by Philco and Ford, the console became known as Telejogo, which
basically consisted of lines that went up and down to hit a square.

odyssey

Shortly after the release of the Odissey , the phenomenon that everyone normally associates
with video game history appears: the Atari 2600 . Designed by Nolan Bushnell and released
in 1978 in the United States and in 1983 in Brazil, the console is considered a cultural
symbol of the 80s, a true sales phenomenon.

Atari 2600

Despite all this success, Atari experienced serious financial problems during the decade, at
the same time that the Japanese Nintendo began to build its empire. Its first sales success
was the 8-bit Famicom console , which was renamed the NES ( Nintendo Entertainment
System ). Under this platform, very famous games were made, such as Mario and Donkey
Kong , for example.

As Nintendo grew and established itself as the largest in the world of consoles, SEGA,
another Japanese company, was also developing. To compete with the NES, the company
launched the well-known Master System . However, knowing that it would not overtake
Nintendo in the 8-bit war, it was forced to focus its efforts on creating a new 16-bit console:
the Mega Drive .

Leader Nintendo has obviously entered the fray and released one of the biggest hits in all of
video game history: the Super NES . This is one of the classic episodes of the battle of the
consoles. While the SEGA device had more games, the Nintendo one was more advanced
and had better graphics. After all, who has never heard of the dispute between Mario and
Sonic , Nintendo and Sega, respectively?

Super NES

After this long competition, a new and strong competitor in the gaming world entered: Sony,
paving the way for the emergence of a new generation of consoles. At that time, SEGA
released its 32-bit, Saturn , without much success . Nintendo surprised the whole world by
announcing the N64 , with 64-bit graphics. Another very important fact was the launch of
Sony's Playstation , which, for having a large library of games, became the sales leader and
hit the incredible mark of 100 million consoles sold.

For being recent, the penultimate generation of video games is known even by children: the
successful Playstation 2 , from Sony, launched in 2000, which continued the success story of
Playstation and started to have media in DVD format, the Nintendo's GameCube , the
natural successor to the N64 , and the new Xbox , from the software giant Microsoft.

The latest generation of consoles comes down to three releases from the same
manufacturers as the last generation: Sony's Playstation 4 , Nintendo's Wii U , and
Microsoft's Xbox One . In fact, the gaming market only grows every day. A proof of this is the
fact that, from 1999 to 2004, it made 21 billion dollars, more than twice the income of all
Hollywood movies in the same period.