Very Interesting would like to thank GameOn Expo and Borja Vaz for their collaboration in making this video.
Today, video games are one of the most powerful industries in the world and the entertainment product that moves the most money, widely surpassing film and television. This support in which people stop being mere spectators and become an active and fundamental part of the plot that is being told to them has gained great relevance in recent years and there will be many who do not imagine today’s world without this product cultural. But getting to the situation at hand was not like passing the first level of Super Mario Bros ; it took a long and arduous path that we want to review .
As with the internet, video games were born in university laboratories . Places like MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) saw the birth of the experiments with spectrometers the first precursors of the video game (although they had some previous example), which in a certain sense sought to replicate activities such as a tennis match . The 70s allowed these technologies to evolve and be shared, and it would be in this decade when the first companies dedicated to video games such as Atari and its mythical Pong (1972) would appear. It was precisely with these more “commercial” projects that videogames passed the specialized circles of professionals who applied their technological knowledge to the world of games and these reach a growing audience through consumer devices such as the first consoles and then arcade machines .
With this situation, the first video game boom takes place . This type of entertainment product is quickly accepted by the younger generations and the market is growing exponentially and in different foci at the same time (California, Japan and Russia, for example). The companies, mainly Atari, which was the most powerful, followed a policy of market saturation in which the production of new titles and the rapid gain to the quality and innovation of these were prioritized. This situation made users stop buying video games and consoles and caused a serious drop in the market that is known as the 1983 Crisis . The most representative case is that of the ET the alien game , produced by Atari as merchandising for the Steven Spielberg film and whose sales were so low that the company decided to bury the copies in a ditch in the desert before continuing to store them.
Salvation came from across the ocean. In Japan, Nintendo maintained its status thanks to the sale of portable consoles and took advantage of the crisis to enter that of desktop consoles while betting on technologically cutting-edge video games of very good quality ( Super Mario Bros , for example). The success of the Japanese company around the world allowed the video game market to endure until the 90s, when new companies began to compete with Nintendo. This decade would bring the application of new technologies to the gamer world and the definitive leap from 2D to 3D environments and all the possibilities that this entailed.
