Since its commercial birth in the 1950s as a technological rarity at a science fair, video games have had an unstoppable rise.
Many people seem to have heard of the game “PONG”, but no, this was not the first video game. The first system that we can call a “video game” appeared on the Westinghouse exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in 1940. Created by nuclear physicist Edward Uhler Condon, it was a very simple person VS computer math game. It was a huge hit with thousands of people playing and 90% of the time the machine won.
However, the first gaming system designed for commercial home use didn’t emerge until nearly three decades later, when Ralph Baer and his team released their prototype Brown Box console, “Brown Box, ” in 1967.
The “brown box” was a vacuum tube circuit that could be connected to a television and allowed two users to control the cubes that were chased on the screen. The “brown box” could be programmed to play a variety of games, including ping pong, checkers, and four sports games. It soon became the Magnavox Odyssey console in 1972. It preceded Atari by a few months, which is often – wrongly – considered the first video game console.
Subsequently, Sega and Taito were the first companies to spark public interest in arcade games with the launch of games such as Periscope and Crown Special Soccer in 1966 and 1967. In 1972, Atari became the first game company to establish truly the benchmark for a large-scale gaming community.
Atari not only developed its games in-house, but also created a new industry around the “arcade,” and in 1973, arcade machines began to appear in bars, bowling alleys, and shopping malls around the world. Between 1972 and 1985, more than 15 companies began developing video games for the ever-expanding market.
The roots of multiplayer gaming as we know it
In the late 1970s, multiplayer games were limited to players competing on the same screen. The first example of players competing on separate screens occurred in 1973 with “Empire” , a turn-based strategy game for up to eight players, which was created for the PLATO network system. This was one of the first widespread computerized teaching systems, originally built by the University of Illinois and later purchased by Control Data (CDC), who built the machines on which the system ran.
In 1973, Jim Bowery released “Spasim” for PLATO, a 32-player space game, considered the first example of a 3D multiplayer game; represents one of the first steps on the technological path towards the Internet and online multiplayer games as we know them today.
At last the game at home becomes a reality
The early 1970s also saw the advent of mass-produced personal computers and game consoles. Technological advancements, such as Intel’s invention of the world’s first microprocessor, led to the creation of games like Gunfight in 1975, the first example of a multiplayer-level human combat combat game.
It was a revolution because it was presented with a new style of play: you had to use a joystick to control the movement and another for the direction of the shot, something that had never been seen before.
A little later, microprocessor integration also led to the launch of Space Invaders for the Atari VCS in 1980, ushering in a new era of gaming and sales – Atari 2600 sales skyrocketed to 2 million units in 1980 alone.
As home games and electronic games grew, so did the development of the gaming community. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, amateur magazines such as Creative Computing (1974), Computer and Video Games (1981), and Computer Gaming World (1981) were published . These magazines created a sense of community and offered a means by which players could interact.
Personal computers arrive
The video game boom sparked by Space Invaders saw the emergence of a host of new companies and consoles, causing a period of market saturation. Too many game consoles, and too few interesting ones, led to a black age in 1983, with huge losses and stacks of low-quality, unpopular titles buried in the American desert – literally – to get rid of them. The gaming industry needed a change.
With the bad press of consoles, home computers, such as the Commodore Vic-20, Commodore 64, and Apple II, began to grow in popularity. These new systems were affordable (about 250 euros in the early 1980s, which would be about 740 euros today) and were advertised as the most “sensible” option for the whole family.
The fact of also having much more powerful processors than the previous generation of consoles, opened the door to a new level of gaming, with more complex and less linear games. They also provided the technology necessary for players to create their own games with the BASIC code. Even Bill Gates designed a game called Donkey (a simple game that consisted of dodging donkeys on a road while driving a sports car).
In addition to providing the means for more people to create their own game from source code, the first computers also paved the way for multiplayer games, a key milestone in the evolution of the gaming community.
Nowadays, with increasingly higher graphics and speeds, it is curious to remember how the explosion in popularity of video games came shortly after in 1993 with the launch of the pioneering DOOM from developer ID Software . It was the beginning of the gaming revolution that continues today.
