History of Video Games

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The history of video games goes as far back as the early 1950s, when academics began designing simple games, simulations, and artificial intelligence programs as part of their computer science research. Video gaming would not reach mainstream po[CENSORED]rity until the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a po[CENSORED]r form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world. As of 2014, there are eight generations of video game consoles.

Origins of the computer game (1940–1958)[edit]

The earliest video games, by the po[CENSORED]r and most all-encompassing definition of an interactive program incorporating both electronics and a display, developed as an outgrowth of computer research in fields such as artificial intelligence. As computer technology evolved through the 1940s from the electromechanical Z3 (1941) to the electronic Atanasoff–Berry Computer (1942) to the Turing-complete ENIAC (1945) and finally to the stored-program EDSAC (1949), computers became both powerful and flexible enough to serve a variety of scientific and business functions. In 1951, the computer was commercialized in the United States by the UNIVAC division of typewriter company Remington Rand, paving the way for the adoption of the mainframe by academic institutions, research organizations, and corporations across the developed world. Adoption of computer technology was initially limited to only the largest such organizations, however, by prohibitive cost, expansive space requirements, enormous power consumption, and the need to employ a highly trained staff to maintain and operate the machines. This created an environment in which every second of computer use needed to be justified as part of a serious scientific or business endeavor. Early game creation was thus largely limited to testing or demonstrating theories relating to areas such as human-computer interaction, adaptive learning, and military strategy.

 

Due to the haphazard nature of early computer game creation and the lack of concern for preservation at the time, it will likely be impossible to pinpoint the first video game ever created. There are probably a number of logic puzzles, board games, card games and military simulations that have never been properly documented and are now unrecoverable from long-vanished computer systems. Some of the earliest known games include the Nimrod (1951), a computer custom-built by Ferranti specifically for display at the Festival of Britain that could play the mathematical game Nim; OXO by A.S. Douglas (1952), which he programmed as part of his master's thesis and is the earliest known game to display graphics on a monitor; Hutspiel (1955), a war game built by the United States military to simulate a conflict with the Soviet Union in Europe; IBM employee Arthur Samuel's checkers program (1956), one of the earliest computer games demonstrated on national television in the United States and eventually capable of self-improvement through analyzing mistakes in its own play; and the NSS Chess Program developed at Carnegie Mellon University (1958), the first chess program sophisticated enough to defeat a novice human opponent.

 

 

 

Tennis for Two – Modern recreation

One program that stands out in this early period — both for its atypical subject matter and its subsequent notoriety in a series of patent lawsuits — is Tennis for Two (1958), created by physicist William Higinbotham to entertain guests at the annual visitor's day held by the Brookhaven National Laboratory. This program displayed a tennis court in side view on an oscilloscope and allowed two players to volley a ball using box-shaped controllers equipped with a knob for trajectory and a button for hitting the ball. Displayed for two seasons at Brookhaven, Tennis for Two proved po[CENSORED]r with the public, but was ultimately dismantled so its parts could be re-purposed for other tasks. Higinbotham never considered adapting the successful game into a commercial product. Like the other game creators in the 1950s, his focus remained on research rather than entertainment. Ultimately, the widespread adoption of computers to play games had to wait for the machines to spread from serious academics to their students on U.S. college campuses.

Spacewar!

By 1960, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was one of the premiere centers of computer research in the world, home to both the Lincoln Laboratory and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The former provided MIT with a custom-built transistorized computer, the TX-0, that was both smaller and more interactive than the typical mainframe, while the latter provided the institution with Steve Russell, who followed Artificial Intelligence Lab founder John McCarthy from Dartmouth College to MIT in 1958 to help him develop the LISP programming language. The TX-0 operated under fewer restrictions than MIT's more powerful IBM mainframes and could actually be operated by students during off-peak hours in the middle of the night. The computer soon attracted a group of engineering undergrads with membership in a student organization called the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) who referred to themselves as "hackers" after the word "hack" members of the club had defined to describe a particularly clever feat of ingenuity. Soon, Alan Kotok, Bob Saunders, Peter Sampson and other hackers were spending their nights punching out computer code on paper tape to create improved programming tools, music programs, and simple AI routines like Mouse in a Maze and a Tic-tac-toe program.

 

 

Spacewar! is credited as the first widely available and influential computer game.

Steve Russell and his friends Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen were attracted to the TX-0 as well, which in 1961 was joined by a PDP-1 from the Digital Equipment Corporation, a computer company established by former Lincoln Laboratory engineers. Equipped with a high-quality vector display, the PDP-1 offered the promise of more sophisticated visual hacks than the aging TX-0. Russell and friends, who were great fans of the science fiction novels of E.E. Smith, decided to exploit the new hardware by creating a game in which two human-controlled spaceships attempted to destroy each other by firing torpedoes. Dubbed Spacewar! (1962), this hack, programmed primarily by Russell with several crucial enhancements from members of the TMRC, became one of the first computer games to achieve national distribution when DEC decided to include it as a test program on every PDP-1 it sold. By the end of the 1960s, Spacewar! could be found in university computer labs across the United States and served as an inspiration for students to create their own variations of the game alongside entirely new designs. These creations remained trapped in the lab for the remainder of the decade, however, because even though some adherents of Spacewar! had begun to sense its commercial possibilities, it could only run on hardware costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. As computers and their components continued to fall in price, however, the dream of a commercial video game finally became attainable at the beginning by the 1970s.

 

Nolan Bushnell and the commercialization of the video game

Even in 1971, the components for a system capable of running a program with the sophistication of Spacewar! were too expensive to transform the game into home entertainment. A new generation of minicomputers like the Data General Nova and the DEC PDP-11 debuted in 1969-70, however, that dropped the price of computing low enough that it could seriously be considered for the coin-operated games industry, which at the time was experiencing its own technological renaissance as large electro-mechanical driving and target shooting games like Sega Enterprises's Periscope (1967) and Chicago Coin's Speedway (1968) pioneered the adoption of elaborate visual displays and electronic sound effects in the amusement arcade. While this coin-op industry was controlled almost exclusively by a group of established firms in Chicago, the promise of integrating solid-state components like integrated circuits into coin-operated games attracted a small number of engineers and entrepreneurs in California's Silicon Valley, where the first commercial video game products would be introduced.

 

 

Computer Space, the first commercially released video game.

Nolan Bushnell stood uniquely between the worlds of coin-op and computers that would join forces to introduce the video game to the general public. As an electrical engineering student at the University of Utah in the mid-1960s, Bushnell received limited exposure to computer programming through his classes while gaining work experience maintaining the coin-operated games at the Lagoon Amusement Park. Upon graduation, Bushnell found employment at Ampex in Silicon Valley, where he was soon exposed to the Spacewar! game at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Already possessed of an entrepreneurial streak, Bushnell immediately looked for a commercial avenue for the game and had the idea of developing a coin-operated version on a minicomputer like the Nova. Enlisting his office mate at Ampex, an older and more experienced engineer named Ted Dabney, Bushnell orchestrated the creation of a partnership called Syzygy Engineering to develop the game. Using a minicomputer proved prohibitively expensive, however, so Bushnell hit on a new concept of controlling the cathode ray tube of a television through transistor–transistor logic (TTL) circuits to generate and move dots around the screen. This conceptual breakthrough, which was actually implemented by Dabney, allowed the duo to create a take-off on Spacewar! called Computer Space, in which the player controls a spaceship and attempts to destroy two hardware-controlled flying saucers before they destroy him.

 

Released in 1971 by one of the few Silicon Valley coin-op companies, Nutting Associates, Computer Space failed to sell its entire production run due to several factors including marketing blunders by Nutting and an overly complicated physics system and control scheme that alienated the working-class bar patrons that were the primary market for coin-operated games at the time. Meanwhile, a second attempt to bring Spacewar! into the arcade market called Galaxy Game by Hugh Pitts and Stan Tuck that began market testing at roughly the same time as Computer Space failed to even expand beyond its initial location, as Pitts took the route Bushnell rejected of recreating Steve Russell's landmark hack on a PDP-11, resulting in a product that was too expensive for mass production. Both Computer Space and Galaxy Game proved po[CENSORED]r with the sophisticated engineering crowd centered around Stanford University, but in order to gain mass market acceptance, the video game would have to evolve to be both cheaper and simpler to play.

and many more changes becomes with time

For more detail Vist the Site:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games