Early Video Game History

Today the video game industry is one of the largest and highest grossing entertainment mediums. The major releases have budgets in the millions of dollars, and due to their high selling price, there is a lot of chance for profit. Like every industry, the video game industry had humble beginnings, starting out as very basic games for primitive computers. The market for video games stagnated for around a decade, and when technology costs permitted, quickly expanded. Due to the young nature of the industry it was very unstable, with two crashes occurring in the first 10 years of it’s beginning as a major entertainment format.
The very first video games were built using primitive computer technology. The very first true computer game, completed in 1962, was used to test a new computer at MIT, this game was called “Spacewar!” and had two people controlling spaceships and shooting at each other. This game was so popular that it was programmed into all PDP computers, exposing colleges all over the nation to this new format of games. For a while there weren’t many other games, due to the cost of the hardware needed to play even the most simple games. Once the technology prices dropped there was a viable market for stand up arcade games.
Arcade games gained steam during the early 1970’s through the mid 80’s; while there were home systems during the 70’s they were expensive and didn’t have the variety that was found in arcades. Due to the large size of arcade machines more powerful hardware could be implemented, thus giving a better gaming experience for cheaper. The first home systems were quite a marvel of technology for the time; they were small, held a few games, and could be played in the home. It was not until the Atari 2600, with its interchangeable cartridges, that home video games began to take over the market from arcades.
There was a minor crash of the video game industry in 1977, due to many clones of popular games saturating the market, While this crash was minor it still impacted the developers to a fair degree. The system that brought the industry back to its feet was the Atari 2600. The 2600 was the first system to popularize third party development and the cartridge game format. The Atari had many defining games, such as pitfall, pong, and space invaders; it also had many games that are considered to be some of the worst produced, such as “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” which was so awful and over produced that all of the copies that weren’t sold had to be buried in New Mexico. Due to the over-anticipation of the video game market, publishers produced many more copies than the demand needed, causing a major crash in the market that could not be remedied by an American company.
The company to reinvigorate the market is the one that, for many years, was synonymous with video games, Nintendo. Surprising to most, Nintendo was established in 1889, and were originally a playing card manufacturer, and later a children’s toy maker. In the 1970’s Nintendo hired Shigeru Miyamoto, who is now the most respected game designer among fans, creating Donkey Kong, Zelda, Mario, and many more. Nintendo decided to start making electronic games when they saw the success of arcades in America. They began with arcade games, and then simple handheld games, and in 1983 the NES was released, NES standing for Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES had power similar to arcade games, while older home consoles had inferior graphics to arcades.
In America the video game crash of 1983 was in full effect, almost no home consoles were being supported and the founder of Atari had sold his company to Time Warner. In 1985 the NES was released in America and became an instant phenomenon, revitalizing the market and causing many other game makers to release opposing consoles. This was the birth of the American video game industry as we know it. Nintendo later went on to release many other consoles, losing the top spot to Sony’s Playstation in the early 90’s, and apparently regaining the top spot with their current console, the Wii.
The video game industry began with early computers, later blossoming into a fully-fledged industry. The relative newness of the early industry lent itself to instability, causing a major crash in 1983, which nearly destroyed the market. In 1985 the Nintendo entertainment system was released in America and revitalized the demand for video games. The video game console wars have been nearly as interesting as the wars fought on the screens of video games. After the NES came the Super NES, Sega Genesis, Playstation, N64, Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo Gamecube, Playstation 2, Xbox, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3, not to mention the handhelds and the less successful consoles. The advancement of computer technology has caused the video games of today to have near photo-realistic graphics, massive worlds, and more pages of code than one would want to try and comprehend.

References

Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games. New York: Three Rivers Press (2001)
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blcomputer_videogames.htm
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gaming-evolution.ars/
http://www.nintendo.com/corp/history.jsp