Understanding a bit about the history of game technology, helps us understand today's game technology. It also helps us understand why things are the way they are in the industry today. By learning the backstory of current industry heavyweights, as well as the origin of some of our game mechanics and game franchises. Let's dive into a brief history of game technology. Stored program digital computers were developed during World War II in the early 1940s. Primarily as a way to do complex math calculations, such as to calculate artillery fire and crack encryption codes. The first commercial computer systems became popular in the 1950s. These were very expensive, very large computers, often taking up entire rooms and sometimes entire buildings. At this time, there was no real display or input, output system other than physical switches and buttons on the computers and punch cards that you could create and feed into the computers, resulting typically in a set of lights turning on or off, or later a print out of paper. One of the earliest video games was created in 1958 by nuclear physicist named William Higinbotham. It was a completely hardware circuit based game called Tennis for Two. It was played using two separate controllers connected to an analog computer and using an oscilloscope as a screen. The game was developed over a short period of time, to create an interactive display at a public exhibition for the Brookhaven National Laboratory. It was essentially just a tech demo. Given the expense of these early computers in the 1960s, the first time-shared operating systems were developed. This allowed multiple people to share in the use of the computer. They could each connect to the computer using a terminal, which typically was a CRT display and keyboard. Some high-level programming languages were introduced at this time, like Fortran and Basic, to make it easier to write programs for these computers. While the purpose of the computer was purely business, military, or academic research, some of the engineers that had access to the mainframe systems started to tinker with them and develop games. Many people point to Spacewar as one of the most influential early computer games. Spacewar was created in the early 1960s at MIT by Steve Russell on the PDP 1 mainframe computer. Unlike Tennis for Two, Spacewar was programmed in software that ran on top of the computer. It was a simple two-player spaceship shooter game where players engage in a dogfight while navigating around a gravity well of a star in the middle of the circular screen. The game was used to demonstrate the capabilities of this new computer. In 1971, Intel released the first commercially available central processing unit or CPU. The silicon-based chip was able to reduce 2,250 transistors down into a form factor, the size of a matchbox. Therefore, this was dubbed a microprocessor. It was inexpensive and could be manufactured in large quantities. As a result, it increased to computer's power while greatly shrinking the size of the computers. Overall, the silicon chipped greatly changed computing and society forever. In 1972, Atari created a table tennis-themed arcade game called pong. Many point a pong as the first arcade video game. The mid-1970s through the early 1980s signified the rise of a video game arcade. Many classic arcade gameplay experiences were defined and several game franchises were born from breakout and space invaders to Pacman and Donkey Kong. At this time, if you wanted to play the best games, you went to the arcade because that is where the action was at. Also in the early 1970s, just as the color television was being installed in households across North America, the company, Magnavox, created the Odyssey that allowed you to play games from home by hooking it up to a television. The Odyssey came with 28 games, each designed into a printed circuit board. The graphics were very primitive, but it came with plastic transparencies that you could overlay on your television screen to theme the game, to different settings. The most popular of the games was a ping-pong game, which was actually the inspiration for Atari's Pong arcade game. But the popularity of Pong in the arcade actually helped drive sales of The Odyssey as people wanted to play Pong at home. Many people point to the Magnavox Odyssey as the first home game console. In 1977, Atari released the Atari Video Computer System, which was later rebranded as the Atari 2600. Prior to this, most of the game systems had the games built-in the hardware, or like the Odyssey, shift the games and printed circuit boards. But the Atari 2600 was a microprocessor-based computer system. The games were a software that shipped on external read-only memory cartridges. This led to a boom in the market of making and selling games separate from the hardware. Suddenly, there were companies like Activision springing up whose sole business was making and selling games, not game hardware. As the industry grew, so did the competition both in the hardware space of game console systems and in the software space of game titles. Unfortunately, in 1983, there was a large-scale recession in the video game industry. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation and the number of game consoles, and the sheer number of available games, many of which were disappointing in quality. At this time, the consumer market was also turning their attention to personal computers over game consoles. The game industry did not really recover until Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, in North America at the end of 1985 and across 1986. The NES was essentially a revised version of the 1983 Famicom released in Japan. Nintendo tried to mitigate the issues that caused the recession. To get your game on the NES, you had to be licensed and approved by Nintendo, and they had high-quality standards and limited the number of releases so as to not flood the market. Of course, there is now a long history of game console systems. The 1970s were dominated by Magnavox and Atari, and the 1980s by Nintendo and Sega. Nintendo helped define the handheld gaming system in 1989 with the release of the original Game Boy. The 1990 showed additional growth for Nintendo with the release of the Super NES in 1991, and then the Nintendo 64 in 1996, as well as the Game Boy Color in 1998. Sony entered the game console market in 1995 with the release of the Sony PlayStation and Atari and Sega tried to compete during this time, but ultimately exited the hardware side of the game industry, by the early 2000s. In 2001, Microsoft jumped into the game industry with the big launch of the Xbox, competing with the release of the Sony PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo Game Cube. Since the early 2000s, the three dominant companies in the home console space had been Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. These three had been releasing their next major platform updates, typically on a 5-7 year cycle, with the Microsoft Xbox 360 in 2005 and the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii, both in 2006. Then the Nintendo Wii U in 2012, and the Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox 1 in 2013. The most recent consoles as of this recording is the Nintendo Switch, released in 2017, and the Microsoft Xbox Series X and Sony PlayStation 5 released in 2020. Of course, many other console systems from many other companies have come and gone. This table shows just a few of the biggest consoles sorted into generations. The consoles are listed in order of units sold, with the highest number being listed first. We are currently in the 9th generation of game consoles. It'll be interesting to see what the future holds. Of the three major game console companies, Microsoft and Sony have tended to compete head-to-head, both catering to the more core gamer market. Really pushing the cinematic quality of AAA gaming while also building their console as complete entertainment systems, extending beyond games. While Nintendo has focused more on casual gamers and building their console as a gaming system for the whole family, focusing on gameplay fund over cinematic quality, as well as their unique IPs, such as Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon. The Switch is also interesting because it bridges between the home console and a handheld gaming system. It basically replaces both the Wii U and The Game Boy. It'll be interesting to see if Nintendo continues in this path. The latest generation, Microsoft and Sony, are taking a different tact of allowing you to remote play console games on your mobile devices, such as tablets or phones.
