A brief history of video games (Part I) - Safwat Saleem

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Video games are everywhere these days, but where did they actually come from? The history of video games is a complicated story that involves giant computers in science labs, the founder of Chuck E. Cheese and billions of dollars in quarters. Safwat Saleem examines the evolution of the beloved world of gaming.

Lesson and animation by Safwat Saleem.

Hi, I'm Medium Invader

from the classic video game Space Invaders,

and I want to tell you a little bit

about where video games came from.

A video game is an electronic game

that has an interface designed for human interaction

on a video device.

Simple.

Video games are used by scientists,

the military,

and people like you,

and their evolution has spread across arcades,

consoles,

computers,

smart phones,

and all kinds of other electronics.

These days video games are everywhere,

but they were actually made in science labs.

In fact, the earliest U.S. video game patent on record

was in 1948,

and at the time it was referred to

as a cathode-ray tube amusement device.

That's a mouthful!

Some of the earliest video games include

the Nimrod computer,

OXO,

Tennis for Two,

and my personal favorite, Spacewar!

But none of these early video games

were ever sold to the public

because they were either too huge

or too expensive

to get out of the lab.

This all changed when a man named Ralph Baer

looked at his television screen and wondered

how else it might be used.

In 1972, Baer's idea to get video games

out of the science lab and into the living room

led to the release of a game console

called Odyssey.

Odyssey allowed you to play a game on your TV.

At about the same time,

two other people, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney,

were working on something similar

in a little company called Atari.

You might have heard of it,

and even if you haven't,

I'm sure that your Dad has.

Atari's first major game release was in 1972,

an arcade game called Pong.

It was an immediate hit,

and it's credited

as the first commercially successful video game.

Atari then released a home version of Pong in 1974.

By 1978, competition between Atari

and another game company called Midway

was heating up.

Midway had licensed an arcade game

for the Japanese company, Taito,

that put them on the map.

The game:

Space Invaders.

It featured iconic actors, like me,

and it went on to become

the second highest selling arcade game of all time.

Space Invaders also helped kick off

what is known as the Golden Age of Arcade Games.

In response, Atari followed

with the release of the arcade game Asteroids,

which ranked sixth on the list

of highest selling arcade games.

It was a good game,

but it's no Space Invaders.

By 1980, color came to arcade games,

and this was also the year

that another video gaming milestone was born.

Pac-Man, created by the Japanese company Namco,

was brought to the U.S. by Midway.

Important to the spread

of video games into popular culture,

Pac-Man was a character that could be licensed.

It wasn't long before it had a song on the charts,

a Saturday morning television show,

and all sorts of other products.

In just a year, Pac-Man arcade games

made over one billion dollars in quarters.

Then, in 1981, a company called Nintendo

started making waves in the U.S. video game market

with their release of Donkey Kong.

It was the earliest video game

to have a story line.

The story went a bit like this:

Donkey Kong is the pet

of a carpenter named Jumpman.

Jumpman mistreats his pet ape,

so the ape steals his girlfriend,

leaving the game player to assume the role

of Jumpman and rescue the girl.

Jumpman was eventually renamed to Mario.

Other iconic arcade games from the early 80s include

Frogger,

Dragon's Lair,

and Mario Brothers.

Perhaps the last iconic game considered

to be part of the Golden Age of Arcade Games

is Double Dragon.

It was the first really successful example

of the beat-them-up genre.

It was released in 1987,

and, like Donkey Kong,

it featured a damsel in distress storyline,

a storyline common in many video games.

By the mid-90s, the Golden Age of Arcade Games

was coming to an end,

and the home game console

was gaining in popularity.

While arcade games continued

to decline in sales over the years,

the popularity of video games was merely beginning,

and we'll talk about that

and a lot more

in part two of a brief history of video games.