History of Games Up Until Now
Game development has grown from a technological oddity at a science fair in the 1950s to one of the most successful entertainment businesses worldwide.
Games travel with us every day due to the recent boom in mobile technology revolutionizing the gaming industry and bringing in a new generation of players. Angry Birds is now so ingrained in modern culture that grandparents even know what it is; more than 42 percent of Americans are gamers, and four out of five households have a console.
The Beginning
Alan Turing invented a chess game based on algorithms back in the 1940s. The game had a ‘logic’ to it, created by accounting for several variables. Computers could not perform Champernowne and Turing’s algorithms during Turing’s time, so they had to be executed manually. Turing’s death prevented the game from being run on a real computer, but his work paved the way for many technological advances in the past few decades.
Arcade Game Mania
Stanford University’s Computer Space became the first commercial arcade game in 1971. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney introduced the concept of Spacewar at its very beginning. To create Atari, the company developed a coin-operated arcade machine. The Pong table tennis game was developed by Bushnell & Dabney using Allan Alcorn’s idea in 1972. A flood of other manufacturers and designers of coin-operated arcade games came to market due to Pong’s success, leading to the creation of the arcade game industry with Namco, Stern Electronics, Williams Electronics, Atari, and Nintendo.
Console Gaming Evolution
As the arcade industry began to take off in 1966, some people started to think about playing games on televisions. Developed by German video-game engineer Ralph H. Baer, the Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial console. Atari’s Pong and other video games took this idea and made it into a mass-market success. Since consoles were not equipped with cartridges for a few more years, all games came preloaded.
The re-established games market presented an excellent opportunity for the game market manufacturers. Besides launching its flagship console alongside Sega, Atari, and Nintendo for the first time, Sony also launched its streaming TV service.
By launching its Sega Saturn one month before Sony, Sega surpassed Sony in the market in November 1994. The Playstation One ended up selling ten times more than the Sega Saturn in the end. That console ended up being the most popular by the 1990s. Sony’s support for third-party developers opened up a variety of titles that were not available from other companies.
It was estimated that more than 100 million Playstation Ones were sold during the 1990s. The Dreamcast, Sega’s final console, ended the company’s dominance and made it clear it was exiting the console race. Microsoft launched the Xbox in 2001, using Sony’s success with its PS2 to create a market for the original Xbox. Even though there was a fiercely competitive environment between Xbox and Playstation, Nintendo was able to sell about twenty million Gamecube consoles in the early 2000s.
2005 and 2006 saw the introduction of the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii as the next generation of high-definition gaming systems. Microsoft offered several titles to entice new players to the platform, such as Halo, Crackdown, and Gears of War. Microsoft launched Crackdown while Sony launched Gran Tourismo, Little Big Planet, and The Last of Us. The console wars continued.
Mobile Gaming
Meanwhile, another piece of technology was quietly rising. Mobile games before the early 2000s were primarily single-player adventures like Snake.
In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone, which had an unprecedented influence on the world. Although it was fairly limited and didn’t have an App Store or 3G capabilities, the ‘MVP’ reflects the future of mobile internet as we know it today.
App Store apps were available in 500 versions on July 10, 2008, when it was launched. Many of the most popular games of all time were created in the following decade. There are more than 500 million players for Candy Crush alone.
The App Store was relatively new at the time, so most mobile games at the time were premium. In 2010, Angry Birds, one of the most popular mobile games, was released for 99 cents. As of 2010, the developer (Rovio) had launched its Android application and had begun experimenting with alternative revenue models. The team decided to launch free games that included ads as soon as it saw the opportunity. For an additional fee, users could remove the ads. After a short time, revenue increased from $40 million to over $50 million a month.
The Gaming Industry Today
There is no sign that the game industry is slowing down. There is no denying that ever since the end of the gaming crash in 1985, developers have had an insatiable appetite for producing games and consoles.
It’s never been better to be a gamer. The choice is yours: will it be the Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PC, Mac, or mobile? Even the classic SNES and NES systems are getting remakes, letting new gamers experience what it was like during the “dark ages”. It seems that virtual reality consoles are the latest gaming hardware to watch.