The History of Video Games
Before video games were invented, computer games packed the stores. They were displayed on your computer screen, but they weren't able to send signals to a home TV. A range of arcade games were played also, such as Computer Space, (the first manufactured arcade game) and Pong (Both games were both developed by Nolan Bushnell founder of Atari), Space Invaders, Asteroids and Pac-Man. In 1966, Ralph Baer got the idea of a home system to be able to display games on a TV set. He called it a video game, because it was like no other thing before.
The production of the first video game, the Magnavox Odyssey began on January 27, 1972. It sold over 100,000 systems over the first year and another 100,000 more in 1973 and late 1974. After years of selling, it was replace by the Odyssey 100.
After finding Atari on June 27th 1972, Bushnell and Al Alcorn (his first employee) designed the famous example of the PONG arcade machine. Atari then, paid Magnavox in order to manufacture and sell PONG systems.
The original Nintendo was released in August, 1985. Backed by classic games such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Excitebike. Its graphics were far superior to any home-based console that had come before it, leaving people with the feeling they were in a arcade.
In 1989, Game Boy was invented. The best development for GameBoy so far is the Advanced GameBoy IDE developed by Yvan Rivard. GameBoy, GameBoy Pocket, GameBoy Color, Super GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, Pocket Camera, Pocket Printer, and Rumble Pack are all registered trademarks of Nintendo.
In 1991, Super Nintendo Entertainment System was released. It raised the bar for video game designers. It featured stero sound, multiple scrolling backgrounds and almost twice the internal memory as its competition.
In 1995, Nintendo then made Nintendo Virtual Boy. It was a good system, but was marketed poorly and had very bad game developers.
Also in 1995, the PlayStation game console came to the stores. The launch of the PlayStation was incredible. In the very first weekend, more than 100,000 units were sold. In the first six months, over a million were sold. By the end of 1996, more than 3.2 million PlayStation game consoles could be found in homes across North America.
In 2000, Sony created Play Station 2. It was able to not only play CDs and DVDs, but could play any Play Station games. PS2 immediately went to the top of the video game scales.
Then in 2001, Nintendo invented GameCube and Microsoft created Xbox. From then on, Sony and Microsoft competed. Each company went through the year, getting the best games and PS2 shot on top of the charts. Bill Gates, owner of Microsoft wanted to create the best system. Xbox was like a computer. It contained its own auto saving in the console, so you wouldn't need a memory card.
There are games that came from throughout the world such as Deus Ex (USA), Rayman (France), and Max Payne (Finland). Videogames have entertained people and will continue all throughout the years to come.