The origin of video games A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device. The word video in video game traditionally referred to a raster display device. However, with the popular use of the term "video game," it now implies any type of display device. The electronic systems used to lies in early cathode ray tube The Cathode Ray Tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun (a source of electrons) and a fluorescent screen, with internal or external means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam, used to create images in the form of light emitted from the fluorescent screen. The image may represent electrical waveforms (oscilloscope), pictures (-based missile defense Missile defense is a system, weapon, or technology involved in the detection, tracking, interception and destruction of attacking missiles. Originally conceived as a defence against nuclear-armed Intercontinental ballistic missiles, its application has broadened to include shorter-ranged non-nuclear tactical and theater missiles systems in the late 1940s. These programs were later adapted into other simple games during the 1950s. By the late 1950s and through the 1960s, more computer games were developed (mostly on mainframe computers Mainframes are powerful computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing), gradually increasing in sophistication and complexity.^{[n 1]} Following this period, video games diverged into different platforms: arcade An arcade game is a coin-operated entertainment machine, usually installed in public businesses such as restaurants, public houses, and video arcades. Most arcade games are redemption games, merchandisers , video games, or pinball machines, mainframe, console A console game is a form of interactive multimedia used for entertainment. The game consists of manipulable images generated by a video game console, and displayed on a television or similar audio-video system. The game itself is usually controlled and manipulated using a handheld device connected to the console called a controller. The controller, personal computer A personal computer game is a game played on a personal computer, rather than on a video game console or arcade machine. Computer games have evolved from the simple graphics and gameplay of early titles like Spacewar!, to a wide range of more visually advanced titles and later handheld games A handheld video game is a video game designed for a handheld device. In the past, this primarily meant handheld game consoles such as Nintendo's Game Boy line. In more recent history, mobile games have become popular in calculators, personal digital assistants , mobile phones, MP3 players, and other similar portable gadgets.

The first commercially viable video game was Computer Space Computer Space is a video arcade game released in November 1971 by Nutting Associates. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who would both later found Atari, it is generally accepted that it was the world's first commercially sold coin-operated video game — and indeed, the first commercially sold video game of any kind, predating the in 1971 The early history of video games dates back to 1947, with a missile simulator which uses analog circuitry, which laid the foundation for a new entertainment industry in the late 1970s within the United States ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language, Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is, and Europe Europe is one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus region (Specification of borders) and the Black Sea to the southeast. Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean and. The first major crash in 1977 A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or modified computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game. The term "video game console" is used to distinguish a machine designed for consumers to buy and use solely for playing video games from a personal occurred when companies were forced to sell their older obsolete systems flooding the market. Six years later a second, greater crash The North American video game crash of 1983 brought an abrupt end to what is considered the second generation of console video gaming in the English-speaking world. It almost destroyed the then-fledgling industry and led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing home computers and video game consoles in North America. It lasted about two occurred. This crash—brought on largely by a flood of video games coming to the market—resulted in a total collapse of the console gaming industry worldwide, ultimately shifting dominance of the market from North America North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and in the western hemisphere. It is bordered on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the southeast by the Caribbean Sea, and on the west by the North Pacific Ocean; South America lies to the southeast to Japan. While the crash killed the console gaming market, the computer gaming market was largely unaffected. Subsequent generations of console video games would continue to be dominated by Japanese corporations. Though several attempts would be made by North American and European companies, fourth generation of consoles In the history of computer and video games, the fourth generation began on October 30, 1987 with the Japanese release of Nippon Electric Company's (NEC) PC Engine (known as the TurboGrafx-16 in North America). Although NEC released the first fourth generation console, this era was dominated by the rivalry between Nintendo and Sega's consoles; the, their ventures would ultimately fail. Not until the sixth generation of video game consoles The sixth-generation era refers to the computer and video games, video game consoles, and video game handhelds available at the turn of the 21st century. Platforms of the sixth generation include Sega's Dreamcast, Sony's PlayStation 2, the Nintendo GameCube, and Microsoft's Xbox. This era began on November 27, 1998 with the release of the would a non-Japanese company release a commercially successful console system. The handheld gaming A handheld game console is a lightweight, portable electronic device with a built-in screen, games controls and speakers. Handheld game consoles are run on machines of small size allowing people to carry them and play them at any time or place. Unlike video game consoles, the controls, screen and speakers are all part of a single unit market has followed a similar path with several unsuccessful attempts made by American companies all of which failed outside some limited successes in the handheld electronic games early on. Currently only Japanese companies have any major successful handheld gaming consoles, although in recent years handheld games have come to devices like cellphones A mobile phone is an electronic device used for full duplex two-way radio telecommunications over a cellular network of base stations known as cell sites. Mobile phones differ from cordless telephones, which only offer telephone service within limited range through a single base station attached to a fixed land line, for example within a home or and PDAs The term PDA was first used on January 7, 1992, by Apple Computer CEO John Sculley at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, referring to the Apple Newton. In 1996, Nokia introduced the first mobile phone with full PDA functionality, the 9000 Communicator, which has since grown to become the world's best-selling PDA and which spawned as technology continues to converge.

Origins

A device called the Cathode-Ray Tube The Cathode Ray Tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun (a source of electrons) and a fluorescent screen, with internal or external means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam, used to create images in the form of light emitted from the fluorescent screen. The image may represent electrical waveforms (oscilloscope), pictures ( Amusement Device was patented in the United States United States patent law was established "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" as provided in the United States Constitution. Congress implemented these protections as a first-to-invent patent legal by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann.^[1] The patent was filed on January 25, 1947, and issued on December 14, 1948. It described using eight vacuum tubes In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve (elsewhere, especially in Britain) is a device used to amplify, switch, otherwise modify, or create an electrical signal by controlling the movement of electrons in a low-pressure space. Some special function vacuum tubes are filled with low-pressure gas: these are so-called soft to simulate a missile firing at a target and contains knobs to adjust the curve and speed of the missile. Because computer graphics Computer graphics are graphics created using computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of image data by a computer could not be drawn electronically at the time, small targets were drawn on a simple overlay and placed on the screen.

In 1949-1950, Charley Adama created a "Bouncing Ball" program for MIT's Whirlwind computer.^[2] While the program was not yet interactive, it was a precursor to games soon to come.

In February 1951, Christopher Strachey tried to run a draughts Draughts or checkers (American English) is a group of abstract strategy board games between two players which involve diagonal moves of uniform pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over the enemy's pieces. Draughts developed from alquerque. The name derives from the verb to draw or to move program he had written for the NPL Pilot ACE The Pilot ACE was one of the first computers built in the United Kingdom, at the National Physical Laboratory in the early 1950s. The program exceeded the memory capacity of the machine and Strachey recoded his program for a machine at Manchester with a larger memory capacity by October.

Also in 1951, while developing television technologies for New York based electronics company Loral, inventor Ralph Baer came up with the idea of using the lights and patterns he used in his work as more than just calibration equipment. He realized that by giving an audience the ability to manipulate what was projected on their television sets, their role changed from passive observing to interactive manipulation. When he took this idea to his supervisor, it was quickly squashed because the company was already behind schedule.^[3]

OXO OXO was a computer game written for the EDSAC computer in 1952, an implementation of the game known as Noughts and Crosses in the UK, or tic-tac-toe in the United States. It was written by Alexander S. Douglas as an illustration for his Ph.D. thesis on human-computer interaction for the University of Cambridge. OXO was the first digital graphical, a graphical version tic-tac-toe Tic-tac-toe, also spelled tick tack toe, or noughts and crosses as it is known in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, is a pencil-and-paper game for two players, O and X, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 grid, usually X going first. The player who succeeds in placing three respective marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row wins the, was created by A.S. Douglas Professor Alexander "Sandy" Shafto Douglas CBE was a British professor of computer science, credited with creating the first graphical Computer game OXO (also known as Noughts and Crosses) a tic-tac-toe computer game in 1952 on the EDSAC computer at University of Cambridge in 1952 at the University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is the second oldest university in England and the fourth oldest in Europe. In post-nominals the university's name is abbreviated as Cantab, a shortened form of Cantabrigiensis (an adjective derived from Cantabrigia, the Latinised form of Cambridge), in order to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. It was developed on the EDSAC Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator was an early British computer. The machine, having been inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England. EDSAC was the first practical stored-program electronic computer, which uses a cathode ray tube as a visual display to display memory contents. The player competes against the computer.

In 1958 William Higinbotham William A. Higinbotham (October 25, 1910 - November 10, 1994), an American physicist, is credited with creating one of the first computer games, Tennis for Two. Like Pong, it is a portrait of a game of tennis or ping-pong, but featured very different game mechanics that have no resemblance to the later game. As the Head of the Instrumentation created a game using an oscilloscope An oscilloscope is a type of electronic test instrument that allows observation of constantly varying signal voltages, usually as a two-dimensional graph of one or more electrical potential differences using the vertical or 'Y' axis, plotted as a function of time, (horizontal or 'x' axis). Although an oscilloscope displays voltage on its vertical and analog computer An analog computer is a form of computer that uses the continuously-changeable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved. In contrast, digital computers represent varying quantities incrementally, as their numerical values change.^[4] Titled Tennis for Two Tennis for Two was a game developed in 1958 on an analog computer, which simulates a game of tennis or ping pong on an oscilloscope. Created by American physicist William Higinbotham, it is important in the history of video games as one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display, it was used to entertain visitors of the Brookhaven National Laboratory Brookhaven National Laboratory , is a United States national laboratory located in Upton, New York on Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base. Its name stems from its location in the greater area of the Town of Brookhaven in New York.^[5] Tennis for Two showed a simplified tennis court A tennis court is where the game of tennis is played. It is a firm rectangular surface with a low net stretched across the center. The same surface can be used to play both doubles and singles from the side, featuring a gravity Gravitation, or gravity, is one of the four fundamental interactions of nature , in which objects with mass attract one another. In everyday life, gravitation is most familiar as the agent that gives weight to objects with mass and causes them to fall to the ground when dropped. Gravitation causes dispersed matter to coalesce, thus accounting for-controlled ball that needed to be played over the "net," unlike its successor—Pong Pong is one of the earliest arcade video games, and is a tennis sports game featuring simple two-dimensional graphics. While other arcade video games such as Computer Space came before it, Pong was one of the first video games to reach mainstream popularity. The aim is to defeat your opponent in a simulated table tennis game by earning a higher. The game was played with two box-shaped controllers, both equipped with a knob for trajectory A trajectory is the path a moving object follows through space as a function of time. The object might be a projectile or a satellite, for example. It thus includes the meaning of orbit—the path of a planet, an asteroid or a comet as it travels around a central mass. A trajectory can be described mathematically either by the geometry of the path, and a button for hitting the ball.^[4] Tennis for Two was exhibited for two seasons before its dismantlement in 1959.^[6]

1950s–1960s

The majority of early computer games A personal computer game is a game played on a personal computer, rather than on a video game console or arcade machine. Computer games have evolved from the simple graphics and gameplay of early titles like Spacewar!, to a wide range of more visually advanced titles ran on university A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is a corporation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education. The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of mainframe computers Mainframes are powerful computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing in the United States and were developed by individuals as a hobby. The limited accessibility of early computer hardware meant that these games were small in number and forgotten by posterity.^{[citation needed]}

In 1959-1961, a collection of interactive graphical programs were created on the TX-0 machine at MIT:

• Mouse in the Maze : which allowed players to place maze walls, bits of cheese, and (in some versions) glasses of martini by way of a light pen interacting with the screen. One could then release the mouse and watch it traverse the maze to find the goodies.^[7]
• HAX: By adjusting two switches on the console, various graphical displays and sounds could be made.
• Tic-Tac-Toe: Using the light pen, the user could play a simple game of naughts and crosses against the computer.

In 1961, a group of students at MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research. MIT is one of two private land-grant universities[b] and is also a sea-grant and space-, including Steve Russell Steve "Slug" Russell is a programmer and computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, one of the earliest videogames, in 1961 with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT working on a DEC Digital PDP-1. While there is some debate over priority regarding the concept of computer-based games in general, Spacewar!, programmed a game titled Spacewar! Steve "Slug" Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz and Wayne Witaenem of the fictitious "Hingham Institute" conceived of the game in 1961, with the intent of implementing it on a DEC PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After Alan Kotok obtained some sine and cosine routines from DEC, Russell began coding, and on the DEC PDP-1, a new computer at the time.^[8] The game pitted two human players against each other, each controlling a spacecraft capable of firing missiles, while a star in the center of the screen created a large hazard for the crafts. The game was eventually distributed with new DEC computers and traded throughout the then-primitive Internet. Spacewar! is credited as the first influential computer game.

In 1966, while sitting bored at a bus stop, Ralph Baer rekindled his idea for an interactive video ‘game’ machine. Refining his ideas into a four-page document, Baer engaged co-worker Bill Harrison in the project, where they both worked at military electronics contractor Sanders Associates in New Hampshire. They created a simple video game named Chase, the first to display on a standard television set. With the assistance of Baer, Bill Harrison created the light gun and developed several video games with Bill Rusch in 1967. Ralph Baer continued development, and in 1968 a prototype was completed that could run several different games such as table tennis and target shooting. After months of secretive labouring between official projects, Baer was able to bring an example with true promise to Sanders' R & D department. By 1969, Sanders was showing off the world’s first home video game console to manufacturers.^[3]

In 1969, AT&T computer programmer Jeremy Ben wrote a video game called Space Travel for the Multics operating system. This game simulated various bodies of the solar system and their movements and the player could attempt to land a spacecraft on them. AT&T pulled out of the MULTICS project, and Ben ported the game to Fortran code running on the GECOS operating system of the General Electric GE 635 mainframe computer. Runs on this system cost about $75 per hour, and Ben looked for a smaller, less expensive computer to use. He found an underused PDP-7, and he and Dennis Ritchie started porting the game to PDP-7 assembly language. In the process of learning to develop software for the machine, the development process of the Unix operating system began, and Space Travel has been called the first UNIX application.^[9]

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