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The first video game
For quite some time it has been difficult to point out which was the first video game, mainly due to the multiple definitions of this that have been established, but Naught and crosses, also called OXO, developed by Alexander S. Douglas in can be considered as the first video game. 1952. The game was a computerized version of tic-tac-toe that ran on the EDSAC and allowed a human player to play against the machine. -
Tennis for Two
In 1958 William Higginbotham created, using a program for the calculation of trajectories and an oscilloscope, Tennis for Two (tennis for two): a table tennis simulator for the entertainment of visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory exhibition.
This video game used to be the first to allow the game between two human players. -
Spacewar
Four years later Steve Russell, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spent six months creating a computer game using vector graphics: Spacewar. -
Fox and Hounds
In 1966 Ralph Baer began to develop together with Albert Maricon and Ted Dabney, a video game project called Fox and Hounds, starting the home video game. -
Magnabox
The fox and hounds project to become the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game system released in 1972 that was connected to television and allowed various prerecorded games to be played. -
Pong
The Pong arcade machine which is considered the commercial version of Higginbotham's Tennis for Two game. The system was designed by Al Alcom for Nolan Bushnell at the newly founded Atari.
The game was introduced in 1972 and was the cornerstone of the video game as an industry. During the following years, numerous technical advances were implemented in video games (notably microprocessors and memory chips). Games like Space Invaders (Taito) or Asteroids (Atari) appeared in arcades. -
The arcades
The 1980s began with strong growth in the video game sector, encouraged by the popularity of arcades and the first video game consoles that appeared during the 1970s. -
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Popularization of video games
During these years, systems such as Oddyssey 2 (Phillips), Intellivision (Mattel), Colecovision (Coleco), Atari 5200, Commodore 64, Turbografx (NEC) stand out. On the other hand, games such as the famous Pacman (Namco), Battle Zone (Atari), Pole Position (Namco), Tron (Midway) or Zaxxon (Sega) triumphed in arcade machines. -
The video game business
The business associated with this new industry achieved great things in these first years of the 80s, but nevertheless, in 1983 the so-called video game crisis began, affecting mainly the United States and Canada, and it would not come to an end until 1985. -
The NES
Japan bet on the world of consoles with the success of the Famicom (called in the West as Nintendo Entertainment System), launched by Nintendo in 1983 while in Europe it opted for microcomputers such as the Commodore 64 or the Spectrum. -
Super Mario Bros
In 1985 Super Mario Bros appeared, which was a turning point in the development of electronic games, since most of the previous games only contained a few screens that were repeated in a loop and the goal was simply to make a high score. The game developed by Nintendo was a burst of creativity. For the first time we had a goal and an ending in a video game. In later years other companies emulated his style of play. -
16 BIT CONSOLES
In the late 1980s, 16-bit consoles such as the Sega Mega Drive began to appear and microcomputers were slowly replaced by personal computers based on IBM architectures. -
Portable video games
Another branch of video games that grew strongly was that of portable video games. These began in the early 70s with the first fully electronic games released by Mattel, which could hardly be considered as video games, and they grew in popularity thanks to arcade conversions such as those made by Coleco or addicting microgames such as Nintendo's Game & Watch . The definitive evolution of laptops as video game platforms came in 1989 with the launch of the Game Boy (Nintendo). -
The age of 16 bits
At the beginning of the 90's, video game consoles took an important technical leap thanks to the competition of the so-called "16-bit generation" made up of the Mega Drive, Nintendo's Super Nintendo Entertainment, the NEC PC Engine, known as Turbografx in the West and the CPS Changer from (Capcom). -
32 and 64 bit generation
Quickly, 3D video games were occupying an important place in the market, mainly thanks to the so-called "32-bit generation" in video consoles: Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn (mainly in Japan); and the "64-bit generation" in game consoles: Nintendo 64 and Atari Jaguar. As for computers, 3D accelerators were created. -
Online and 128 bits
The connections between computers through the internet that facilitated multiplayer play, making it the preferred choice of many players, and were responsible for the birth of MMORPGs (online multiplayer role-playing games) such as Ultima Online (Origin). Finally in 1998 the Dreamcast (Sega) appeared in Japan and would start the "128-bit generation". -
The year 2000
In 2000 Sony released the anticipated PlayStation 2 and Sega released another console with the same technical features as the Dreamcast,
Microsoft entered the console industry creating the Xbox in 2001.
Nintendo released the successor to the Nintendo 64, the Gamecube, and the first completely new Game Boy since the company's inception, the Game Boy Advance. -
The fall of sega
Seeing that it could not compete, especially with a new machine like Sony's, it announced that it would no longer produce hardware, becoming only a software developer in 2002. -
The PC Gamer
The personal computer PC is the most expensive gaming platform but also the one that allows the most flexibility. This flexibility comes from the fact of being able to add components to the computer that can be constantly improved, such as graphics or sound cards and accessories such as steering wheels, pedals and controls, etc. It is also possible to update the games with official patches or with new additions made by the company that created the game or by other users.
