Video Games - How it all began
The very first video games were designed in 1947 and they were for play on a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). The first one was a very simple game that was designed by developers Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. Many of the very early video games ran on mainframes at universities in the United States and were mostly designed by individual users who programmed them on their own time. In 1966, Ralph Baer created a game called Chase that had a policy to finally be able to be displayed on a television set.
The 1970’s were seen as the dawn of a golden age with the development of the coin-operated game. In 1971, the first coin-operated arcade version of the game Spacewar! (copyright protected) was announced and it was called Computer Space. Nolan Bushnell created Atari in 1972 and one of the very first video games, Pong, was released that same year. Pong was very similar to table tennis where it had a ball that was served from the center of the court and as soon as it moves, the player has to maneuver themselves to hit the ball back to the opponent. The Golden Age of video games was reached in 1978 with the release of Space Invaders. The very popular and addicting Asteroids was then released by Atari in 1978 which became its biggest seller. Video games in color began to become very popular with ones such as Pac-Man and Breakout. The first handheld video games were made in 1972 when the game Tic Tac Toe was made by the Waco company.
Video games began to become very popular on home computers where people could play in the privacy of their homes. The Magnavox Odyssey was one of the first built for a home console. Atari’s home version of Pong around Christmas 1975 was when they really took off. The success of Pong was only the beginning of hundreds of clones.
The Golden Age of video games really reached its full steam in the 1980’s when gaming computers emerged in 1982 such as the advance of the Commodore 64 system and the ZX Spectrum platform. Battlezone, 3D Monster Maze, Dungeons of Daggorath, Pole Position, Dragon’s Lair and Pac-Man gained even more popularity.
Nintendo Game and Watch also began their line in 1980. These were LCD portable handheld video games that gave dozens of other game and toy companies the idea to also make their own portables. Some of the news had it that the advantages of these video games were that they only needed batteries of the size that were made for watches and they were also much smaller than most LED handhelds and were even small enough to be worn on someone’s wrist.