The History of Video Games

  The history of video games goes as far back as the 1940s, when in 1947 Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a United States patent request for an invention they described as a "cathode ray tube amusement device." Video gaming would not reach mainstream popularity until the 1970s and 80s, when arcade and computer games and the first gaming consoles were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in the developed world. There are considered to be currently seven generations of video game consoles, with the seventh being ongoing and the most recent.
  On January 25, 1947, Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a United States patent request for an invention they described as a "cathode ray tube amusement device".This patent, which the United States Patent Office issued on December 14, 1948, details a machine in which a person uses knobs and buttons to manipulate a cathode ray tube beam to simulate firing at "air-borne" targets. A printed overlay on the CRT screen helps to define the playing field.
   Tennis for Two
  In 1949–1950, Charley Adama created a "Bouncing Ball" program for MIT's Whirlwind computer. 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 program he had written for the NPL Pilot ACE. 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.
  OXO, a graphical version of tic-tac-toe, was created by A.S. Douglas in 1952 at the University of Cambridge, in order to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. It was developed on the     EDSAC 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 created a game using an oscilloscope and analog computer.Titled Tennis for Two, it was used to entertain visitors of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.Tennis for Two showed a simplified tennis court from the side, featuring a gravity-controlled ball that needed to be played over the "net," unlike its successor—Pong. The game was played with two box-shaped controllers, both equipped with a knob for trajectory and a button for hitting the ball.Tennis for Two was exhibited for two seasons before it was dismantled in 1959.
In early 1950s–1969 the majority of early computer games ran on universities' mainframe computers 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.
In 1961, a group of students at MIT, including Steve Russell, programmed a game titled Spacewar! on the DEC PDP-1, a new computer at the time.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, Ralph Baer engaged co-worker Bill Harrison in the project, where they both worked at military electronics contractor Sanders Associates in Nashua, NH. 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. Baer and Harrison were joined by Bill Rusch in 1967, an MIT graduate (MSEE) who was subsequently awarded several patents for the TV gaming apparatus (US Patents 3,659,284, 3,778,058, etc.). Development continued, 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, the team 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.
   In 1969, AT&T computer programmer Ken Thompson 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 Thompson 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 Thompson 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.
  Early arcade video games (1971–1977)-in September 1971, the Galaxy Game was installed at a student union at Stanford University. Based on Spacewar!, this was the first coin-operated video game. Only one was built, using a DEC PDP-11 and vector display terminals. In 1972 it was expanded to be able to handle four to eight consoles.
   Also in 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created a coin-operated arcade version of Spacewar! and called it Computer Space. Nutting Associates bought the game and manufactured 1,500 Computer Space machines, with the release taking place in November 1971. The game was unsuccessful due to its steep learning curve, but was a landmark as the first mass-produced video game and the first offered for commercial sale.
   Bushnell and Dabney founded Atari, Inc. in 1972, before releasing their next game: Pong. Pong was the first arcade video game with widespread success. The game is loosely based on table tennis: a ball is "served" from the center of the court and as the ball moves towards their side of the court each player must maneuver their paddle to hit the ball back to their opponent. Atari sold over 19,000 Pong machines,creating many imitators.
 Video game crash of 1977-In 1977, manufacturers of older, obsolete consoles and Pong clones sold their systems at a loss to clear stock, creating a glut in the market,[16] and causing Fairchild and RCA to abandon their game consoles. Only Atari and Magnavox remained in the home console market, despite suffering losses in 1977 and 1978.
  The crash was largely caused by the significant number of Pong clones that flooded both the arcade and home markets. The crash eventually came to an end with the success of Taito's Space Invaders, released in 1978, sparking a renaissance for the video game industry and paving the way for the golden age of video arcade games.Soon after, Space Invaders was licensed for the Atari VCS (later known as Atari 2600), becoming the first "killer app" and quadrupling the console's sales.This helped Atari recover from their earlier losses.The success of the Atari 2600 in turn revived the home video game market, up until the North American video game crash of 1983.