History of video games

Video games were introduced as a commercial entertainment medium in 1971, becoming the basis for an important entertainment industry in the late 1970s/early 1980s in the United States, Japan, and Europe. After a disastrous industry collapse in 1983 and a subsequent rebirth two years later, the video game industry has experienced sustained growth for over two decades to become a $10 billion industry, which rivals the motion picture industry as the most profitable entertainment industry in the world.

Origins

A device called the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device was patented in the United States 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 to simulate a missile firing at a target and contains knobs to adjust the curve and speed of the missile. Because computer graphics could not be drawn electronically at the time, small targets were drawn on a simple overlay and placed on the screen.

Tennis for Two

In February 1951, Christopher Strachey tried to run a draughts programme he had written for the NPL Pilot ACE. The program exceeded the memory capacity of the machine and by October, Strachey had recoded his program for a machine at Manchester with a larger memory capacity.

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 displaying memory contents as a visual display. The player competes against the computer (which incorporates basic Artificial Intelligence) using a rotary dial.

In 1958 William Higinbotham created a game using an oscilloscope and analog computer.^[2] Aptly 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 successors. The game was played with two box-shaped controllers, both equipped with a knob for trajectory and a button for hitting the ball.^[2] Tennis for Two was exhibited for two seasons before its dismantlement in 1959.