Hello all and welcome to our blog! We are excited to bring you this project of ours dedicated to all things gaming. You can find information about various video games, as well as articles about gaming hardware that would hopefully help you improve your set up.
We were wondering how to introduce this blog in a creative manner because the title alone pretty much tells you what the blog is going to be about.
You might find this a bit cheesy, but we thought a good beginning to a blog about gaming should be a post about the beginnings of video games themselves, so sit down and relax while reading about the fascinating early history of computer gaming.
Brief Early History of Video Games
The history of video games starts earlier than you probably expected. The very first video game, or what can at least be considered as a proto-video game, came out in 1947. Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann developed a game played on analogue device equipped with additional paper drawings that has you control a dot that shoots “missiles”.
Soon after, many similar patents for early video games were filed. Most of these games came with a special platform, meaning that developers created both the software and hardware.
Some of the most prominent video games of that era include Bertie the Brain (1950, developed by Josef Kates), a tic tac toe game, Nim for the Nimrod machine (1951, developed by John Makepeace Bennett and Raymond Stuart-Williams), and Tennis for Two (1958, developed by William Higinbotham), a simple tennis game using an analogue computer and an oscilloscope to display the game.
These early games didn’t see that many players but that soon changed with the release of Spacewar! In 1961. Developed by MIT students Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders and Steve Piner, Spacewar! could be played on the PDP-1 computer, rather than a game-exclusive platform like Nimrod which allowed for wide distribution.
The game is considered to be the first true video game because it could be accessed by every owner of the specific computer, PDP-1 in this case. Spacewar! thus paved the way for all video games that would follow.
The Rise of Video Games
Although Spacewar! could be enjoyed by many more players than the earliest video games, distribution was still an issue.
The video game scene, however, changed drastically in the 1970’s with the adoption of standardised programming languages such as BASIC and C. Other contemporary inventions such as time-sharing further aided video games by broadening the access to computers and allowing more people to develop their own games.
In addition to making software more accessible, the 1970’s also brought new hardware inventions which greatly aided the making of new video games and helped distribute them to a wider audience.
Yes, we are talking about the emergence of gaming consoles. In 1972, Sanders Associates, in partnership with Magnavox, released the first gaming console in North America – the Magnavox Odyssey. Ralph Baer, one of the developers, later received the National Medal of Technology from President George W. Bush for his creation.
The Odyssey came with two controllers which allowed for players to team up or play against one another. Some of the prominent games for the Odyssey include Simon Says, Tennis, and Submarine, among others.
The 1980’s saw even more gaming software and hardware inventions, with video games becoming a staple in every home. Nintendo and SEGA completely changed the game in 1983 when both companies released their respective consoles, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and SG-1000.
Conclusion
As this short post showed, gaming should not be thought of only in software terms, as it’s commonly talked about today, because hardware and software have always come hand in hand, one aiding the other at all times. This is why we dedicate this blog to the experts of gaming hardware as much as we dedicate to the talented game designers.