It’s 2016 and the revenue generated by the Gaming Industry is up by 8.5% as compared to 2015. Whooping $99.6 billion revenue earned where for the first time in the history of the gaming industry, mobile gaming has generated the largest revenue as compared to PC and consoles. This clearly shows how video games have become an important and integral part of our life and culture.

The fact that gaming industry was not the same 50 to 60 years back, the journey of video games from university laboratories to our living rooms and now pockets has been a behemoth.

It all started in the year 1940 when Edward Condon an American nuclear physicist designed a Computer that allowed people to play the game. He named it “Nim”. The game was then played by thousands where the computer won more than 90% of the time. Though Nim was the first electronic game that was actually played by many, Alan Turing (Father of the Modern Computer) and David Champernowne together had already started working on a computer game. It was a chess simulation game called “Turochamp” and was completed in the year 1948. Through the game was never actually implemented on the computer due to the complexity of the code, it still remains as the chess program designed before the first computer was invented.

(Nim played by more than 50,000 people in 6 months)

Later in the year 1952, a Ph.D. candidate from Cambridge University Alexander Douglas designed a game called OXO, a version of Tic-Tac-Toe and one of the earliest computer games. Played on Cambridge’s EDSAC computer, the game OXO used rotary telephone dial to enter the moves and allowed the player to choose to start the game or allow the machine to make the first move. The EDSAC displayed the game board on a 35 x 15 dot cathode ray tube. OXO thus became the first game ever built using artificial intelligence (AI).

Almost a decade later, in the 1960s the idea of video games played on the television set became a reality. Ralph Baer (The Father of Video Games) worked with two other engineers  Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch and developed “Brown Box”, the first ever console video game system. The US Department of Defense with the help of Baer created a war game known as STAGE and subsequently, Baer completed two more TV games in the 1960s.  Later in the decade, Computer Space became the first video arcade game to be released.

It was not until the year 1972 that the gaming industry actually began making real profits. Atari released Pong in the year 1972 and the Pong home version through Sears retail stores, thus the availability of computers games was made in large numbers. Pong became the first ever sports arcade video game to reach mainstream popularity. The success of pong helped establish the video game industry. Over the next 7 years, Atari dominated the gaming industry but later suffered huge loss through mismanagement and poorly designed games.

(An upright cabinet of Pong on display at the Neville Public Museum of Brown County)

Various clones of Pong that flooded the market in the year 1977 led to the crash and downfall of the video game industry. This downfall eventually came to an end with the release and huge success of Taito’s Space Invaders released in 1978. Space Invaders went on to sell over 360,000 arcade cabinets worldwide over the years thus sparking a renaissance for the video game industry and paving the way for the golden age of video arcade games – the era of the 1980s.

Since the 1980s, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of a modern popular culture in most parts of the world and has undergone various transformations to appeal and attract the gamers and maturing with the advancement of technology.

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