Odyssey – First Video Game System

The idea to create a video game system first appeared in the head of 29-year old Ralph Baer in 1951.  He was a TV engineer at the TV company called "Loral."  Ralph received a task to create the best TV set in the world from Sam Lackoff, his Chief Engineer.  This was not a problem for young Ralph Baer and from there he decided to make something totally new.  He wanted to create a way to play games on TV set.  Unfortunately however, Baer was not able to implement his idea because his boss, Sam did not approve it.

Ralph Baer came back to his idea of playing games on TV sets only fifteenth years later.  During the time period of 1966 -1968 Ralph built seven prototypes that played several video games.  His works resulted in the creation of "Brown Box," which played Target Shooting games, Ball & Paddle games, as well as other types of games.

Ralph Baer demonstrated his work to different TV manufactures, and in 1971 one of them was interested.  It was Magnavox, the agreement was signed, and in the May of 1972 Magnavox released the first video game system called "Odyssey."

Tennis for Two – First Video Game Created for Fun

"Tennis for Two," was created in 1958 by William Higginbotham.  When discussing the first video game in history, it is difficult to come to a conclusion as to which game was actually first.  This is due the technical aspect of early video games, and also the purpose of their creation.  Some people believe that "Tennis for Two" was the first video game in history and William Higginbotham is the inventor of video games.

"Tennis for Two," is also known as Tennis Programming.  It was played on the analog computer with separate controllers and oscilloscope in the role of a screen.  This game was played by two people.

The oscilloscope screen used a cathode-ray tube, and showed the tennis court from the two-dimensional side view.  Net and ground were represented as the bright vertical and horizontal lines.  The ball was represented by a moving dot.  Players used controllers to operate the invisible rackets.  Controllers had a button for “hitting” the ball, and a rotating dial for setting the angle of the ball(s) trajectory.

Unlike A. S. Douglas, who created "OXO" ("Noughts And Crosses") for scientific purposes in 1952, for his PhD dissertation about human-computer interaction, William Higginbotham created "Tennis for Two," as an entertainment based project.  This is why, despite the release dates, some people believe that "Tennis for Two" deserves the title for the first video game created, rather than "Noughts And Crosses."

Video Arcade Games Ancestors of 20-th Century

More than a hundred years ago, way back when the Civil War was finished, humanity got to know about a new invention called as the "Penny Arcade."  The Penny Arcade had basic attractions such as test your strength machines and peep shows.

It is no secret that the Penny Arcade attracted a lot of attention through out the years, including the turn of the century into the 1900's.  Things really got going during the 1920's - 1930's, during the Great Depression "Film Shorts" did a really great job at providing entertainment. 

For all these years it had been keeping Americans from more horrible woes however, the Arcades did quite a decent job too.  Thanks to an invention called Pinball, made by the man with the surname of Gottlieb, people got interested in playing an ''easy to learn, difficult to master'' game.  Even after the World War-driven fear of the US population ended, Pinball games remained to be an incredibly popular source of entertainment.

It should not be much of a surprise that all that changed in 1974, when Nolan Bushnell invented a tiny little jewel called Pong.  Despite the fact that Pong is not the first electronic Video game ever made, it did become the first game to attract Video Games into the Arcade Industry.

Clip about the History of Video Games

Here is a very interesting video.  It is a clip representing an amateur song on the topic of the history of video games.

In fact, the video is very cool.  But there are also some sad disadvantages.  The lyrics consist mostly of different words (the only exception is refrain) that define different video game technologies, names of great people from the arcade world, arcade game companies, video game consoles, and titles of arcade games.  These words were planned to be sorted in chronological order.  The end result however, left the song with some with chronological mistakes, some important video games for example (like Spacewar, 1962) and people (like Willy Higinbotham, the inventor of video game Tennis for Two, 1958, which is believed to be the first video game) were missed.

Also, (in my opinion,) the song should be in a different genre of music.  The song talks about a time before the 1990's, the time of classic video games.  These games had the 8bit music, and I believe that the song should be 8bit too.

Despite these disadvantages, the video leaves a good impression.  It is very pleasant to hear the well known, and loved titles of classic arcade games, the games of childhood.  It is as though you are remembering your whole life, in terms of video arcade games.  A special thanks for the video itself, it perfectly supplements the nostalgic atmosphere of the music.  It would be nice if the author wrote the continuation of the song to tell about the history of video games from 1990 until today.

You can watch the clip about the history of video games below or here on Youtube.com.

Present Situation of Video Arcade Games: Part 2

On the other hand, there are also some arcades games that do not need to fight for survival. This is because some genres of video games are still very popular in arcades. Among these are dancing and rhythm types of games. Some famous video arcade games of this genre would include "Dance, Dance Revolution," and part of the "Bemani," series.

When the modern video arcade games cannot find a place under the sun, the early video games find new life.

Thanks to the simple, and purely exciting game play of many of the early video games, many of these games have found a lot of new fans amongst the modern generation. The modern generation however, play these arcade games on mobile phones, or with the help of special emulators such as MAME.

In addition, nowadays some of the classic video arcade games are reappearing in commercial settings. Such as the way the "Ms. Pac-Man 20 Year Reunion." was released, as well as "Galaga Class of 1981," (two-in-one game.) Other classic arcades are integrated directly into controller hardware (joysticks) with replaceable flash drives storing game ROMs.

End of Golden Age of Video Arcade Games: Copies of Popular Games

During the late 1970's technology made it possible to create video games with much better quality graphics and sound in comparison to previous years. It was still  a very far cry from what future technologies would have to offer, with realistic images and full motion video. This is why arcade game developers had to compensate for the lack of quality, by making the game play even more fun or entertaining. Many consider the late 1970's the golden age of the video arcade games. A lot of wonderful video arcade games were created then.

Unfortunately, this wonderful time didn’t last to terribly long, arcade games continued to be popular till the beginning of 1990's, but then there time had passed.  So, what happened, there are several reasons for it, and one of them is that the arcade market started to be filled with the numerous copies of these popular arcade games. These copies killed the interest to video arcade games, the development of something new became a rarity. Even though there were still new genres being explored by arcade game developers, the overwhelming majority of created games were maze type games, shooting games, and other such variations of these well-known themes.

Appearance of New Arcade Game Controls

Arcades catering for video games began to gain momentum in the end of 70-ies with such video games as 1978’s Gee Bee and Galaxian of 1979. And it became widespread in 1980 with the release of such video arcade games as King and Balloon, Tank Battalion, Pac-Man, and others.

The central processing unit in games of those times allowed for more complexity in comparison with the earlier discrete circuitry games, such as Pong that was created by Atari in 1972.

At that time several games were released that came with some new controls. For example, Football from Atari, released in 1978, came with the trackball, Hogan's Alley used tethered light guns, Paperboy included a bicycle handlebar, and racing wheel was included in Night Driver.

Other specialty controls, such as crossbow-shaped light gun in Crossbow and pedals in racing games, also were introduced to the arcade market during this period of time.

But, despite of the appearance of new arcade game controls, most manufacturers continued to prefer the buttons and joysticks.

Video Games of Different Times

Here is a wonderful video that shows different games starting from such classic video arcade games as Space Invaders (1980) and Donkey Kong (1982), and ending with such famous games of our times as World of Warcraft (2005) and Final Fantasy XII (2006). The newest shown game is MotorStorm (2007), while the oldest one is Pong (1972).

First half of the video is especially nice. This is so nostalgically to see the favorite games from the childhood. Pac-Man (1981), Super Mario Bros. (1985), Tetris (1989) – these video games are true legends. A wish to play video arcade games of those times appears again and again. Even though more than 20 years have passed, these video arcade games are still popular.

You can watch the video about the history of video games below. You can also watch it and view a full list of shown video games here.