Video games have come a long way over the past half-century today we have all sorts of games ranging from detailed storylines to multi player chaos the graphics of our games today aren't far off the CGI films from a decade ago and moreover the gaming industry brought in twenty-three billion dollars of revenue last year but where did it all come from and what are the very origins of what we call video games today in this blog we'll travel back in time a little bit and find out when most people think of the origin of video games, their mind wanders to the classic arcade game pong, but pong and the corresponding arcade era was actually the end stage of pioneering video games and not the beginning to find the first piece of video game code ever written.
We have to start three years after World War two in 1948 Alan Turing who was actually the father of AI and David Champ a noun wrote a theoretical chess simulation called Turo champ this was the first game code ever written unfortunately it would never run on a computer as the code was too complicated to actually run on machines over the time in early 1950s saw the first video games to run on a machine of course the computers back then were large glorified calculators that took up an entire room but there was an issue though for a second put yourself in the shoes of an engineer in 1950 if you wanted to demonstrate a computer's usefulness to someone who didn't even know what a computer was how would you do it, in an interesting and engaging way the answer with tech demos of course created in 1950 virtually the brain was one of the first of such demo games it was basically noughts and crosses which is light bulbs as a display in 1952 al Xander Douglas created another noughts and crosses game but took it a step further he used a video display instead of light bulbs although this was a step forward the game featured new interactive moving graphics so some historians do not view this as the first two video game possibly the first real video game and the first created simply for entertainment purposes was tennis for two in 1958 it featured moving graphics on an oscilloscope American physicist William Higinbotham designed the game to be shown at a public exhibition here's how we discovered how to make the game while reading the instruction manual for a Donner model 30 computer which was an analogue computer used by the US government, William learned that the computer could calculate basic missile trajectories or a bouncing ball with wind resistance he decided to use these abilities to form the foundation of a game this was actually the very first interactive computer game.
The game was a smash hit during the three-day exhibition with players lining up to see the game high school students were especially enthralled although this was an iconic moment in videogame history, it was yet to break out as a media forum as the years passed there were still no such thing as a video game industry almost all games had been developed on a single machine for a specific purpose a software game that could run on multiple machines was not yet realized this all changed in 1961 when MIT acquired the dec pdp-11 Peter which used a vector display system although it had no CPU the transistors still managed to 5 megahertz processing speed which is about 500 times slower than the clock speed in a modern smartphone actually very powerful for 1961 because of the computers small size and speed students and employees of MIT loved writing non-academic programs whenever it wasn't being used.
In 1962 three MIT employees Martin grades Steve Russell and Wayne Whittington created the game space war on the PDP one the two-player game involved a dog fire between two spaceships set against the backdrop of the star field interestingly one of the aims of the game's design was to use up all of the computer's resources and utilize every part of the machine so in essence what you're looking at is the maximum performance of 1961 technology.
I think it was actually pretty impressive for what they had space war was copied to other mini computers in other American universities making it the first video game to be available outside a single Research Institute despite this, the game wasn't widespread as the PDP one cost $120,000 or almost a million dollars in today's currency and only 55 were ever sold as a side point if he think space war looks familiar the game actually inspired asteroids by Atari in 1979, but following the spread of space war further computer games were developed by programmers at other universities.
The 1970s saw an uptick in the number of video games being created but there were still known commercial games yet alone a smash hit title to start a gaming revolution until 1972 that is here's how it happened inspired by the MIT games space war two guys Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney decided to create a coin-operated version of the game in 1971 it was called computer space and went on to be the first arcade video game as well as the first commercially available video game it was a moderate success and was profitable but the pair thought that they could do better they immediately started work on another game and decided to found their own company called Atari incorporated initially this next game was to be a driving game but Ataris first employee Allan Alcorn was given the project of making a simple ping pong game as training while Ellen was working on the training project Bushnell saw the progress and already thought that the game was pretty fun so much so that Atari should just actually release it.
This training project ping pong became the first video game smash hit that will go down forever in history its name became pong pong was unleashed in 1972 and it was immensely successful selling over eight thousand cabinet arcades across America the secret to pong success was the use of a low-cost TV monitor as an example a vector monitor in those days cost $15,000 and whereas you could use a TV set 400 and that was kind of one of the metaphors and allowed it to be every words to infuse specialized computer centers it was a great social experience that was going on, the number of people that have said in last 25 years that they met their husband or wife playing pong it's been in the hundreds 1972 also saw the release of the Magnavox Odyssey the first home video game console seconds to create a closed-circuit electronic playground, Odyssey is tips analogic now video games had come out of arcades and straight into the home.
The Odyssey was the first video gaming device to be in a television commercial it sold for about five hundred seventy dollars in today's currency and shipped with several games even though the
Odyssey was extremely primitive it was still a brand new medium of entertainment for the household and because of this it was immensely successful selling over 100,000 units in 1972 alone pong and the Odyssey had kicked off a new era in video gaming from this time numerous competitors began to pop up to create a new video game industry, over the years the computing power and graphics would improve and despite the video game crash of 1983 the industry came rebounding with knee strength in the 1990s storyline to become a bigger part of the gaming experience and soon vast imaginative world became a possibility the 2000s saw photorealistic graphics become feasible and now we're on the verge of the next revolutionary stage in gaming virtual reality
Alright guys that's the end of the blog, thanks for reading the whole way through if you enjoyed this blog please share it with someone who would be interested and leave a comment stating the first video game that you ever played, Thanks for reading guys.
