Let's Talk History - how did games on electronic devices come about?

Image credit: Nelo Hotsuma

The study of past events is history. With gaming having become a billion dollar industry and gamers coming in all shapes, ages and sizes, it was time to visit the past. In the video games industry, the time that has elapsed since its inception has not been very long, but it already has considerable history. The gaming industry was spawned by research in the missile defense systems in the 1940s. Slowly research in computer science brought about development of games on mainframe computers in the 1950s and 1960s. This eventually developed into games on different platforms like arcade, PCs, mainframes, consoles and video games. By today’s standards older games were primitive. Today’s games have rich textures, brilliant full-color graphics and sophisticated sound.

Computer Space was one of the first viable games in the 1970s. Nolan Bushnell who developed it, also started Atari which developed one of the first commercially successful arcade game called Pong. The entertainment industry in the US, Europe and Japan grew in leaps and bound. Video gaming entered popular culture and has left a huge mark as more and more people across age-groups are taken in by them. The Japanese dominate the hand held console segment even as we have seen eight generations of them.

As the internet technology matured, online games became the norm. Soon they became multiplayer and Massively Multiplayer Online Games, giving rise to technologies and acronyms like MMOG and MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Player Games).

In the last decade, development budgets increased as gamers wanted more immersive experiences and gaming was a commercially successful business. As motion sensors matured and prices dropped, they were introduced into gaming paraphernalia, increasing the immersive experience of players. Simultaneously  more people were converted into gamers by introducing simplified casual games. 

As the technology of cloud computing matured, rendering of the game happened elsewhere and it was streamed to the player. With convergence of technology smart phones are the new devices to play games on.

Even as I write this, time is passing and the present is being rendered into the past.