-
Nimatron
An engineer called Edward Condon designed a computer for the Westinghouse display at the World's Fair that played a traditional game in which players tried to avoid picking up the last match. The name of his game was changed to Nimatron. -
Bertie the Brain
Bertie the Brain was a computer game of tic-tac-toe, built by Dr. Josef Kates for the Canadian National Exhibition. -
Tennis for Two
William Higinbotham was an American physicist. He also has a place in the history of video games for his creation of Tennis for Two, the first interactive analog computer game and one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display. -
Spacewar
A group of young MIT programmers, led by Steven Russell, produced Spacewar, a game complete with rocket-powered spaceships, missiles, gravitational effects, and even an unpredictable “hyperspace” function. Although it was never commercialized, Spacewar inspired those who would bring video games to the masses 10 years later. -
Computer Space and Galaxy Game
Two games emerged to the general public as a pair of the first US-made coin-operated arcade games. Neither of them expanded very far as they were too expensive to mass-produce. These two games were called Computer Space and Galaxy Game. -
Pong
Pong was the first game developed by Atari Inc., by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Players use paddles to hit a ball back and forth on a black and white screen. -
Magnavox Odyssey
The Magnavox Odyssey is the first commercial home video game console. It was developed by a small team led by Ralph H. Baer at Sanders Associates and released by Magnavox in the United States -
Zork
"Zork" was originally MIT hacker jargon for an unfinished program. The implementors named the completed game Dungeon, but by that time, the name Zork had already stuck. -
Everquest
Everquest is the first to handle online multiplayer, spawning a game genre based on the game’s name also formed the genre MMORPG. -
Period: to
Golden Age of Arcade Games
The late 1970s to mid-1980s is said to be the 'golden age' of arcade games when this type of entertainment was a superpower in popular culture. -
Video Game Market Decrease
The estimated US$42 billion market in 1982, including consoles, arcade, and personal computer games, dropped to US$14 billion by 1985, with a significant shift away from arcades and consoles to personal computer software in the years that followed. The North American video game crash had two long-lasting results. -
Famicom
While the home gaming industry in the United States was experiencing its death throes, Nintendo was gearing up to fill the void. In 1983, the same year as the crash, Nintendo released its Family Computer, commonly called Famicom, in Japan. It suffered a few speed bumps, but by the following year, it was the most popular game console in the country. -
Period: to
Sega
The Game Gear is an 8-bit fourth generation handheld game console released by Sega on October 6, 1990, in Japan, in April 1991 throughout North America and Europe, and during 1992 in Australia. The Game Gear primarily competed with Nintendo's Game Boy, the Atari Lynx, and NEC's TurboExpress. -
Period: to
Adventure games
Adventure game’s popularity peaked during the late 1980s to mid-1990s when many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres, but it had become a niche genre in the early 2000s due to the popularity of first-person shooters, and it became difficult for developers to find publishers to support adventure-game ventures.