Origins of video games

I know what this sounds like, another boring trip down memory lane talking about games that had terrible graphics and awkward game controllers, and you’re right why should we look back at the past when the best is yet to come, especially with the Xbox One and PS4 right around the corner but haven’t any of you ever wondered what inspired great FPS games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield? And where did the game consoles such as the PS4 and Xbox One originate from? Well stick around this futuristic campfire and I will tell you.

Nothing drives technology faster than war, all you have to do is take a look back in history and you can clearly see the evidence that technology develops faster when countries are at the brink of war as they are trying to get one up on each other, and once that has blown over people will try and find a way to play games out of what has been invented, I mean look at the internet, that was originally invented so that the military could transfer data across point to point even if one of the computer nodes was destroyed and now we use this great invention to play games or watch silly cat videos.

We got from this:

To this:

The first ever video game console was released in 1972 called Magnavox Odyssey, this was revolutionary as now gamers could now play games like (and similar to) Pong right at home instead of having to go to the local arcade. One of the down sides to this console was that it lacked CPU, which means to get the full enjoyment out of its games the user has to have someone to play with. Four years later Atari released their console called “Atari 2600”, this second generation console had sold over 30 million units (as of 2004) and their best-selling game was Pac-man which sold 7 million copies. Atari pretty much dominated the industry from 1976-1983, whereas the lesser known consoles like ‘Arcadia 2001’ didn’t stand much of a chance as Atari bought the rights to publish the more popular games like ‘Pac-man’ solely on their consoles, in the end Atari went bankrupt, due to multiple events, one of which was that Atari supplied way too many copies of ‘ET’, the video game, and because Atari had many unsold copies they had to dump the remaining copies in a land fill. This pretty much bankrupted Atari. Around this time PC gaming was becoming more and more popular as the PC could give off more realistic graphics and better sound quality compared to the any of the other consoles like the Sega-1000 and Nintendo. These were the main companies that posed a threat to Atari and lead to a shift of dominance from USA to Japan in game consoles because of Atari’s mishap from their ET game. During 1989 Nintendo released the Game Boy, it was the first in hand held of its kind, and their best-selling game was Tetris. This was popular as now gamers could play games anywhere and wasn’t just restricted to playing a video game inside their house.

The ET landfill

PC gaming is still hugely popular (even today), no other console can come close to the graphics and screen resolution that the PC can achieve, which is why in 1991 the first ever, graphically pleasing, First Person Shooter (FPS) game was released…’Catacomba 3D’ although it used magic instead of bullets and guns, this then lead to ‘Wolfenstein 3D’ (1992) and ‘Doom’ (1993) to be released and this time it they did include the bullets and guns, these FPS games would gradually evolve over time and become games such as ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Battlefield’ that we all have come to know today.

Wolfensein 3D (1992)

Battlefield 4 (2013)