The History of Video Game Consoles
Video games have been a core source of entertainment since the 1950s. Gaming has come a long way from a handful of pixels to virtual reality. The evolution of gaming shows us just how much each game has changed from its earliest beginnings.
One of the very first video games, using a digital display, was called Tennis for Two and was created by William Higginbotham in 1958. Tennis for Two was displayed on an oscilloscope, normally used for measuring signal voltage. It had very simple gameplay, consisting of a two-dimensional view of a digital tennis court. A “ball” bounced back and forth between the two halves of the court, leaving a little dot trail as it bounced. Players would hit the ball by using a controller to move the angle of an invisible “racket”, allowing them to volley the ball back and forth to each other. The most difficult feature of the game was attempting to play Tennis for Two with an unseen racket.
Although the mechanics of Tennis for Two were similar to Pong, the game itself was incredibly different. Pong, one of the most popular early games, was created in early 1972 by Allen Alcorn. Pong was a two-dimensional table tennis simulator originally designed to fulfill the requirements of a programming assignment. When Pong was released to the general public, arcade-like games dominated the market with little competition. This was until Magnavox released the first-ever home gaming console, the Brown Box, in May of 1972.
Nintendo, another gaming company, came out with their own home console in 1977. The console, Nintendo Color TV Game 6 (titled with a “6” because it was included six games), was only released in Japan. Shortly after, the creators of Pong, Atari, came out with their first home console, titled the Atari Video Computer System. These consoles were iterated into different versions across the early 1980s, ending with version three in 1982.
In 1983, the video game market crashed when Atari released multiple games, only to have them be heavily glitched in its programmatic code or highly unpopular. Warner Communications, the owner of Atari, broke Atari up into three categories and sold them all off one by one, almost shutting the organization down. After Atari was broken up, their competitors (Mattel and Coleco) kept the market down by failing to release anything that would catch the public’s attention. Eventually, they slowly stopped releasing products altogether. Nintendo released the Nintendo NES in the United States in late 1983, saving the market from crashing for good. After the release of the NES, Nintendo came out with the first game to ever have a saved progress file, “The Legend of Zelda,” in 1987. Two years later, Nintendo released the portable Game Boy, their second most popular hit. After these three releases, the gaming market returned to normal.
In the 1990s, the gaming manufacturers introduced the public to 3D games. Sony, a new competitor in the market, released the PlayStation 1 (also known as the PS1) in 1995. The PS1 became the top-selling 32-bit console with its introduction of 3D gaming. Nintendo released the Nintendo 64 in 1996 and it was the last video game console to use cartridges. The company also released the Super Mario 64 game in the same year, taking 3D gaming to the next level with hyper-realistic graphics. These types of games continued in the 2000’s with “Halo” and “Dead or Alive 3” on Microsoft’s Xbox. With the release of Sony’s PlayStation 2, market analysts were not expecting Microsoft, or even Nintendo, would would ever surpass Sony’s next generation console.
When the Xbox 360 was introduced in the winter of 2005, a full year before Sony’s next console, the PlayStation 3, Microsoft gained more popularity with increasingly advanced graphics and realism. The Nintendo Wii came out the same year as the PS3 in 2006 and surpassed both Microsoft and Sony in popularity and sales. However, in the long run, Microsoft dominated the U.S. gaming market with the release of the Kinect (a physical motion sensor) for the Xbox 360, extending the market life of the console.
For a handful of years after the PS3 came out, nothing caught the public’s attention within the video game market. Until 2012, when Nintendo announced the WiiU, a handheld console modeled after the Wii and the Nintendo DS, released back in 2004. Microsoft rolled out the Xbox One shortly after Sony released the PlayStation 4 in 2014, but Sony still came out on top in total sales (even after Microsoft dropped its prices), making Sony’s PS4 the top-selling console of 2014 worldwide.
As we look to the future of gaming, virtual reality is slowly generating interest within the gaming community with products like the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality (VR) headset. The Oculus Rift is set to release in 2016, along with Ustwo’s “stunning video game for virtual reality,” (Stinson) Land’s End. VR gaming environments provide players with full immersion experiences and will drive game developers to create even more realistic worlds with tactical feedback. Video games have always been, and will most likely continue to be, a great source of entertainment and happiness for both children and adults worldwide.
