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The history of video games spans a period of time between the invention of the first electronic games and today, covering many inventions and developments. Video gaming reached mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public.
Possibly the first computer game to be sold commercially was Microchess in 1976 by Peter R. Jennings, who also started possibly the first computer game publishing company, Microware. [46] Soon a small cottage industry was formed, with amateur programmers selling disks in plastic bags put on the shelves of local shops or sent through the mail. [45]
Under some definitions Tennis for Two is considered the first video game, as while it did not include any technological innovations over prior games, it was the first computer game to be created purely as an entertainment product rather than for academic research or commercial technology promotion.
The first of these remote display games was Xtrek. Based on a PLATO system game, Empire, Xtrek is a 2D multiplayer space battle game loosely set in the Star Trek universe. This game could be played across the Internet, probably the first graphical game that could do so, a few months ahead of the X version of Maze War. Importantly, however, the ...
Bertie the Brain was a video game version of tic-tac-toe, built by Dr. Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. [1] Kates had previously worked at Rogers Majestic designing and building radar tubes during World War II, then after the war pursued graduate studies in the computing center at the University of Toronto while continuing to work at Rogers Majestic. [2]
Through the 1950s and 1960s the majority of early computer games ran on university mainframe computers in the United States. Beginning in 1971, video arcade games began to be offered to the public for play. The first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was released in 1972. [86] [87]
In 1974, Mazewar introduced the first graphic virtual world, providing a first-person perspective view of a maze in which players roamed around shooting at each other. It was also the first networked game, in which players at different computers could visually interact in a virtual space.
It is recognized as the world's first first-person racing video game or the first three-dimensional racing video game. [4] Atari, Inc. releases Hi-way, which was Atari's first game to use a cockpit cabinet. [5] Atari, Inc. releases Crash 'N Score, Gameplay is an early example of a simulation of a demolition derby.