The Birth of Videogames (1940s–1960s)

• World War 2 (1945). The first digital computers created for code breaking. After WW2, the computer became commercialized (albeit still being too expensive for the average consumer).
• Bertie the Brain (1950) was a tic-tac-toe machine built to demonstrate developments in computer science.
• William Higinbotham designs Tennis for Two in 1958. Higinbotham worked on the team that developed the first nuclear bomb.
• Spacewar! (1962) showcased the improving graphical capacities of early computers like the PDP-1 minicomputer. The PDP-1 cost $120,000 or roughly a million after accounting for inflation. (Try SpaceWar! here)

The Rise of Videogame Arcades and Home Console Gaming(1970s)

• Computer Space (1971) was created as an arcade videogame, drawing heavily from Spacewar!
• The Magnavox Odyssey (1972) was launched as the first console for videogames at home. Likely inspired by the Odyssey’s Tennis game, Atari released the arcade game, Pong (1972).
• Space Invaders (1978) was released by Japanese game development company, Taito, to great acclaim and financial success—grossing over $3.8 billion (around $13 billion today accounting for inflation).

The Globalization of Videogames (early 1980s)

• Pac-Man (1980) was released for arcades, quickly becoming a chart-topping success in both the US as well as Japan. One of the earliest games to employ mechanics that were not associated with war or sports.
• In 1980, Space Invaders was the first arcade game ported to a console system (Atari 2600). The revenue from Atari’s console port of Space Invaders allowed Atari to dominate the market for videogame consoles.
• Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak were notable Atari employees during its heyday.
• Oversaturation of the console market and the marked reduction in game quality resulted in the collapse of the American videogame market collapse in 1983.

The Nintendo and Sega Generation (1980s-1990s)

• The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES, 1983) was released in Japan, with Nintendo implementing strict quality control measures to ensure the quality of third party games produced for their platforms.
• Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985—with the first instance of side-scrolling gameplay allowing players to play seamlessly across multiple scenes.
• The Sega Genesis was released in 1989 (1988 in Japan), beating out NES in its year of release.
• Nintendo released the GameBoy in 1989—dominating the competition (the Atari Lynx & the Sega Game Gear) with its lower price despite having much poorer specifications.

The Arcade Revival and the Rise of Sony (early 1990s)

• The highly successful release of Street Fighter 2 (1991) and growing popularity of competitive arcade fighting games leads to a resurgence in the popularity of arcade gaming.
• Sony enters the market in 1994 with the Sony PlayStation. Sony focused on 3D graphics hardware and its support for PC based game development (prior console games were developed on often unwieldy stand-alone developer kits). The PlayStation was also priced significantly lower than the competition—the announcement for which perhaps goes down in history as one of the shortest game release presentations ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExaAYIKsDBI
• In 1996, Sega attempted to recapture market share with the release of the Saturn Model 2 for $199. Unfortunately, Sony simply lowered their PlayStation price to match it.

The Rise of the PC and the Next Generation of Consoles (late 1990s—2000s)

• The PC based game development kit popularized by Sony resulted in many ports of popular PlayStation games to the PC—for example: Tomb Raider III (1998) and Final Fantasy VII (1997)
• Many of the legacy PC franchises had their start in the late 1990s, such as: Age of Empires (1997), Fallout (1997), Diablo (1997), StarCraft (1998), Baldur’s Gate (1998), Half-Life (1998), EverQuest (1999), Unreal Tournament (1999).
• This continued into the turn of the millennium with games like CounterStrike (2000) and The Sims (2000).
• The Sony PlayStation 2 was released in 2000 and the Nintendo Game Cube and the Microsoft XBox were launched in 2001.
• Access to Broadband internet access propels the online gaming scene forward and becomes a staple for many new franchises such as Call of Duty (2003) and World of Warcraft (2004).

The Birth of New Technologies (2010s-present)

• The iPhone (2007) and the launch of the AppStore (2008) saw the beginnings on smartphone gaming with releases such as Angry Birds (2009)
• New motion control technologies were popularized by the Nintendo Wii (2006) and other competitors like the Xbox Kinect (2010) and the PlayStation Move (2010)
• Augmented reality and geospatial technologies become popularized by games like Pokémon Go (2016)
• The Oculus Rift was launched in 2016, breaking ground in implementing virtual reality for videogames.