Fiorella La Guardia

Important enough that he has an airport named after him, Fiorella La Guardia (1882-1947) served as the mayor of New York from 1934-1945. In 1942, Mayor La Guardia made a push to ban pinballs as part of his campaign to address problematic gambling in New York. This led to a citywide ban on pinball machines, with remaining contraband machines being altered to rebrand them as games of skill rather than games of chance. One of these alterations was the addition of the flippers that most nowadays would consider central to the game of pinball. Prior to 1947, the player’s only real interaction with the machine was to drop in money and launch the ball. The ball would then fall randomly down different paths—the outcome of which could and was used as something to bet on. With his effective takedown of pinball in its original form, La Guardia paved the way for a new version of pinball that distinguished games from gambling through the implementation of a new mechanic; in this one case at least.

Ralph Baer

While we often credit Nolan Bushnell as the father of videogames due to his founding of Atari in 1972 and his extensive contributions to the development of the early videogame arcade scene, Ralph Baer can be thought of as the father of home videogaming. In 1967, Baer began prototyping a method of interfacing with commercial televisions (which were becoming more and more affordable at the time). The technology that he created would go on to become the Magnavox Odyssey—the first home console (1972).

Please watch this video.

Shigeru Miyamoto

Miyamoto Shigeru is one of the undeniable greats among the pantheon of legendary videogame developers and designers. A lifelong developer of toys and games, Miyamoto created many of the character franchises—such as Donkey Kong (1981) and Mario (1981), the Legend of Zelda (1986), and many others that are still receiving updates and reboots to this day. While it is difficult to think of Nintendo without Miyamoto, since he began working at Nintendo in 1977 Miyamoto has never been its boss.

Please watch the following video from Vox.

For more information, read this article by The New Yorker

The Korean Videogames Industry

Alongside the many individuals whose work intentionally and/or unintentionally advanced the technology and culture surrounding videogames, various interesting social, political, and economic factors have played important roles in the present state of the field. While South Korea has become widely recognized for its avid gaming culture (with around 20,000 gaming cafes around the country; Statista, 2022), widely popular MMORPGs (e.g., Black Desert Online; Maplestory; Tera), and renowned esports professionals (e.g., Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok; Lim “BoxeR” Yo-hwan; Cho “Maru” Sung-choo) are now eidely recognized and influential. This was not nearly the case in 1996.

Then everything changed when the 1997 International Monetary Fund financial crisis occurred. The 1997 financial crisis is generally accepted to be the worst economic recession in South Korea’s history (Jin, 2020). The recession led to two important factors: the South Korean government pouring money into the tech sector to boost the country’s economy; and a surge of penniless, depressed, and unemployed Koreans with a lot of time but little money on their hands. Fortunately, while they were not able to buy games of their own at the time, many of these people could still afford to enjoy videogames at internet cafes (known in South Korea as PC Bangs) where the hourly rates for computer use were less than US$1—significantly cheaper than other entertainment options (Jin, 2020). The government’s push to improve the South Korean tech center led to widespread availability of high-speed internet and funds for videogame startups. Coupled with the burgeoning esports and videogaming culture, South Korea quickly rose in prominence as a powerhouse not only for esports athletes but game developers as well.

Hideo Kojima

The second-most influential designer in Japan (after Miyamoto), Kojima designed and developed the popular Metal Gear game for the publisher Konami. Departing Konami to found the company Kojima Productions, he was praised for new designs that imitated real-life topical events. The Metal Gear franchise spawned a new genre (the so-called “stealth genre”) of games which has led to the modern generation of videogames

Gabe Newell

Along with co-worker Mike Harrington, Gabe Newell left MicroSoft to create the company Valve. In time he would develop the software distribution platform Steam, using profits from his work on Half-Life 2 to fund the implementation of a new method of marketing videogames. Steam is currently the largest digital distribution platform for PC games; by 2017 game sales through Steam totaled approximately $4.3 billion. ‘Nuff said.

Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle

In 1978, two young students at Essex University (UK) created the first Multi-User Dungeon, a text-based adventure game that allowed for multiple players to engage simultaneously. While there were other fantasy adventure games available before this (notably the Colossal Cave Adventure in 1975 and Zork in 1977 [developed by a group of MIT students]), all based on the popular Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, these had been single player designs. Trubshaw and Bartle ran MUD1 over the university’s computer network, which could be accessed by other British universities. Gamers had never before be able to enjoy a “shared” world, and in short order MUD1 became the basis for the proliferation of multi-player games that now dominate the videogame industry.

Alexey Pajitnov

Without Tetris, the greatest of puzzle videogames created in 1985 by the Russian Alexey Pajitnov, millions of casual players of “simple” videogames would have instead turned to other pastimes. After a lengthy period when Tetris was published for the global market by Nintendo—being a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the designer did not own the copyright—publishing rights finally reverted to Pajitnov in 1996, who founded a new company to expand the franchise. Declared by some to be “one of the most addictive games ever designed,” by 2010 Tetris had sold over 170 million copies, roughly 100 million for cell phones (where it has helped us pass many a boring hour in offices and waiting rooms).

ESRB

The bloody action of games such as Mortal Kombat and Doom, and the excesses of tasteless games such the infamous Custer’s Revenge or Leisure Suit Larry, caused an uproar among parents and politicians. In response to the outcry, in 1994 the Entertainment Software Association established the Entertainment Software Rating Board (the ESRB) to indicate appropriate age-ranges for players based on criteria such as violence, nudity and simulated sex, alcohol and drug use for each videogame. It quickly became the nigh-universal standard by which the content of games is judged by the public. In the minds of many worried parents and pundits who had not been raised in the videogame culture, the ESRB made gaming “safe” and opened the door for the subsequent explosion in videogaming’s popularity in the 1990s.