Video Games

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VIDEO GAMES

VIDEO GAMES encompass a range of electronic games, including coin-operated arcade games, console and cartridge games, various handheld electronics, and games on diskette and CD-ROM ranging in sophistication from simple geometric shapes to virtual reality programs with movielike qualities.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Steve Russell developed the first computer game, Spacewar, in 1962. Ralph Baer, an engineer at defense contractors Sanders and Associates, developed the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey connected to a regular television antenna terminal and was hardwired with twelve games, all variations of Ping-Pong. There was no sound or color, and each of the games required a different plastic overlay for the television screen, but 100,000 were sold by 1972. At the same time, another young entrepreneur, Nolan Bushnell, developed Pong and formed Atari. By 1974, 150,000 versions of home Pong had sold, and two years later there were over seventy companies making clones. The development of the game cartridge made hardwired consoles and tabletop games obsolete. Instead of buying a piece of hardware with a permanent set of games, consumer could buy one piece of hardware, the console, and as many games, or software, as companies could manufacture. By 1980 third-party companies such as Activision began producing games for other companies' consoles.

As PC technology advanced, so did gaming technology. In the early 1980s the market was dominated by Atari, Intellivision, and Coleco Vision, then in 1985 Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), using an eight-bit processor. By the 1990s, Nintendo released the sixteen-bit Super Nintendo and was joined by Sega. With the proliferation of video games in the 1980s, arcades became standard in American malls. Teenagers dropped 20 billion quarters into games by 1981. The video game industry also benefited from the increasing power and decreasing cost of home computers and the Internet. The Internet provides a virtual arcade where players can challenge opponents from all over the world

using the vast array of data transmission methods. A 2000 survey found that 61 percent of players are over age eighteen, with an average age of twenty-eight. The home console market, dominated by Nintendo, Sony, and Sega, has taken advantage of advances in computer technology to increase processor speed to sixty-four-bit and enable consoles to connect to the Internet.

As the popularity of video games grew, controversy developed over the addictiveness of the games and related health problems stemming from hours of stationary play. The violent nature of many games has also become an issue, as graphics technology allowed for increasingly realistic images. In 1993 a rating system, much like the system for rating movies, was put in place.