The average player thought so, too, as the game's manufacturer, Nutting Associates, was disappointed by the relatively small number of units sold – somewhere in the region of 1,500.īushnell and Dabney parted ways with Nutting the following year, renamed their business Atari, and struck a deal with Bally, makers of pinball machines, to develop a new arcade machine. It looks a lot better than one might expect for the age, but the gameplay (rotate your ship, use a thruster, fire off one missile at a time) is pretty clunky. There are plenty of online emulators for the original hardware – and the majority of the game images you'll see in this article are from such things – but watching footage from an actual arcade machine is perhaps the best way to experience the game in the same manner that the public did, over 50 years ago. With the wonder of NASA's Apollo missions still fresh in the minds of the public, it should come as no surprise that the game involves flying a rocket about space and blowing up UFOs. While definitely not the first-ever video game, it was certainly the first commercial one. Electrical engineers Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created their own version of Spacewar!, called Computer Space (1971), designing it to run on custom hardware, exclusively for arcades (or any establishment that could afford one). To really begin our journey across five decades of video games, we must head to the arcade halls and homes of America, circa the early 70s. Spacewar! (1962) certainly was one, but given that it only ran on DEC's hugely expensive PDP-1 computer, that wasn't for the masses either. One-off creations, such as Bertie the Brain (1950), were created as engineering promotions, and it arguably wasn't a video game. Put your devices on mute, grab a favorite beverage, sit back, and enjoy! Humble beginningsīecause we're looking at video games for the mass consumer, we can ignore but still pay our respects to the efforts in the 1950s and 60s. While we can't cover every title released, as even just the best-selling ones would fill several articles, there will be some great ones to reminisce over. Join us as we take a long stroll through 5 decades of video games, reviewing some of the highs and lows, and other key moments in between. Born in the minds of creative and curious engineers, games have grown from mere electronic curiosities into a global industry worth billions of dollars.īlurring the lines between art and interactive entertainment, video games create emotions and experiences like no other product. For a little over 50 years, video games have been a significant part of popular culture, for millions of people around the world.
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