Arcade Games
1900 – Skee ball was deemed the original arcade game and was created in 1909 by J.D Estes in Philadelphia.1930 – The very first coin operated arcade game was named baffle ball and was created in Chicago. In 1933 the pinball machine was created and was known as a game of “Chance”.
1970 – In the 1970’s the Galaxy Game was created and was the very first coin operated video game, The galaxy game was first installed in the university of Stanford in September, Then the following November began the mass production of Arcade video games. 1972 Pong was created to rival The Galaxy game. Pong was developed by Atari and sold more than 35,000 units. From 1972-1984 15 companies had begun development on their own arcade video games. 1978 Taito Corp releases Space Invaders this arcade took a year in development and become one of the most popular arcade games of all time.
1980 – 1980, Pac-Man was released and sold over 350,000 Arcade Cabinets. This gained over 2 billion in revenue. The following year Donkey Kong was released and was one of the first Platform games and was also only the second game ever to include multiple levels. 1985 the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was released, The following year saw the release of the Sega Master System. 1989 saw the introduction of the Sega Genesis 16 Bit console, Followed by the Nintendo Super NES.
1990- 1990 Saw the rise of arcade fighting games due to the release of Capcom’s Mortal Kombat. 1999 Konami released Dance Dance Revolution which led to a 260% increase in net income.
2000 – Sega Flight simulator Strike fighter was released, 2005 Nintendo used built in camera’s to snap a photo to be used in the game Mario cart arcade GP. 2007 Deal or No deal was released using actual clips from the show. 2009 Konami and Activison created Guitar Hero Arcade.
Consoles
1970 - Olan Bushnell and Ted Dabney (future founders of Atari) begin their attempt to create an arcade version of Spacewar, calling it Computer Space. Computer Space becomes first video arcade game ever released. 1500 games are distributed. Public consensus is that it is too difficult to play. Magnavox's Odyssey, the first home video game system, is showcased at a convention in Burlingame, CA, and is released to the public later that year. The first game created by Atari is Pong. Ping-Pong, the original name, is already copyrighted, so the makers name it Pong after the sound of a ball hitting the paddle. Atari introduces its first cartridge-based home video system called the Video Computer System which later becomes known as the Atari 2600. It retails for $249.95. Atari develops a handheld console that displays holograms. Asteroids is the first game to allow high scorers to enter three character initials to be stored in the machine.1980 - 1980, Activision becomes the first third-party video game vendor. The company is created by Atari programmers who want to receive individual credit for creating Atari's video games. Defender, the the screen to inform users of the surroundings since first game incorporating a "virtual world" is introduced. The game uses a "radar" scope at the top of the screen is too small to display all of the action. The Commodore 64 is introduced. It is the most powerful video-game console to date and the least expensive.
1990 - Super NES is released in the U.S. by Nintendo for $249.95. Sony brings the PlayStation to the U.S. and sells the console for $299. Nintendo releases the Nintendo 64 in Japan (it's released in the U.S. in 1996). Tiger introduces a multipurpose handheld console to compete with the Game Boy. Called game.com, it features games, an address book, calculator, and stylus for touchscreen capability. It also connects to a PC modem for access to email. Sega introduces the Dreamcast in Japan. This console operates on Microsoft Windows CE which will allow for easier conversions between Dreamcast and PC games.
2000 - Sony's PlayStation 2 launches in the U.S. for $299.99 and is sold out by early morning. The Sims is released, and quickly becomes a hit. It eventually (in 2002) surpasses Myst as the best-selling PC game ever. Microsoft and Nintendo introduce their next-generation systems within days of each other. Microsoft claims its Xbox offers "the most powerful game experiences ever." The product (estimated retail price of $299.99) comes with a built-in hard drive and Ethernet port. Nintendo's GameCube (suggested retail price of $199.95) delivers new forms of interactive gaming for players and an easier development environment for game creators. Sega announces that it will no longer manufacture hardware.
2010 – in 2011 ‘Skylanders Spyro’s adventure’ became the first popular augmented reality game in which players could use plastic figures on a device t put them into the video game.
Television Games
1950 - 1953, A children's television programme called Winky Dink and You, begins the move towards interactive TV. Kids in the US buy a special transparent sheet to place over the screen and, using ordinary crayons, help the show's characters draw things like pathways or tools. The series is discontinued because children begin drawing directly on the TV screen. See www.toonarific. com/w/WinkyDink.html.
1980 - The first arcade laserdisc video game was Sega's Astron Belt, an early third-person space combat rail shooter featuring live-action full-motion video footage (largely borrowed from a Japanese science fiction film) over which the player/enemy ships and laser fire are superimposed. Developed in 1982, it was first unveiled at the 1982 AMOA show in Chicago and released the following year. However, the game that popularized the genre in the United States was Dragon's Lair, animated by Don Bluth and released by Cinematronics shortly after. Around the same time, the laserdisc games Bega's Battle and Cliff Hanger were also released. In the late 1980s, American Laser Games started to produce a wide variety of live-action light gun laserdisc video games, which played much like the early cartoon games, but used a light gun instead of a joystick to affect the action. Meanwhile, Digital Pictures started to produce a variety of interactive movies for home consoles. When CD-ROMs were embedded in home computers, games with live action and full motion video featuring actors were considered cutting-edge, and some interactive movies were made. Some notable ones (which, unlike Dragon's Lair, are considered adventure games) are Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within, Voyeur, Star Trek: Klingon, Star Trek: Borg, Ripper, Black Dahlia, The X-Files Game, Phantasmagoria, Bad Day on the Midway and The Dark Eye. Others in the action genre are Brain Dead 13 and Star Wars: Rebel Assault.
1990 - In 1994, Visiware has established itself as the authority in creating custom TV user experiences for gaming and interactive TV. With established partners through out the world our portfolio and expertise allows us to offer design, development and integration with multiple technologies and multiple platforms. With our end user focus and team of experienced game editors and interactive TV specialists we are on the forefront of technology and use case evolution, Visiware provides a complete end to end solution for IPTV, cable, satellite, and web operators. 1998 : Testing of a new interactive games channel on France Telecom’s cable network in Bordeaux.
2000 - Launch in France the 1st interactive game channel for the family, LudiTV (later renamed Playin’TV). 2001, Launch of Playin’TV in the USA. 2002 : Creation of a joint venture with the group Fox Kids Europe and launch of the interactive game channel for kids, Fox Kids Play. 2003, Launch the interactive game channel, Playin’Star (Playin’Casino in certain countries) 2006, Launch of Playin’TV Mobile, Club Playin’TV, Internet flash portal and the Triple Play offer. Visiware factory is now launching its games on 550 devices (300 mobiles + 250 TV + internet) plus the back office to support it all. 2011, Visiware launches « PlayAlong »: a unique massive multi-player dual screen international platform, already deployed in 10 countries with 700 shows produced in 6 months. Playin'TV, the most broadcasted interactive game channel in the world. Playin'TV is a game channel for the entirety family to enjoy whatever your age. It is unique in the worldwide audiovisual landscape and stands out as the biggest success story in the interactive television market. A team of 100 developers work daily to create new innovative and high performance games.
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1960 - In 1961, a group of students at MIT, including Steve Russell, programmed a game called Spacewar! On the then-new DEC PDP-1.This game was soon distributed with new DEC computers and traded throughout primitive cyberspace. Presented at the MIT Science Open House in 1962 in 1966, Ralph Baer (then at Sanders Associates) created a simple video game called Chase that could be displayed on a standard television set. Baer continued development, and in 1968 he had a prototype that could play several different games, including versions of table tennis and target shooting. Under Baer, Bill Harrison developed the light gun and, with Bill Rusch, created video games in 1967.
1970 - Before the mid-1970s, games typically communicated to the player on paper, using teletype machines or a line printer, at speeds ranging from 10 to 30 characters per second with a rat-a-tat-tat sound as a metal ball or belt with characters was pressed against the paper through an inked ribbon by a hammer. By 1975 many universities had discarded these terminals for CRT screens, which could display thirty lines of text in a few seconds instead of the minute or more that printing on paper required. This led to the development of a series of games that drew "graphics" on the screen. Daglow, then a student at Claremont Graduate University, wrote the first Computer Role Playing Game on PDP-10 mainframes, Dungeon. The game was an unlicensed implementation of the new role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Although displayed in text, it was the first game to use line of sight graphics, top-down dungeon maps that showed the areas that the party had seen or could see, allowing for light or darkness, the different vision of elves and dwarves, etc. Star Trek was created, probably by Mike Mayfield on a Sigma 7 minicomputer at MIT. This is the best-known and most widely played of the 1970s' Star Trek titles, and was played on a series of small "maps" of galactic sectors printed on paper or on the screen. It was the first major game to be ported across hardware platforms by students. Gregory Yob wrote Hunt the Wumpus for the PDP-10, a hide-and-seek game, though it could be considered the first text adventure. Both Maze War (on the Imlacs PDS-1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California) Will Crowther wrote the first text adventure game as we would recognize it today, Adventure (originally called ADVENT, and later Colossal Cave). It was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. The player controls the game through simple sentence-like text commands and receives descriptive text as output.
1980 - Don Daglow wrote the first Computer Baseball game on a PDP-10 mainframe at Pomona College. Players could manage individual games or simulate an entire season. Daglow went on to team with programmer Eddie Dombrower to design Earl Weaver Baseball, published by Electronic Arts in 1987. Home computer games became popular following the video game crash of 1983, particularly in Europe, leading to the era of the "bedroom coder".
1990 - Microsoft bundles a video game version of the classic card game solitaire with Windows 3.0. Millions of users who would not normally pick up a game console find they enjoy playing computer games. Solitaire becomes one of the most popular electronic games ever and provides a gaming model for quick, easy-to-play, casual games like Bejeweled.
2000 - Valve energizes PC gaming with its release of Steam. The digital distribution platform allows players to download, play, and update games.
PC Games
1950 - William Higinbotham, who, in 1958, created a game called Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope to entertain visitors at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Unlike Pong and similar early games, Tennis for Two shows a simplified tennis court from the side. The ball is affected by gravity and must be played over the net. The game is played with two bulky controllers each equipped with a knob for trajectory and a button for firing the ball over the net. Tennis for Two was exhibited for two seasons before its dismantling in 1959. Many of the earliest computer games ran on university mainframes in the United States and were developed by individual users who programmed them in their idle time. However, the limited accessibility of early computer hardware meant that these games were few and easily forgotten by posterity.1960 - In 1961, a group of students at MIT, including Steve Russell, programmed a game called Spacewar! On the then-new DEC PDP-1.This game was soon distributed with new DEC computers and traded throughout primitive cyberspace. Presented at the MIT Science Open House in 1962 in 1966, Ralph Baer (then at Sanders Associates) created a simple video game called Chase that could be displayed on a standard television set. Baer continued development, and in 1968 he had a prototype that could play several different games, including versions of table tennis and target shooting. Under Baer, Bill Harrison developed the light gun and, with Bill Rusch, created video games in 1967.
1970 - Before the mid-1970s, games typically communicated to the player on paper, using teletype machines or a line printer, at speeds ranging from 10 to 30 characters per second with a rat-a-tat-tat sound as a metal ball or belt with characters was pressed against the paper through an inked ribbon by a hammer. By 1975 many universities had discarded these terminals for CRT screens, which could display thirty lines of text in a few seconds instead of the minute or more that printing on paper required. This led to the development of a series of games that drew "graphics" on the screen. Daglow, then a student at Claremont Graduate University, wrote the first Computer Role Playing Game on PDP-10 mainframes, Dungeon. The game was an unlicensed implementation of the new role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Although displayed in text, it was the first game to use line of sight graphics, top-down dungeon maps that showed the areas that the party had seen or could see, allowing for light or darkness, the different vision of elves and dwarves, etc. Star Trek was created, probably by Mike Mayfield on a Sigma 7 minicomputer at MIT. This is the best-known and most widely played of the 1970s' Star Trek titles, and was played on a series of small "maps" of galactic sectors printed on paper or on the screen. It was the first major game to be ported across hardware platforms by students. Gregory Yob wrote Hunt the Wumpus for the PDP-10, a hide-and-seek game, though it could be considered the first text adventure. Both Maze War (on the Imlacs PDS-1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California) Will Crowther wrote the first text adventure game as we would recognize it today, Adventure (originally called ADVENT, and later Colossal Cave). It was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. The player controls the game through simple sentence-like text commands and receives descriptive text as output.
1980 - Don Daglow wrote the first Computer Baseball game on a PDP-10 mainframe at Pomona College. Players could manage individual games or simulate an entire season. Daglow went on to team with programmer Eddie Dombrower to design Earl Weaver Baseball, published by Electronic Arts in 1987. Home computer games became popular following the video game crash of 1983, particularly in Europe, leading to the era of the "bedroom coder".
1990 - Microsoft bundles a video game version of the classic card game solitaire with Windows 3.0. Millions of users who would not normally pick up a game console find they enjoy playing computer games. Solitaire becomes one of the most popular electronic games ever and provides a gaming model for quick, easy-to-play, casual games like Bejeweled.
2000 - Valve energizes PC gaming with its release of Steam. The digital distribution platform allows players to download, play, and update games.
Mobile Games
In the early 2000s, mobile games gained popularity in Japan's mobile phone culture, years before the United States or Europe. By 2003, a wide variety of mobile games were available on Japanese phones, ranging from puzzle games and virtual pet titles that utilized camera phone and fingerprint scanner technologies to 3D games with exceptionally high quality graphics. Older arcade-style games became particularly popular on mobile phones, which were an ideal platform for arcade-style games designed for shorter play sessions. Namco began to introduce mobile gaming culture to Europe in 2003.[6] In the present day, Japan is the world's largest market for mobile games.[7] The Japanese gaming market today is becoming increasingly dominated by mobile games, which generated $5.1 billion in 2013, more than traditional console games in the country
Nokia tried to create its own mobile gaming platform with the N-Gage in 2003 but this effort failed mainly because, at the time, the convergence of a cell phone and a handheld gaming platform did not mix. Many users complained of having to talk on the phone 'taco-style' by tilting it sideways in order to speak and hear. There were hardware issues as well, and though some quality games came out, support for the platform was anaemic.
In Europe, the downloadable content was introduced by the “Les Games” portal from Orange France, run by In-fusio, in 2000. Before the mobile games were usually commissioned directly by phone manufacturers, but now also mobile operators started to act as distributors of games. As the operators were not keen on handling potentially hundreds of relationships with one- or two-person developers, mobile aggregators and publishers started to act as a middleman between operators and developers that kept the revenue share of the developers of minimal.
The launch of the Apple App Store in 2008 radically changed the market. First of all, it widened consumers' opportunities to choose where to download apps; the application store on the device, operator’s store or third party stores via the open internet, such as GetJar and Handango. The Apple users, however, can only use the Apple App Store, since Apple forbids the distribution of apps via any other distribution channel. Secondly, mobile developers can upload applications directly to the App Store without the typically lengthy negotiations with publishers and operators, which increased their revenue share and made mobile game development more profitable. Thirdly, the tight integration of the App Store with the device itself led many consumers to try out apps, and the games market received a considerable boost.[5]
Consequently, the first commercially highly successful mobile games emerged soon after the launch of the App Store. The initial version of Angry Birds developed by Rovio Entertainment, for example, was released on iOS in December 2009.
Today, smart phone and tablet games have come a very long way. Their graphics are about the same as you would expect on a 6th or 5th generation game console (which may not seem like a very big improvement yet is considered one because the game is being played on a cell phone).[citation needed]
In Europe, the downloadable content was introduced by the “Les Games” portal from Orange France, run by In-fusio, in 2000. Before the mobile games were usually commissioned directly by phone manufacturers, but now also mobile operators started to act as distributors of games. As the operators were not keen on handling potentially hundreds of relationships with one- or two-person developers, mobile aggregators and publishers started to act as a middleman between operators and developers that kept the revenue share of the developers of minimal.
The launch of the Apple App Store in 2008 radically changed the market. First of all, it widened consumers' opportunities to choose where to download apps; the application store on the device, operator’s store or third party stores via the open internet, such as GetJar and Handango. The Apple users, however, can only use the Apple App Store, since Apple forbids the distribution of apps via any other distribution channel. Secondly, mobile developers can upload applications directly to the App Store without the typically lengthy negotiations with publishers and operators, which increased their revenue share and made mobile game development more profitable. Thirdly, the tight integration of the App Store with the device itself led many consumers to try out apps, and the games market received a considerable boost.[5]
Consequently, the first commercially highly successful mobile games emerged soon after the launch of the App Store. The initial version of Angry Birds developed by Rovio Entertainment, for example, was released on iOS in December 2009.
Today, smart phone and tablet games have come a very long way. Their graphics are about the same as you would expect on a 6th or 5th generation game console (which may not seem like a very big improvement yet is considered one because the game is being played on a cell phone).[citation needed]
