The Amazing History of Video Games

Video games are older than home computers, older than the internet, and older than almost everyone reading this. The first ones were not made to be sold. They were made by scientists messing about with the enormous machines they had been given for serious work.

The Very Beginning

• 1952 — Alexander S. Douglas builds OXO, a game of noughts and crosses you play against a computer.
• 1958 — the physicist William Higinbotham builds Tennis for Two, where two people knock a ball over a net.
• 1962 — Steve Russell and friends at MIT write Spacewar!, in which two spaceships duel around a star.

The Arcade Era

In the 1970s games left the laboratory and turned up in shops and cafés, in cabinets that ate coins.

• 1972 — Pong, a game of table tennis so simple it needs no explaining, becomes a huge hit.
• 1978 — Space Invaders arrives, and rows of aliens march down the screen a little faster every time you shoot one.
• 1980 — Pac-Man appears, and so does Donkey Kong, which introduces Mario.

Games Come Home

• 1983 — the video game business crashes.
• 1985 — Nintendo releases the NES with Super Mario Bros., and the business recovers.
• 1989 — the Game Boy makes games portable.
• The 1990s — 3D arrives, and Super Mario 64 shows what it is for.

Today

• The 2000s — playing with strangers over the internet becomes normal.
• 2006 — the Wii asks you to stand up and swing your arms.
• Now — headsets put the game around you instead of in front of you.

Put Them In Order

Six of the games and machines above. Which came first?

Look at the gap between the first two and the last one. Tennis for Two and the Wii are both games you play by moving your body — and there are nearly fifty years between them.

What Next?

Every one of these looked like the future when it arrived, and most of them look ancient now. Whatever replaces the headset probably already exists in somebody's workshop, being built for a reason that has nothing to do with games.