Let’s talk about Gaming History
Whether you know it or not, video games have been around for a long, long time. Video games go back further than you may have imagined with the first video games being invented in the early 1960s. This may blow your mind, but video games have basically existed since computers existed. Now these games were not found in homes, that did not begin until the 1970s. This is when Atari became very popular with games such as Pong and Computer Space. The video game Pong is really what made video games popular in homes, but this was basically the only game that existed at the time.
Now video games were not full of a steady increase as there was a large fall off in the industry in 1983. This was caused by a lot of faulty games and video game companies that made for many options, but none of them were very good. Although this is when Nintendo stepped in and took over the American markets which they arguably still have a hold in today. This was in 1985 as well as going into the early 1990s. Not only was Nintendo making video games for home consoles but they also created some of the first handheld consoles with their launch of the Game Boy in the 1990s. At this time Sega also joined the market within the United States and competed with Nintendo in homes across America.
Going into the late 1990s and early 2000s this is when the companies we more popularly know today joined the market. It was at this time that PlayStation and Xbox came into the market with their first versions of their now popular home consoles. Starting with the simple PlayStation 1 and Xbox consoles they were large steps in the right direction when it came to video games in the homes of America.
Following these booms, Nintendo stepped up their game to create the Wii console which was one of the first ones that relied on motion sensing and getting people more active in their homes.
Both PlayStation and Xbox tried to recreate this technology, but it was safe to say that Wii dominated the market in this niche.
Now video games have started to move towards cell phones since they can be played anywhere and many games are free to play. You can be anywhere in the world now and play your favorite games! Nintendo has still tried to compete in this spectrum in recent years with the new Nintendo Switch. It does cost players a price but it is very versatile and is a lot of fun to play.
Recently both PlayStation and Xbox have come out with brand new versions of their consoles which seem to be the future of video games. These consoles are centered around extra fast loading time and near picture perfect graphics. They have only come out within the past year or so, so the potential is still high with these consoles. We look forward to seeing what the future of gaming holds. To demonstrate the rise of popularity of video games throughout history we have included a data chart below.
References and Citations
