History of Video Games

Believe it or not, the history of video games goes back to the 1950s. As a young television engineer, Ralph Baer came up with the idea of playing games on your television set. His bosses scoffed at the idea and it wasn’t until fifteen years later that Ralph would be able to build his video game. Because of that, he is known as the inventor of the first video game.

The first successful video game was Pong. This very simple game consisted of two players (displayed as lines) that batted a ball back and forth by moving up and down. The game could not be called Ping Pong even though that is what it resembled because the name was copyrighted, so the game was called Pong. It could be played at home of the television or out in a store as the first arcade game.

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Pong set off an industry that was instantly filled with other successful games. Tank was the first in the history of video games to store its graphic data on a ROM chip. Rather than lines and a circle, Tank had characters that looked much more realistic. Before they made history with the first personal computer, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak entered the history of video games with their invention of Breakout, produced by Atari. One of the biggest games of the late 70s was Space Invaders. Space Invaders was the first game to break out of the arcade to be found in restaurants and bars.

Atari decided it needed its own space game and created Asteroids. It was so popular it became the biggest seller in the history of video games at that time. The one that really changed this history of video games is Pac-Man. This one video game was so popular, it spawned fifteen sequels.