It may seem like video games have
been around forever, but less than a century ago, if you told
someone that there would be a way to play interactive games on
your TV screen, they would look at you like you just escaped from
the local looney bin? Thats right, there was a time....WITHOUT VIDEO GAMES! Can you imagine the dangerous levels of productivity!
Anyway, in 1952, a Cambridge University professor named A.S.
Douglas created the world's first video game: OXO. This game
was a tic-tac-toe simulator where the player plays against the
computer. 6 years later-in 1958, William Higinbotham created the world's second
video game -Tennis for Two. The game used an oscillioscope
and an analog computer. The game was a tennis simulator
that was created at Brookhaven National Laboratory to entertain
vistiors. The first arcade game, Pong, which was created
by Atari in 1972, was very similar to Tennis for Two. The
main differences between the two games was that they used
different angles, and Pong was much more widely
distributed. Also, the first home video game console-the
Magnavox Odyssey-was released that same year. This marked the
beginning of the first generation of video game consoles-the generation featuring
the early consoles, sometimes referred to as "pong consoles", as the games were in the style of pong.
Also, in 1976, the first second
generation gaming console-the
Fairchild Video Entertainment System
(later renamed Fairchild Channel F),
was released to the public. Little
did anyone know how much video games would evolve
over the next 41 years...
