Spacewar! on a PDP-1 made games a shared campus virus
Video games began on 1950s–60s lab computers as demos and simulations. Spacewar!, written in 1962 for MIT’s PDP-1 by Steve Russell and colleagues, became the first widely shared title, hopping from university machine to university machine before arcades existed.
The ancestors were lab curiosities. A cathode-ray tube amusement device patented in 1947 simulated missile fire on an oscilloscope but was never mass-produced, and Alan Turing and David Champernowne wrote the chess program Turochamp in 1948, too demanding for any computer of the day. Josef Kates exhibited the tic-tac-toe machine Bertie the Brain in 1950, Ferranti showed off Nimrod playing Nim a year later, and Christopher Strachey's checkers for the Ferranti Mark 1 inspired Arthur Samuel's early game-playing AI. In 1952 Sandy Douglas put noughts and crosses on the EDSAC screen as OXO, and in 1958 William Higinbotham built Tennis for Two at Brookhaven, one of the first games made purely for fun.
Spacewar! added features as it spread, from a moving starfield to simulated gravity and external controllers, and inspired programmers to write their own games despite the PDP-1's cost and rarity. Mainframes also hosted Mabel Addis's The Sumerian Game. Meanwhile Ralph Baer, at Sanders Associates, began designing a television game system in 1966 and had the Brown Box prototype running table tennis and volleyball by 1968.
Consumer hardware followed in the early 1970s with the Magnavox Odyssey console and the arcade machines Computer Space and Pong, whose clones fuelled boom-and-bust cycles. Cheap microprocessors and cartridge consoles such as the Atari VCS rode the golden age of Space Invaders and Pac-Man until the 1983 crash in the United States, caused by a glut of poor and copycat games. Japan took the lead, and Nintendo's NES revived the market in 1985, followed by the Nintendo–Sega console war and the Game Boy.
CD-ROMs and Sony's PlayStation squeezed Sega out of hardware; Microsoft launched Xbox in the early 2000s, fearing the PlayStation might displace the PC, while Nintendo bet on novel play with the motion-controlled Wii and later the Switch. Mobile gaming, free-to-play models and a boom in independent studios reshaped the industry in the 2010s.
Source: History of video games
