Video games now out-earn music and film combined
By 2020 the global games market took in an estimated 159 billion dollars—about three times music and four times film in 2019. The medium began as lab curiosities and radar-inspired spots on cathode tubes before arcade cabinets and living-room Odyssey boxes.
A video game is an electronic game whose interface drives visual feedback on a screen, headset, or similar display, usually with sound and sometimes haptics. Platforms span arcades, consoles, PCs, phones, VR, and cloud streaming; genres sort play styles and audiences. Interactivity that changes what you see is part of what separates games from board titles that merely play clips between turns.
Early milestones include a 1947 cathode-ray amusement patent by Goldsmith and Mann, 1950s mainframe experiments such as OXO and Tennis for Two, and 1962's Spacewar! on a PDP-1. Ralph Baer's Brown Box became Magnavox's 1972 Odyssey; Bushnell and Dabney's Computer Space hit arcades in 1971, then Atari's Pong conquered cabinets and, by Christmas 1975, homes. A North American market crash in 1983 followed oversupply; Japanese console makers and PC platforms rebuilt the industry, while indie scenes later filled gaps left by costly AAA production.
Naming was unsettled. Ed Adlum recalled shifting from awkward "TV games" to "video games," a phrase BusinessWeek printed by November 1973 and Bushnell used in a 1972 letter. Walking simulators and empathy games without classic win states still count for many because they offer interactive worlds. Hardware sales chase ever better performance, making games a driver of electronics design.
Baer and Bushnell both earn "father of video games" tags for television play and commercial arcades. From coin-op golden ages to mobile taps, the through-line is player agency rendered as light—and a business that now outweighs older entertainment giants.
Source: Video game
