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BRIEF HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES

For a more detailed history of video games visit Wikipedia's article
Wikipedia - Video game history

It was the year 1947 of the 20th century. It is believed that it was then when the first video game was designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann for playing on a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). Still, many people attribute William Higinbotham with the invention of video games when in 1958, he created a game called "Tennis for Two".

It wasn't until 1972 when the first video game console, the "Magnavox Odyssey" was released. However, it wasn't until 1975 when Atari's home version of "Pong" was released and video games finaly took off.

The "Golden Age" of arcade games reached it's full steam in the 1980's. The 1980's brought innovative and genre-defining games early on. In 1980, Pac-Man became the first video game character to achieve widespread popularity in his own right.

Video games suffered for sometime in North America during the 1980's, but it all changed when in 1985 Nintendo released their new console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Along with the NES came the "Super Mario Bros" video game, which all of a sudden became a success.

During the early 1990's, Nintendo and Sega had established themself as the two dominant video games companies. Nintendo's "Super NES" (1991) and Sega's "Genesis" (1989) were the most popular consoles during the early days of the decade. Then in the mid 1990's Sega released the "Saturn", Nintendo released the "Nintendo 64", and Sony made their debut into the scene with their first console, the "Playstation".

From there on video games have continued to grow and getting better everyday. In the present, the latest generation of consoles have achieved a level of realism never thought posible. One can only wonder how video games will be in years to come!

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Well, just wanted to share video game history with you all, I think is very important to understand from where and how far video games have come. Be sure to check out the full article, it's quite interesting.

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PS3 tag: TipoDLuffy

"...quite possibly the greatest game ever made"

Hey, another videogame history buff. You've probably heard of it, but there is a great book about this called "Supercade." It talks a lot about arcade games and only goes up to the NES, but it is really detailed.

This is a cool thing to research...

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Status:
FF6 -- Finished! Yeah!
FF7 -- Finished (easily, and without KOtR)
FF8 -- End of Disc 3
Secret of Evermore--Leveling up for Salabog

"Go sit over there. Put your seatbelt on."--Squall

Oh there's some things that happened in between 'tennis for two' and Pong that the article appears to skip, such as a Space Wars for one (no relation to a certain set of movies, in fact it predates it by a decade or so).

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Arts

Farts

Twarts

Quote (Narratorway @ 12th November 2006 02:58)

Oh there's some things that happened in between 'tennis for two' and Pong that the article appears to skip, such as a Space Wars for one (no relation to a certain set of movies, in fact it predates it by a decade or so).

You mean Spacewar!, which is often attributed as the first major video game. Tennis for Two was an experiment that came off as a game, while Spacewar! was the first video game that people (namely computer programmers at MIT during the 1960s) actually played.

And yeah, that Wikipedia article is solid, but your synopsis is extremely lacking. There is a surpisingly high amount of quality video game literature you can find online, and sometimes even at a library or bookstore, and then there are compilation articles like the Wiki. But enough chatter - why does this topic exist? To enlighten us that video games do in fact have a history before Final Fantasy hit the Famicom twenty years ago? Thanks for telling us what we already know?

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this is a blog mostly about comics and videogames
END SPOILER

Wow i never knew some of this i never knew videogames were so old!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15734058/

I've seen this show on CNBC a couple of times.