Computer programmers were not the first to create games. Physicist William Higginbotham created Tennis for Two on a university computer in 1958 as a fun diversion.

The game was so popular that teens were lined up to play it. This proved that gaming could have a real impact on society.

The First Video Game

From playing tic-tac-toe on a cathode ray tube to battling dragons and rescuing princesses, video games have shaped our lives. The multibillion-dollar industry is here to stay, and while it’s easy to take for granted the sweeping impact of this phenomenon, it wasn’t always so.

The first video games are considered to have been created in the late 1940s and early 1950s. One of the earliest was Bertie the Brain, created by inventor Josef Kates in 1950. This giant machine, which was four meters tall, played a variation of Tic-Tac-Toe and entertained visitors to the Canadian National Exhibition for weeks.

However, the modern video game industry really began with the creation of Pong by Atari in 1972. This electronic table tennis game was the first to be commercially successful and fueled a massive growth in the gaming industry.

By the 1980s, video games were peaking in popularity. Many of the most popular games from this period, such as Space Invaders and Mystery House, are still beloved today. The era also saw the birth of the personal computer and the first home consoles from companies like Commodore and Nintendo.

Not many people know that the man who practically invented what we call a video game was a physicist working on nuclear weapons. William Higinbotham, who is sometimes referred to as the “Father of Video Games,” created Tennis for Two on an analog computer and connected oscilloscope screen in 1958 for the Brookhaven National Laboratory open house.

The Arcade

The arcade is where video games went public, reaching millions of people and sparking a massive industry. In the late 1970s, arcade machines like the alien-fighting Space Invaders and the chomp-happy Pac-Man became mega-hits and popularized many features that are now standard in video games.

The first arcade video games used electronic circuitry to take input from a controller and display it on an electronic monitor or screen. The earliest arcade games were automated versions of popular staffed carnival midway games such as Skee-Ball and Whac-A-Mole.

By the early 1980s, arcades had become crowded with many different types of video games. These included Pong, a variation on the board game Computer Space developed by Magnavox in 1972. Other arcade games featured a mixture of competition and action, such as the fighting games Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and the driving games Ridge Racer and Daytona USA.

In addition to the proliferation of video games in arcades, companies began selling home gaming systems. The first, the primitive Odyssey console, had 28 arcade-accurate games, including Computer Space and Pong. Later, companies released consoles that could play games with 3D graphics and force feedback aircraft joysticks and racing wheel/pedal kits for greater realism.

The growth of the console industry drew players away from arcades, leading to a decline in the popularity of video games overall and contributing to the industry’s crash in 1983. The 1990s saw a consolidation of game publishers, higher production budgets for console games and new game formats.

The Home Console

The home console grew out of the early 1970s, when game companies designed systems that plugged into television sets and allowed people to play games in the comfort of their own homes. While most of these early systems were failures, one — the Magnavox Odyssey(r) with its Pong(tm) games — gained enormous popularity and gave rise to the industry.

Nintendo, a Japanese company that began as a card and novelty producer, entered the console market in 1984 with the Famicom(tm) system, which had 8-bit graphics and improved colors and sound over its predecessors. The company wisely marketed the console with its own line of popular games, and it held third parties to strict quality standards for NES-compatible software. This approach was the opposite of Atari’s mistake, which flooded the market with low-priced games like its infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (which many consider the worst video game ever).

The success of the NES and later systems such as Sega’s Genesis and Sony’s PlayStation helped the gaming industry grow into a multi-billion dollar business. The consoles’ use of CD-ROMs, which allowed a great deal more information to be stored on each disc than the traditional cartridges, also revolutionized the industry. The release of the PlayStation brought high-quality, 3D graphics to the home and led to such well-known franchises as Final Fantasy and Silent Hill.

The Handheld

The handheld video game was a portable, self-contained game console with a built-in screen and control mechanisms. The earliest handheld games were as simple as Mattel’s Auto Race or Electronic Football, which used red-LED screens and involved pressing buttons to maneuver a car or quarterback icon on the screen while avoiding objects (represented by less bright dots) that appeared in front of the player.

The 1980s marked a turning point for gaming. As the industry became increasingly popular, a number of important innovations occurred. Some gamers became addicted to a burgeoning genre known as multiuser dungeons or MUDs, which were text-based role-playing games that allowed multiple players to connect to a single virtual world and accomplish goals such as killing monsters and leveling up their characters.

In addition, arcades began to decline as the popularity of home consoles increased and portable devices sprang up that offered more advanced graphics and more sophisticated gameplay. The handheld gaming boom peaked in the early 1990s with the release of Nintendo’s 8-bit Game Boy, which came bundled with Tetris.

Whether eating dots with Pac-Man, saving the princess with Super Mario and Luigi or wiping out your opponents in Fortnite, video games have helped shape the lives of millions of children and adults alike. And the impact they’ve had will likely continue to be felt for decades to come.