Video Games

1958 – ongoing57 items

games
An Atari Pong cabinet at the head of a row with Rush’n Attack, Astro Fighter and Frogger, 2011. Photo: Rob Boudon, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
An Atari Pong cabinet at the head of a row with Rush’n Attack, Astro Fighter and Frogger, 2011. Photo: Rob Boudon, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

From an oscilloscope to every pocket

Video games from a physics lab’s open house in 1958 to a business bigger than film and music together. It starts with Tennis for Two, the first game strangers queued to play; a few earlier experiments, such as Cambridge’s noughts-and-crosses program OXO (1952), were seen by almost no one. The machines the games ran on are in the Modern Computing timeline.

How it is laid out

The industry counts its consoles in generations, and each gets a band from its first machine to its last one’s retirement, so they overlap: the Atari 2600 was still sold in 1992. Four more bands tell their own stories:

  • The golden age of arcades, Space Invaders to the crash

  • The 1983 crash, when the American market fell by 97%

  • Korea’s StarCraft era, where esports became a profession

  • The mobile era, when the phone became the biggest platform

Threads

Filter by tag to follow one line: arcade, console, pc, mobile, esports and business. The map runs from Kyoto, Tokyo and Osaka to Moscow, Warsaw, Stockholm, Espoo, Edinburgh, Busan, Beijing and Shenzhen.

On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer. — Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, Game Developers Conference, 2005

Items

  1. Tennis for Two

    Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York

  2. Spacewar!

    Building 26, MIT, Cambridge

  3. Ralph Baer’s television game proposal

    Sanders Associates, Nashua, New Hampshire

  4. Computer Space

  5. First console generation

    ≈ 10 years, 9 months

  6. Magnavox Odyssey

  7. Pong tested at Andy Capp’s Tavern

    Andy Capp’s Tavern, Sunnyvale

  8. Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics

    Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

  9. Second console generation

    ≈ 15 years, 7 months

  10. Fairchild Channel F

  11. Atari VCS launched

  12. Golden age of arcade games

    ≈ 5 years

  13. Space Invaders

    Taito, Tokyo

  14. Activision founded

  15. Pac-Man goes on test in Tokyo

    Shibuya, Tokyo

  16. Donkey Kong

    Nintendo, Kyoto

  17. The video game crash

    ≈ 2 years

  18. Third console generation

    ≈ 19 years, 11 months

  19. Famicom launched in Japan

  20. Atari buries its cartridges in Alamogordo

    City landfill, Alamogordo, New Mexico

  21. Tetris

    Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre, Vavilova Street, Moscow

  22. Super Mario Bros.

  23. NES test launch in New York

    New York

  24. Fourth console generation

    ≈ 16 years, 8 months

  25. Game Boy

  26. Street Fighter II

    Capcom, Osaka

  27. Fifth console generation

    ≈ 12 years, 9 months

  28. Senate hearings on violent games

    Senate office buildings, Washington

  29. Doom

    id Software, Mesquite, Texas

  30. PlayStation launched in Japan

  31. Pokémon Red and Green

  32. Snake on the Nokia 6110

  33. StarCraft

  34. Sixth console generation

    ≈ 14 years, 7 months

  35. Korea’s StarCraft era

    ≈ 13 years · Seoul

  36. PlayStation 2 launched in Japan

  37. Valve launches Steam

  38. 100,000 at the Gwangalli Beach final

    Gwangalli Beach, Busan

  39. World of Warcraft

  40. Seventh console generation

    ≈ 11 years, 7 months

  41. Wii launched in North America

  42. The mobile era

  43. Minecraft

    Stockholm

  44. Angry Birds

    Espoo

  45. Supreme Court: games are protected speech

    Supreme Court of the United States

  46. Eighth console generation

  47. Grand Theft Auto V

    Rockstar North, Edinburgh

  48. The Alamogordo landfill dig

    City landfill, Alamogordo, New Mexico

  49. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

    CD Projekt, Jagiellońska Street, Warsaw

  50. Tencent buys all of Riot Games

    Tencent, Nanshan, Shenzhen

  51. Pokémon Go

  52. Nintendo Switch

  53. Fortnite Battle Royale

  54. League of Legends Worlds final in the Bird’s Nest

    Beijing National Stadium

  55. Ninth console generation

  56. Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard

  57. Nintendo Switch 2