Video game

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 25th of January 1947, two men named Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for a "cathode-ray tube amusement device." Inspired by radar displays, it let a user steer a glowing dot across a screen to simulate firing a missile. The targets were paper drawings taped to the glass. That patent, issued on the 14th of December 1948 as U.S. Patent 2455992, sits at the very edge of a story that now dwarfs older entertainments. By 2019, this medium pulled in roughly three times the revenue of the global music industry and four times that of film. How did a dot chasing paper targets become an industry that reshapes the electronics it runs on? Who decides what even counts as a game when a judge has to rule on it in court? And why did the whole thing very nearly collapse in 1983?

• 2. Before The Screen Lit Up

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  The Nimrod computer appeared at the 1951 Festival of Britain, using a panel of lights to play the mathematical game of Nim. In 1952, Christopher Strachey's Checkers may have been the first game to display visuals on an electronic screen. That same year, Alexander S. Douglas built OXO, a tic-tac-toe game running on the EDSAC. These were not consumer products. They were experiments riding on room-sized mainframe computers that filled laboratories.

  William Higinbotham engineered Tennis for Two in 1958, using an oscilloscope to show a side view of a tennis court. A few years later, Massachusetts Institute of Technology students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen wrote Spacewar! on a DEC PDP-1 computer in 1962. Its vector display let two spaceships battle each other. Each of these early creations spoke a different visual language, from a tennis court traced on an oscilloscope to ships drawn in glowing lines.

  In 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, Ralph H. Baer devised a way to play a basic table tennis game on a television screen. With his company's approval, he built a prototype called the "Brown Box." Sanders patented the work and licensed it to Magnavox. That decision would put a game machine into living rooms for the first time, and it set the stage for the commercial age that followed.

• 3. The Birth Of An Industry

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  Computer Space arrived in 1971 as the first arcade video game, dreamed up by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney after they saw Spacewar! running at Stanford University. They built a cheaper, coin-operated version inside a smaller cabinet. The pair then formed Atari, Inc.

  In 1972, working with Allan Alcorn, Atari released its second arcade game, the ping pong-style hit Pong. It drew directly from a table tennis game that players had already met elsewhere. That same year, Magnavox commercialized Baer's invention as the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. The Odyssey's own table tennis game was the very thing that inspired Pong.

  Atari made a home version of Pong, released by Christmas 1975. The combined success of the Odyssey and Pong, in arcades and in the home, launched the industry in earnest. Both Baer and Bushnell have carried the title "Father of Video Games" for their work. Yet even the name for these machines was still up for grabs.

• 4. Naming A New Machine

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  Ed Adlum once ran the coin-operated section of Cashbox magazine until 1972, and he found the available labels awkward. Manufacturers were calling their products "TV games," alongside terms like "television game" and "telegame." Adlum recalled wrestling with descriptions before he "finally woke up one day" and said, "What the hell... video game!" He borrowed the word "video" from how Billboard described movie jukeboxes. A September 1982 issue of RePlay credited him with first naming these machines video games, and the phrase stuck.

  The Oxford English Dictionary cited a BusinessWeek article from the 10th of November 1973 as the first printed use of the term. Bushnell believed it came from a vending magazine review of Computer Space in 1971. A later check of Vending Times and Cashbox found the term even earlier, in a letter dated the 10th of July 1972, where Bushnell used "video game" twice. Video game historian Keith Smith read the sudden appearance as a sign the field had quietly agreed on the word. In Japan, where companies like Toshiba and Sharp Corporation built the early consoles, people still call them "TV games" or "terebi geemu" well into the 21st century.

• 5. What Counts As A Game

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  Dragon's Lair brought interactive films into arcades in the 1980s, playing full motion video off a stored medium while offering only limited user control. This created a puzzle. The Clue VCR Mystery Game also used external media, asking players to watch clips between turns, yet few would call it a video game. The working line drawn since then is interactivity that affects the visual display.

  Gone Home, a walking simulator, lets players explore without offering any objective. That Dragon, Cancer, an empathy game built around emotion, likewise has no winning condition. Both strained the old assumption that a game needs a score or a final boss. They are still treated as video games because they hand the player a world to interact with.

  The absence of any industry-wide definition became a real problem in the case Epic Games v. Apple. The dispute touched Fortnite Creative and Roblox, which build sprawling worlds of player-made experiences, and whether each experience counted as its own game for App Store fees. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that video games "appear to require some level of interactivity or involvement between the player and the medium." She added that they are "generally graphically rendered or animated, as opposed to being recorded live." Even so, she concluded the medium "appears highly eclectic and diverse."

• 6. The Crash And The Recovery

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  The North American home video game market crashed in 1983. The cause was a loss of publishing control and a saturation of the market, after dozens of companies had formed simply to clone popular games. Many of those North American firms shut down. Japan's growing game industry was briefly shocked but had the longevity to ride out the short-term blow.

  Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America in 1985 and helped revive the business. Alongside the hardware, Nintendo set up practices to block unlicensed game development and to control distribution on its platform. Console manufacturers still use those methods today, including Nintendo's reliance on game cartridges for its systems.

  Following the crash, the industry grew more conservative and organized itself around a split between publishers and developers. By the 2000s it had centered on low-risk, high-budget "AAA" games. The arrival of the Internet then opened digital distribution, which fed a riskier, experimental strain of work. Indie games, made by small teams outside direct publisher control, gained ground from the late 2000s onward and kept growing into a major share of the field.

• 7. Games As Art, Mind, And Worry

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  Film critic Roger Ebert published an essay titled "Video Games can never be art," daring the industry to prove him wrong. The argument hinged on interactivity getting in the way of artistic intent. The matter found a legal answer in 2011, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association that video games were protected speech with artistic merit. The Art of Video Games later appeared at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and toured other museums from 2012 to 2016.

  Research points to real effects on the body and mind. Action game players have shown better hand-eye coordination and visuo-motor skills, including resistance to distraction and sensitivity to peripheral vision. A 2020 study from Oxford University surveyed 3,274 gamers aged over 18, using actual play-time data from Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville. Those who played more tended to report greater wellbeing. A study reported in 2018, covering 1,000 gamers, found 55% said gaming helps them unwind and relieve stress.

  The same medium has drawn alarm since the 1970s. Parents and advocates have feared that violent games push young players toward real violence, fears sharpened by the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. The World Health Organization included "gaming disorder" in the 11th revision of its International Statistical Classification of Diseases. Yet the American Psychiatric Association has stated there is insufficient evidence that games create violent tendencies or addiction. That tension, between a protected art form and a suspected hazard, is the one the medium still carries with it.