In 1947, two inventors filed a patent for a device that would change entertainment forever, yet it never produced a single moving image. Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann created a cathode-ray tube amusement device that used paper targets fixed to the screen, allowing users to control the parabolic arc of a dot to simulate a missile firing at targets. This analog device, issued as U.S. Patent 2455992 on the 14th of December 1948, was the first electronic game, but it lacked the video display that would eventually define the medium. The true birth of video games as we know them began decades later, when engineers started connecting interactive electronic devices to video displays. By 1958, William Higinbotham engineered Tennis for Two, an electronic interactive game that used an oscilloscope to display a side view of a tennis court, bringing the concept of a video game to life for the first time. This was followed in 1962 by Spacewar!, written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen on a DEC PDP-1 computer, which featured two spaceships battling each other on a vector display. These early experiments laid the foundation for a global industry, transforming simple dots and lines into complex worlds that would eventually generate revenues exceeding three times the size of the global music industry.
The Fathers Of The Industry
The commercialization of video games required two distinct visions to collide, one from the laboratory and one from the arcade. In 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, Ralph H. Baer devised a system to play a basic table tennis game on a television screen, creating the prototype known as the Brown Box. Sanders patented Baer's innovations and licensed them to Magnavox, which commercialized the technology as the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972. Simultaneously, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, inspired by seeing Spacewar! running at Stanford University, devised a similar version running in a smaller coin-operated arcade cabinet using a less expensive computer. This was released as Computer Space, the first arcade video game, in 1971. Bushnell and Dabney went on to form Atari, Inc., and with Allan Alcorn, created their second arcade game in 1972, the hit ping pong-style Pong, which was directly inspired by the table tennis game on the Odyssey. Atari made a home version of Pong, which was released by Christmas 1975. The success of the Odyssey and Pong, both as an arcade game and home machine, launched the video game industry. Both Baer and Bushnell have been titled Father of Video Games for their contributions, yet their paths diverged sharply. Baer's work was rooted in engineering and hardware innovation, while Bushnell's genius lay in business and the arcade model, creating a dichotomy that would define the industry's future.
The video game industry experienced a meteoric rise during the golden age of arcade video games from the late 1970s to early 1980s, but this newfound success was built on fragile foundations. The industry was mainly composed of game developers with little business experience, leading to numerous companies forming simply to create clones of popular games to try to capitalize on the market. Due to loss of publishing control and oversaturation of the market, the North American home video game market crashed in 1983, dropping from revenues of around 3.2 billion dollars in 1983 to 100 million dollars by 1985. Many of the North American companies created in the prior years closed down, leaving a void in the market. Japan's growing game industry was briefly shocked by this crash but had sufficient longevity to withstand the short-term effects, and Nintendo helped to revitalize the industry with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America in 1985. Along with it, Nintendo established a number of core industrial practices to prevent unlicensed game development and control game distribution on their platform, methods that continue to be used by console manufacturers today. The industry remained more conservative following the 1983 crash, forming around the concept of publisher-developer dichotomies, and by the 2000s, leading to the industry centralizing around low-risk, triple-A games and studios with large development budgets of at least 20 million dollars.
The Language Of Play
The term video game was developed to describe electronic games played on a video display rather than on a teletype printer, audio speaker, or similar device, distinguishing them from handheld electronic games such as Merlin, which commonly used LED lights for indicators not in combination for imaging purposes. The first appearance of the term video game emerged around 1973, with the Oxford English Dictionary citing a the 10th of November 1973 BusinessWeek article as the first printed use of the term. Though Bushnell believed the term came from a vending magazine review of Computer Space in 1971, a review of the major vending magazines Vending Times and Cashbox showed that the term may have come even earlier, appearing first in a letter dated the 10th of July 1972. In the letter, Bushnell uses the term video game twice. Per video game historian Keith Smith, the sudden appearance suggested that the term had been proposed and readily adopted by those in the field. Around March 1973, Ed Adlum, who ran Cashboxs coin-operated section until 1972 and then later founded RePlay Magazine, covering the coin-op amusement field, in 1975, used the term in an article in March 1973. In a September 1982 issue of RePlay, Adlum is credited with first naming these games as video games: RePlay's Eddie Adlum worked at Cash Box when TV games first came out. The personalities in those days were Bushnell, his sales manager Pat Karns, and a handful of other TV game manufacturers like Henry Leyser and the McEwan brothers. It seemed awkward to call their products TV games, so borrowing a word from Billboards description of movie jukeboxes, Adlum started to refer to this new breed of amusement machine as video games. The phrase stuck.
The Architecture Of Worlds
Video games require a platform, a specific combination of electronic components or computer hardware and associated software, to operate, and these platforms have evolved from dedicated hardware units to complex ecosystems. Early arcade games, home consoles, and handheld games were dedicated hardware units with the game's logic built into the electronic componentry of the hardware. Since then, most video game platforms are considered programmable, having means to read and play multiple games distributed on different types of media or formats. Physical formats include ROM cartridges, magnetic storage including magnetic-tape data storage and floppy discs, optical media formats including CD-ROM and DVDs, and flash memory cards. Furthermore digital distribution over the Internet or other communication methods as well as cloud gaming alleviate the need for any physical media. In some cases, the media serves as the direct read-only memory for the game, or it may be the form of installation media that is used to write the main assets to the player's platform's local storage for faster loading periods and later updates. Games can be extended with new content and software patches through either expansion packs which are typically available as physical media, or as downloadable content nominally available via digital distribution. These can be offered freely or can be used to monetize a game following its initial release. Several games offer players the ability to create user-generated content to share with others to play. Other games, mostly those on personal computers, can be extended with user-created modifications or mods that alter or add onto the game; these often are unofficial and were developed by players from reverse engineering of the game, but other games provide official support for modding the game.
The Battle For Art And Law
The legal and cultural status of video games has been a contentious issue since the industry's inception, with the medium fighting for recognition as a form of art and protected speech. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association that video games were a protected form of speech with artistic merit, cementing the view that video games were an art form. This ruling came after film critic Roger Ebert published an essay Video Games can never be art, which challenged the industry to prove him and other critics wrong. Since then, video game developers have come to use the form more for artistic expression, including the development of art games, and the cultural heritage of video games as works of arts, beyond their technical capabilities, have been part of major museum exhibits, including The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and toured at other museums from 2012 to 2016. The debate over what constitutes a video game continues, with the lack of any industry definition for a video game by 2021 being an issue during the case Epic Games v. Apple which dealt with video games offered on Apple's iOS App Store. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, recognizing that there was yet an industry standard definition for a video game, established for her ruling that At a bare minimum, video games appear to require some level of interactivity or involvement between the player and the medium compared to passive entertainment like film, music, and television, and videogames are also generally graphically rendered or animated, as opposed to being recorded live or via motion capture as in films or television. Rogers still concluded that what is a video game appears highly eclectic and diverse.
The Global Economy Of Play
The video game industry has grown into a formidable heavyweight across the modern entertainment industry, with estimated annual revenues of over 175 billion dollars in 2020, three times the size of the global music industry and four times that of the film industry. According to the market research firm Newzoo, the global video game industry drew estimated revenues of over 175 billion dollars in 2020. Mobile games accounted for the bulk of this, with a 48% share of the market, followed by console games at 28% and personal computer games at 23%. Sales of different types of games vary widely between countries due to local preferences. Japanese consumers tend to purchase much more handheld games than console games and especially PC games, with a strong preference for games catering to local tastes. Another key difference is that, though having declined in the West, arcade games remain an important sector of the Japanese gaming industry. In South Korea, computer games are generally preferred over console games, especially MMORPG games and real-time strategy games. Computer games are also popular in China. The industry itself grew out from both the United States and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s before having a larger worldwide contribution. Today, the video game industry is predominantly led by major companies in North America, Europe, and southeast Asia including Japan, South Korea, and China. Hardware production remains an area dominated by Asian companies either directly involved in hardware design or part of the production process, but digital distribution and indie game development of the late 2000s has allowed game developers to flourish nearly anywhere and diversify the field.
The Future Of Interactive Media
The video game industry continues to evolve, with emerging Asian markets and the proliferation of smartphone games in particular altering player demographics towards casual and cozy gaming, and increasing monetization by incorporating games as a service. The industry has expanded onto mobile gaming through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, virtual and augmented reality systems, and remote cloud gaming. Virtual reality games generally require players to use a special head-mounted unit that provides stereoscopic screens and motion tracking to immerse a player within virtual environment that responds to their head movements. Some VR systems include control units for the player's hands as to provide a direct way to interact with the virtual world. VR systems generally require a separate computer, console, or other processing device that couples with the head-mounted unit. Cloud gaming requires a minimal hardware device, such as a basic computer, console, laptop, mobile phone or even a dedicated hardware device connected to a display with good Internet connectivity that connects to hardware systems by the cloud gaming provider. The game is computed and rendered on the remote hardware, using a number of predictive methods to reduce the network latency between player input and output on their display device. For example, the Xbox Cloud Gaming and PlayStation Now platforms use dedicated custom server blade hardware in cloud computing centers. The industry remains challenged to distinguish between creating new games based on refinements of past successful games to create a new type of gameplay, and intentionally creating a clone of a game that may simply swap out art assets, while also navigating the complexities of intellectual property and global regulations.