The video game industry is undoubtedly one of the biggest and most popular in terms of modern-day entertainment. The last two covid-pandemic years have only acted in favour of the video game industry as many people, who were forced to stay at home, decided to pick up the controller.
Today video games is an industry that grosses around $100 billion dollars per year. But it wasn’t always like this. Video games used to be a chastised form of entertainment with much of the older generations believing the medium “rots your brain”.
The first video games on record date back to the late 1950s, early 1960s when games like Spacewar! and OXO were developed by university professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These games were played on what was then the most cutting-edge computer technology available.
1967 was the year that introduced the first-ever home console for gaming, which in the grand scheme of things was a huge step for the gaming industry.
In The Beginning
Ralph Baer, who is commonly referred to as the “father of video games” invented what was then known as the Brown Box. This was a split-screen multiplayer home console which was later rebranded as the Odyssey when eventually sold to consumers.
This was followed up by possibly the biggest innovation in gaming at the time. In 1977 a Japanese company by the name of Atari looked at the ideas and popularity that Ralph Baer had introduced with the Odyssey and attempted to replicate this technological success.
They released their Atari console which brought thousands of new people to the gaming fandom. The Atari was a home console that featured joysticks and interchangeable game cartridges which allowed players to pick and choose what they wanted to play, whenever they wanted to play it.
When Atari stopped production in 1992 it was estimated that just over 30 million units of their console had been sold worldwide.
Following the Atari, Nintendo released their first gaming console the Nintendo 64 which was a host for some of the most popular video games of all time including the original Mario, Donkey Kong, and Space Invaders to name a few.
Where We Are Now
Fast forward to the present day and now we have some of the most impressive and powerful increments of popular modern gaming consoles, the PlayStation and the Xbox with PC gaming also looking extremely strong in the industry.
The console era could be argued to be coming to its own conclusion fairly soon as well with new technology entering the industry at a rapid pace.
Cloud-based gaming systems, virtual and augmented reality, the Metaverse and the resurgence of arcade gaming seem to all be intruding into the console gaming industry. Games at https://mobilecasino.my/real-money/ are also a major attraction.
New innovations are seemingly always on the horizon for gaming, which makes it difficult to predict what the next major technology will be in this sphere.