Brief History of Gaming

Timeline created by Gentleman207 in Science and Technology

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Event Date:	Event Title:	Event Description:
01/25/1947	Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device patent filed.	The earliest known interactive electronic game was by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube. The patent was filed on January 25, 1947 and issued on December 14, 1948. The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analog circuitry, not digital, to control the CRT beam and position a dot on the screen. Screen overlays were used for targets since graphics could not be drawn at the time.
05/05/1951	NIMROD Computer unveiled.	On May 5, 1951, the NIMROD computer, created by Ferranti, was presented at the Festival of Britain. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of 'Nim'; this was the first instance of a digital computer designed specifically to play a game. NIMROD could play either the traditional or "reverse" form of the game.
01/01/1952	OXO/ Noughts and Crosses (TicTacToe)	In 1952, Alexander S. Douglas made the first computer game to use a digital graphical display. OXO, also known as Noughts and Crosses, is a version of TicTacToe for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge. It was designed for the world's first stored-program computer, and used a rotary telephone controller for game control.
01/01/1958	Tennis for Two	In 1958, William Higinbotham made an interactive computer game named Tennis for Two for the Brookhaven National Laboratory's annual visitor's day. This display, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, was meant to promote atomic power, and used an analog computer and the vector display system of an oscilloscope.
01/01/1970	Mainframe Computers	University mainframe game development blossomed in the early 1970s. There is little record of all but the most popular games, as they were not marketed or regarded as a serious endeavor. The people–generally students–writing these games often were doing so illicitly by making questionable use of very expensive computing resources, and thus were not anxious to let very many people know of their endeavors. There were, however, at least two notable distribution paths; The PLATO system and DECUS.
09/01/1971	Galaxy Game Machine Introduced	In 1971, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck developed the first coin-operated computer game, Galaxy Game, at Stanford University using a DEC PDP-11/20 computer; only one unit was ever built (although it was later adapted to run up to eight games at once).
11/01/1971	Computer Space, First mass produced Video Game, is released.	Two months after Galaxy Game's installation, Computer Space by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney was released, which was the first coin-operated video game to be commercially sold (and the first widely available video game of any kind, predating the Odyssey by six months). Both games were variations on the vector display 1961 Spacewar!; however, Bushnell and Dabney's used an actual video display by having an actual television set in the cabinet.
05/01/1972	Release of Magnavox Odyessey	In 1966, Ralph Baer resumed work on an initial idea he had in 1951 to make an interactive game on a television set. In May 1967, Baer and an associate created the first game to use a raster-scan video display, or television set, directly displayed via modification of a video signal – i.e. a "video" game. The "Brown Box", the last prototype of seven, was released in May 1972 by Magnavox under the name Odyssey. It was the first home video game console.
11/01/1972	PONG is created.	Pong, also by Bushnell and Dabney, used the same television set design as Computer Space, and was not released until 1972 – a year after Computer Space. The game was originally manufactured by Atari Incorporated (Atari), who released it in 1972. Allan Alcorn created Pong as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell based the idea on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, which later resulted in a lawsuit against Atari.
01/01/1975	'Dungeon' is released (Exact Date is Undocumented)	1975: Daglow, then a student at Claremont Graduate University, wrote the first role-playing video game on PDP-10 mainframes: Dungeon. The game was an unlicensed implementation of the new tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Though displayed in text, it was the first game to use line of sight graphics, as the top-down dungeon maps showing the areas that the party had seen or could see took into consideration factors such as light or darkness and the differences in vision between species
01/01/1977	'Air' is released.	Kelton Flinn and John Taylor create the first version of Air, a text air combat game that foreshadowed their later work creating the first-ever graphical online multi-player game, Air Warrior. They would found the first successful online game company, Kesmai, now part of Electronic Arts. As Flinn has said: "If Air Warrior was a primate swinging in the trees, AIR was the text-based amoeba crawling on the ocean floor. But it was quasi-real time, multi-player, and attempted to render 3-D.
01/01/1977	Video Game Crash of 1977	In 1977, manufacturers of older, obsolete consoles and Pong clones sold their systems at a loss to clear stock, creating a glut in the market, and causing Fairchild and RCA to abandon their game consoles. Only Atari and Magnavox remained in the home console market, despite suffering losses in 1977 and 1978. The crash was largely caused by the significant number of Pong clones that flooded the markets. The crash eventually came to an end with the success of Taito's 'Space Invaders'.
01/01/1979	Popularisation of Home Computer Systems.	While the fruit of retail development in early video games appeared mainly in video arcades and home consoles, home computers began appearing in the late 1970s and were rapidly evolving in the 80s, allowing their owners to program simple games. Hobbyist groups for the new computers soon formed and personal computer game software followed. Beginning largely with ports of arcade games, such as 'Pac-Man' and 'Frogger', a common form of distribution was typing in the code by hand.
10/01/1979	Activision is formed.	In 1979, Activision was created by disgruntled former Atari programmers "who realized that the games they had anonymously programmed on their $20K salaries were responsible for 60 percent of the company's $100 million in cartridge sales for one year". It was the first third-party developer of video games. By 1982, approximately 8 million American homes owned a video game console, and the home video game industry was generating an annual revenue of $3.8 billion.
01/01/1980	The Game and Watch is released.	Game & Watch (ゲーム＆ウオッチ, Gēmu ando Uotchi?, or G&W) is a line of handheld games produced by Nintendo from 1980 to 1991. Created by game designer Gunpei Yokoi, each Game & Watch features a single game to be played on an LCD screen in addition to a clock (thus, "Game & Watch"). It was the earliest Nintendo product to garner major success, as well the first widely popular handheld gaming device. In 1979, Gunpei Yokoi saw a bored businessman playing with an calculator to kill time: The G+W was born.
05/22/1980	Pac-Man is released in Japan.	Pac-Man (パックマン, Pakkuman) is an arcade game developed by Namco and licensed for distribution in the United States by Midway. Immensely popular from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is considered one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games, and an icon of 1980s popular culture.Upon its release, the game became a social phenomenon that sold a bevy of mechandise and also inspired an animated TV Show and a top-ten hit single!
07/09/1981	Donkey Kong is released in Japan.	Donkey Kong (ドンキーコング, Donkī Kongu) is a franchise of video games series that features the adventures of a large ape called Donkey Kong, created by Shigeru Miyamoto. The original Donkey Kong game was the first appearance of Mario, Nintendo's flagship character, pre-dating the well-known Super Mario Bros. by four years. The game alone recieves partial credit for rescuing the American Video Game industry after the crash of 1983 on its American release; The NES recieves the rest.
07/15/1983	The Nintendo Entertainment System is launched in Japan.	The Nintendo Entertainment System (also abbreviated as NES or simply called Nintendo) is an 8-bit video game console that was released by Nintendo in North America during 1985, in Europe during 1986 and Australia in 1987.Nintendo introduced a now-standard business model of licensing third-party developers, authorizing them to produce and distribute software for Nintendo's platform. It was the best selling console of it's generation, with 61.91 million worldwide sales.
06/06/1984	Tetris is released in the USSR	Tetris (In Russian: Тетрис) is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra- (all of the game's pieces contain four segments) and tennis, his favorite sport. The Game Boy version of Tetris is currently among the top ten best selling video games of all times, with 33 million copies sold.In 1996, the rights to the game reverted from the Russian state to Pajitnov himself.
Timespan Dates:	Timespan Title:	Timespan Description:
01/01/1947 to 01/01/1958	Automated Chess	Alan Turing, a British mathematician, developed a theoretical computer chess program as an example of machine intelligence. In 1947, Turing wrote the theory for a program to play chess. His colleague Dietrich Prin] wrote it as the first limited program of chess for Manchester University's Ferranti Mark I.The program, however, was only capable of computing "mate-in-two" problems and was not powerful enough to play a full game.
01/01/1959 to 01/01/1961	MIT Computer's Lifespan	In 1959–1961, a collection of interactive graphical programs were created on the TX-0 experimental computer at MIT. These included Mouse in the Maze and Tic-Tac-Toe. Mouse in the Maze allowed users to use a light pen to place maze walls, dots that represented bits of cheese, and (in some versions) glasses of martini. A virtual mouse represented by a dot was then released and would traverse the maze to find the objects. The 'first shooter game' 'Spacewar!' was released in 1961.
01/01/1972 to 01/01/2006	PLATO Computer systems	In-depth History of PLATO systems. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system. The last production PLATO system was shut down in 2006, yet it established key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing and Multi-player games.
06/27/1972 to 07/01/1984	Atari, Inc.	Wikipedia Page,Atari's story In-depth Atari, Inc. was an American video game and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Primarily responsible for the formation of the video arcade and modern video game industries, the company was closed and its assets split in 1984 as a direct result of the North American video game crash of 1983.
01/01/1978 to 01/01/1986	Golden Age of Video Arcade Games.	The arcade game industry entered its golden age in 1978 with the release of Space Invaders by Taito, a success that inspired dozens of manufacturers to enter the market. The game inspired arcade machines to become prevalent in mainstream locations such as shopping malls and traditional storefronts during the golden age. Space Invaders would go on to sell over 360,000 arcade cabinets worldwide, and by 1982, generate a revenue of $2 billion in quarters, equivalent to $4.6 billion in 2011.