Since the commercial birth of gaming in the 1950s, the now technological oddity has grown to become a multi-billion dollar industry. According to a 2018 report by PCGames, the video gaming industry is expected to surpass the $230 billion mark by 2022. Another report published by Statista forecasts the amount to be $200 billion by 2023. Despite these monumental figures, it’s hard to believe that the video game industry has been in existence for about 70 years only.
Video games trace their lineage to the 1950s, although their mainstream popularity emerged sometimes in the 70s. Since then, the consumption of video games has seen exponential growth, and as of today, there are an estimated 2.7 billion video gamers across the world. In this article, we are going to look at how the video game industry began, explore the various types of video games in the early days, and how they have continued to evolve to where we’re today.
The Early Days
Today’s video games have a very interesting beginning, given that they were birthed in research labs by scientists. In 1952, for example, a British professor known as A.S. Douglas created the OXO video game, which was part of his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University. A few years later in 1958, an American Physicist William Higinbotham developed Tennis for Two using an analogue computer for display at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s exhibition
In 1962, an American Computer scientist named Steve Russell invented the infamous Spacewar for the PDP-1 computer at MIT. Thanks to his efforts, Spacewar became the first-ever video game to run on multiple computer installations.
Atari And Arcade Gaming
The late 1960s and early 70s saw the emergence of companies looking to quench the public’s thirst for arcade gaming. During this period, Atari pioneered and revolutionized large-scale gaming by not developing their games in-house but also popularizing arcade gaming. After releasing Pong in 1973, the whole arcade gaming phenomenon spread into bars, bowling alleys, and malls.
The arcade gaming revolution was further reinforced by the release of Periscope and Crown Special Soccer in 1966 and 1967 by Sega and Taito respectively.
The Era of Consoles
In the late 1960s, the era of video game consoles was taking off but it didn’t pick momentum until 1972 when the first commercial home video game console was released. Known as Magnavox Odyssey, this console featured a Pong-type game, which was primarily informed by the early success of the arcade Pong version.
During the era of consoles, one of the key factors that led to the further development of video games was the emergence of game cartridges. These memory cards containing ROM stored the games and could be swapped in the console, essentially eliminating the bottlenecks posed by limited memory.
Home Computers
The development of home computers in the 1970s allowed game developers to start churning out more complex games such as Mystery House for the Apple II and Rogue for IBM PCs.
In the mid-80s, the processing power of home computers was further improved, which helped complex stories to be told, as well as facilitate new forms of interaction between players.
The Move To Online Gaming On Consoles
In the early 1990s, the gaming community welcomed the 4th generation, 16-bit-era consoles early. Three years later, the Internet blasted into the public domain, which is when tangible advances in modern “online” gaming started taking shape. In 1995, for example, Nintendo released Satellaview, which was a satellite peripheral for the Super Famicom console. With this technology, players could download games, cheats hints, and even news directly to their console via satellites. Unfortunately, internet costs were extremely high then and broadcasts stopped in 2000,
Between 1993 and 1996, there were attempts by Nintendo, Atari, and Sega to use cable providers to actualize online gaming. However, none of them succeeded to slow Internet capabilities and high costs. At the turn of the millennium, however, Sega Dreamcast, which was the world’s first-ever Internet-ready console, was released. And although it didn’t succeed it paved the way for the next-gen consoles like the Xbox.
In 2001, the release of Runescape proved to be a game-changer as it ushered in the era of MMORPG this allowed millions of players the world over to play, interact, and compete against each other on the same platform.
The Modern Age Of Gaming
Since the early 2000s, limitations that early game developers faced have almost certainly been eliminated. The Internet capabilities and computer processor technology have improved, and every batch of new batch games, consoles, and graphics seems to blow their predecessors out of the water. Better yet, the cost of internet, servers, and game development technology have dropped, making it a piece of cake to develop and even play video games online.
As online first-person shooter games continue to grow in popularity, gaming “clans” or guilds have continued to emerge from around the world. These organized groups of ardent video game players regularly congregate virtually to organize battles in multiplayer games. Needless to say, valorant boosting service is an offshoot of this modern gaming era.
The Move Toward Mobile
Video games have undergone yet another rapid evolution since the entry of smartphones and app stores in 2007. Mobile phones have not only changed the way we play video games but also brought gaming into mainstream pop culture. Over the last decade or so, there have been rapid developments in mobile technology, which have led to a massive explosion of mobile gaming. In 2020, for example, mobile-based gaming generated a total of $77.2 billion in revenues compared to $29.6 billion from console-based gaming.
The Future of Video Gaming
The future of video gaming is undoubtedly bright, with the industry set to be dominated by a number of trends such as cloud gaming, face/voice recognition, and Virtual Reality, just to mention but a few. And talking of Virtual reality (VR), Facebook recently released Oculus Quest 2 headset, which allows video gamers to play in an interactive, immersive 3D world. And since this technology is expected to continue improving, it is safe to say that we will see fully interactive “worlds” for MMORPG in our time, whereby players can move around and interact in an immersive world. Finally, some of the best top-notch Tarkov hacks have been released recently, adding further dimensions to major titles not previously considered or used.
Along with that, the world of language processing and artificial intelligence has seen immense improvements over the last few years. In 2014, Google acquired DeepMind, closely followed IBM’s 2015 acquisition of AlchemyAPI, which is a leading deep-learning technology provider. During the same year, Apple acquired two of the leading companies in the AI field to help improve computer’s open-ended dialogues and the accuracy of voice recognition technology. This combination of virtual and augmented reality technology is set to usher in a new chapter for video gaming with high-quality graphical content, strong relationships with the games’ characters, and vast, playable gaming environments.
