Game History

The first recognized example of a game machine was unveiled by Dr. Edward Uhler Condon at the New York World’s Fair in 1940. 

Sega and Taito were the first companies to pique the public’s  interest in arcade gaming when they released the electro-mechanical games Periscope and Crown Special Soccer in 1966 and 1967. In 1972, Atari (founded by Nolan Bushnell, the godfather of gaming) became the first gaming company to really set the benchmark for a large-scale gaming community.

The first example of players competing on separate screens came in 1973 with “Empire” — a strategic turn-based game for up to eight players — which was created for the PLATO network system. 

The integration of the microprocessor also led to the release of Space Invaders for the Atari VCS in 1980, signifying a new era of gaming — and sales: Atari 2600 sales shot up to 2 million units in 1980.

The real revolution in gaming came when LAN networks, and later the Internet, opened up multiplayer gaming. Multiplayer gaming over networks really took off with the release of Pathway to Darkness in 1993, and the “LAN Party” was born. 

Sega Dreamcast, the world’s first Internet-ready console, in 2000.

The release of Runescape in 2001 was a game changer. MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) allows millions of players worldwide to play, interact and compete against fellow fans on the same platform.

As online first-person shooter games became more popular, gaming “clans” began to emerge around the world. 

Since smartphones and app stores hit the market in 2007,  gaming has undergone yet another rapid evolution that has changed not only the way people play games, but also brought gaming into the mainstream pop culture in a way never before seen.

Angry Birds made Rovio $200 million in 2012 alone, and broke two billion downloads in 2014.

Virtual reality (VR) company Oculus was acquired by Facebook in 2014, and is set to release its Rift headset in 2016. The headset seems to lean perfectly toward use within the video games industry, and would potentially allow gamers to “live” inside an interactive, immersive 3D world.

In 2014, Google acquired Deep Mind; this year, IBM acquired AlchemyAPI, a leading provider in deep-learning technology; in October 2015, Apple made two AI acquisitions in less than a week.