Computer Space and beyond: 50 years of gaming

A student of the University of Utah teamed up with a researcher at Stanford University to make a video game called Spacewar!

They used to play it in a university lab and saw the potential to convert it into an arcade game encased in a cabinet.

The final game, called Computer Space, achieved success in 1971 and paved the way for the video game industry, which is now worth more than the music and film industries combined.

• Pong is widely regarded as the first mainstream success of the arcade gaming revolution and was released by one of the first video game companies, Atari. 
• The company was responsible for taking arcade games into homes, by releasing the first home video game consoles having Pong and Space Invaders.
• The 80s saw mainstream action on the arcade front with Super Mario, Tetris, Pacman among other iconic titles that made youngsters throng the neon-lit amusement arcades.

• Market saturation and diminishing interest started to surface in 1985, but the popularity of video games again spiked with the highly innovative Nintendo NES console, selling about 62 million units.
• Games started being increasingly violent, which resulted in movie-like age restrictions and ratings.
• The 90s was also the decade of Sony Playstation, and the First Person Shooter games, pioneered by the gothic and violent Doom.

2001 saw Microsoft getting into video games with the Xbox, bringing with it great titles like Halo and selling millions of units. The

In 2004, massive multiplayer games debuted with World Of Warcraft, with thousands playing together in real-time. Nintendo released the family-friendly console Wii, which had motion controls that could enable sports-like games with full-body movement.

An indie game released in 2011, Minecraft didn’t have any professional-grade graphics or even a story, but still became a huge hit selling 200 million units.

Games became ‘gamblized’ around 2005, with loot boxes that gave random perks for cash and many other legal/illegal options that players could tinker with.

A lot of people started playing more and more video games at home after March 2020, when the lockdowns started.

Online titles(like the hugely popular Among Us) are showing the highest level of growth during this time, with a new social approach to gaming, integrating it with online tools already in use.