Welcome to the History of Gaming Learning Page!

The First Video Games

Gaming started all the way back in the mid 1900's. In 1950 the first computerized game was ever created under the name of Bertie the Brain. This Canadian invention was a 4 meter tall computer which capable of executing one one simple task... to play tic-tac-toe. The machine also had built in AI (artifical intelligence) that the player would play against. This AI had multiple difficulties for different ranges of player abillity. Many of these ideas and techniques are still being used in modern video game creation today.

Progress of gameing (1960-1970)

In the early 1960's a number of mainframe computer systems coupled with games made their debut. However, these types of sytems and games never took off. The main reason for this was because there was no way to distribute these systems to anyone internaionally (or even across just the United States). Another big factor for why these systems took off was because there was simpily a lack of programmers interested in creating entertainment programs at that time. This is a farcry from today's market, where gaming is one of the LARGEST bussiness' in the world.

The Golden Age of Gaming (1970's)

By the early 1970's mainframe computers were getting more and more advanced. This led to some of the biggest changes in how we look at video games. Firsly, in 1972 the first home console was ever created: The Magnavox Odyssey. This console was revolutionary for its time. To be able to have any sort of system that was conveinent enough for consumers to use in their own home was revolutionary. This breakthrough combined with the new era of Arcade gaming (also made popular in the 70's) ushered in a new era of gaming in genearl.

The advanment of Gaming (1980's-1990's)

In the tail end of the 70's all the way to the start of the 80's personal home computers were becoming more and more popular. This got many game developers thinking about how to use this to their advantage. With that many programmers instead of making games for consoles exclusivly for playing games, decided to make games that would be run on the consumers' home computer. As the technology kept getting better, eventually there was another major break through: 3d Graphics. Developed throughout the 90's 3D graphics became a staple in many video games. The first game to ever successfully use 3D was Virtua Racing created by Yu Suzuki.

Modern Gaming

In the current day gaming has only gotten even bigger. It has grown so much, in fact, that it is now the number 1 grossing entertainment industry (even of book, films, and TV shows). As time goes on we, and our work on games, just get more and more advanced. An easy way to prove this is simpily looking at the size difference in classic games vs. modern ones. As graphics get better, and coding gets more advanced games data sizes become larger and larger. For example, Pong was 128k bits. Back in when this game was created (1972) this was considered a game with considerable size. A modern game, for example Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019) had a total size of 200GB. Putting that in perspective that means Modern Warfare is almost 200X as big as the original pong game. To think how much bigger our games can get in 30 years is extraordianry. It only leaves the quesion, how big will games be in 2050!?!

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