Nowadays, video games are things that you will see in almost every household. Video games are a great way for people to have fun whether alone or with friends. They are also a great way to pass time.
For example, let's say you are on a 13-hour flight and you happened to bring your Nintendo Switch with you as well as a couple of games. At any moment throughout the flight, you would be able to pull out your Switch and get straight to gaming without having to worry about a wifi connection. While you may not be able to use certain features such as online matchmaking in Super Smash Bros. or trading Pokémon with other trainers, you will still have a good chunk of the game available to you. But video games were not always easily accessible, portable, or good-looking as they are now.
Above is an image of the first video game. The name of the video game was Tennis For Two and it was created in 1958 by American physicist William Higinbotham in Upton, New York on a very large analog computer. It was a two-player game, so it had two controllers that would plug into the main device similar to something like an NES or SNES. For the display, it looked a lot like a heart monitor displays a heartbeat with the screen updating in a way that makes it look like one long image that is constantly scrolling across. In Tennis For Two, instead of showing a heart rate, it would show a tennis ball that would bounce from one side to the other whenever the player would use the controller to hit the tennis ball to the other player.
Here's an image of the two controllers that would be used for the game. You would have one controller for the player on the right, and one for the player on the left. Each controller had a dial and a button on it. The dial would control the angle that the ball would travel when hit, and when the button is pressed, it will send the tennis ball bouncing back the way that it came from. The dials on the controller were only able to go to certain angles to make sure that a player could not purposely hit the ball behind themself.
This image shows the type of console that the player would use to both play and see the game. The screen was what is called an oscilloscope. Oscilloscopes work by displaying the amount of voltage and this is typically shown on an X and Y graph.
This led to the creation of other classic games such as Spacewar! and Pong. These games originally played on classic style arcade machines, but eventually were able to be played in homes through the use of a TV and a console. One of the earlier consoles was the Magnavox Oddessy. This console offered a few games like Table Tennis, Analogic, and Submarine. These consoles then opened up a gateway for other home video game consoles to be created. These games were all pre-loaded onto the console so there was no way to play games on than what was on the console at the time of purchase. The first console to include cartridges was the Atari 2600. This enabled buyers to purchase separate games and allowed them to pay for what they wanted rather than buy everything, but not use all of it.
One of the most popular home consoles was the Nintendo Entertainment System which was released in 1985. This console was Nintendo's first console and similar to the Atari 2600, this console had a slot for game cartridges which meant that users would be able to buy whichever game they wanted and not have to worry about slow loading times. Slow loading times were often an issue for consoles that had all the game pre-installed on them. Having separate cartridges for games meant that the console would be able to focus specifically on the game that was in the cartridge slot which resulted in faster loading times. The NES was also a two-player console but also allowed for single-player usage for games like Super Mario Bros. and Contra.
In only 30 years, videos were able to advance very quickly originally going from a small mini-game on a tiny screen to a full-on game with a story and colored graphics. And over the next 30 years, they would only become even more advanced with handheld devices and graphics that would look so good, you would think that it was real life at first glance. Video games will always be very popular and are a great way to spend quality time with friends or family. Next time you look at your PS5 or Xbox Series X, search up some of the older variations and see how far these amazing devices have come.