History of Video Games
Hi BTN, this is Mini here. Ive got a question. What was the first ever video game, who created it and why?
RUBY: Hey dude, mind if I change the channel?
NIC: Yeah, I'm in the middle of a game.
RUBY: But I really wanna try out my new time-warp controller.
NIC: Hang on, your what?
RUBY: My time-warp controller. Apparently, it lets you time travel through video games. Got it for two bucks from the op shop.
NIC: Right.
RUBY: So, you're playing some car racing game from this year, but if we go back to say, 2000, you get something like this.
NIC: Old school.
RUBY: You think that's old school? Check out 1995.
NIC: Oh yuck. What am I, the red pixel or the green pixel?
RUBY: What about the 1980s when the first handheld device was invented!
NIC: Oh, I remember these!
RUBY: Okay, enough of this high-tech business. Let's go way back to the first ever video game.
That's going to take a bit of detective work. To find out about the early days, I had a chat to Simon Wisbey. He's a video game expert who's been in the business a long time.
RUBY: So, Simon, what were early video games like?
SIMON: Really simple Ruby. It was black and white, very simplistic minimum sound.
Recognise this game? You might know it as naughts and crosses, but the original version from 1952 was called OXO. An English computer scientist named Alexander Douglas invented it as part of a university project showing how people and computers could interact. In 1958, this slightly more complicated game, Tennis For Two was released. As you can see, still not the most exciting graphics. But in the 1980s, it was made famous, when it became an arcade video game. It's still one of the most popular of all time.
RUBY: So how is it that video games made it onto the arcade scene?
SIMON: Well it's really interesting, we saw that start happening in the early 80s, where all the fish and chip shops and all the takeaway shops used to have an arcade game. Then they started making dedicated arcades, and that's when you saw wall-to-wall video games, pinball machines, driving simulators. It was huge.
But like all good things, that came to an end. As games came out that you could play at home on the couch, fewer people felt the need to visit arcades. But that doesn't mean it's game over for all these machines! Simon says they're back in fashion.
SIMON: There's a lot of what we call now 'retro' games. Like Space Invaders, Space Invaders Donkey Kong. They're really coming back. We're finding a lot of kids have a passion to play the game.
RUBY: Okay I have one more question. Can we play a game?
SIMON: Absolutely. You pick it.
NICK: Tied again!? What a nail biter. This game is totally underrated.
- Ruby Cornish | Reporter
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- History of Video Games | Worksheet
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