Brief History of Video Games

ORIGIN

Computer games are a part of modern culture, but does anyone know where they came from? I’ve been on many websites to try and find out where the origin of video games lies. It seems that many sites portray “Pong” to be the first video game but after a great deal of research it appears that the first concept of a video game came from a Cambridge University masters student. A.S Douglas was writing his PHD degree on Human-Computer interaction. He created a version of the classic game “tic-tac-toe”. The first game considered to be the first computer game was “Tennis for Two” since its was deigned on a oscilloscope. After Tennis for Two, many other games were created, such as “spacewar!” and “pong”. Pong was portrayed as the initial game since it was the first game created for commercial value. It seems to me that the initial concept of computer generated entertainment, surprisingly came from scientific background aimed towards breaking the boundaries of technology rather than commercial value. I always had it in me that it would have been for commercial value since I could not imagine a bunch of scientists deciding to design games for fun.

My beginning was far from many other gamers. Games were not seen as a beneficial part of my life, that being in the eyes of my parents. It was by chance that I stumbled on to games. I remember the first computer my dad got for the house. He needed a simple computer to run office. But seeing as I was in Kenya at the time, the only computer we had was a windows 3.11. It brings back memories. The computer had over a hundred games on it. The first game I played was chips challenge. It was a simple challenge based game by which the character found his way across the map picking up any essential items such as; flippers and heavy boots. I remember moving on to Prince of Persia, I really got into it due to the fact that my mum loved playing it as well. We challenged each other to see who could get far in the game. Well got to go get some Chinese and play Timesplitters 2 (classic)……