Blog Post 4 History Gamer Frenzy

 When discussing the history of anything it is important to understand the exact origin point of the subject. For Video games, that was in 1940 when a computer scientist with knowledge of advanced mathematics was bored and wanted to see if he could create a game on a computer the way we had non-digital games for so long. He coded the game we now know as Nim which is a math game about drawing sticks until none are left. He then took it a step forward to create an AI partner that would play the game with you. This is the first instance of what we now refer to as NPCs which stand for non-playable characters and the creation of video games as we know it. 

Fast forward to 1967 and we have inventor Ralph Baer who wanted to expand on this video game technology. It had already been proven that games could be played digitally but only on computers and at this time the vast majority of people didn't own computers and even if they did they wouldn't have known how to use them. This gave Ralph Baer the idea to create a mini computer that was made specifically to play games on. This device would be small enough to hold in your hands and wouldn't require the knowledge of computer science to use it. This invention became known as the brown box and is referred to as the first gaming console to ever be released. Ralph Baer patented this earlier but was only able to start selling these commercially in 1972.

The commercial release of the brown box is when the gaming craze began, now people all over could play games on a television and not have to buy a computer. This same year is when the game Pong was created which is known as the grandfather of all games because it was the first game that was widely played on the brown boxes. After a few years of people getting into this new hobby of gaming others have seen the success of pong and want to create games for themselves. This is when you get games like Space invaders, Donkey Kong and Pacman all games that are considered classics by the gaming community at large.

The Popularity of games only began to surge from this point but a big spike in popularity came in 1999 when Sega released the Dreamcast. What made this so special was the fact that this new console was able to have players play games online. Up until this point people could only play multiplayer games in the same room with separate controllers. This opened the world of gaming to be worldwide so even if you didn't have any friends in your state you could play with someone across the world who enjoyed the game just as much as you and build that friendship through games.

A large amount of progress has been made in the field of gaming since then, for instance in 2006 the Nintendo Wii was invented allowing players to essentially use their bodies as controllers forcing them to be more active. After that in 2014 Facebook acquired Oculus and pores money into research of virtual reality which had been something that existed for sometime but now it could be used for gaming actually making the player feel like they were in the game. So what does the future hold for gaming? Some companies have already started research into deep dive gaming which is when you are no longer playing the game but you and your consciousness are actually inside the game. It might be a while before we are able to see something of that scale but it quite impressive how far technology has come in this field in less than a full decade

Sources

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1301997

https://www.stash.com/learn/defining-moments-in-video-game-history-a-timeline/

https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/history-of-video-games