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The video game industry as it exists today primarily sprang from two independent sources. The first of these was the coin-operated amusement business that began in the late nineteenth century at amusement parks, boardwalks, bars, and bowling alleys and consisted of mechanical devices operated by patrons who inserted coins to make the machines work. Starting in 1948, the jukebox became the most profitable and important coin-operated amusement device, but the most important game was pinball.[1] The pinball industry began in 1931 when David Gottlieb created the Baffle Ball machine, which was the second pinball machine but the first to be successfully mass produced.[2] The pinball market really took off in the 1950s during the post-World War II American economic boom.[3] The pinball business was responsible for the creation of the production, distribution, and consumer channels used by the new video game industry in its early days, and important American video game companies such as Bally Manufacturing (est. 1932), Williams Manufacturing (est. 1943), and Midway Games (est. 1958 and purchased by Bally in 1969) were all established for the creation of pinball and other coin-operated devices. In addition to pinball, these companies created mechanical sports games, driving games, and shooting games using light guns that were all forerunners of video game genres.[4]

Following the Korean War, the strong American military presence in Japan also served to expand the coin-operated amusement industry into that country. Because World War II had greatly depleted Japan’s manufacturing infrastructure, the early coin-operated companies in Japan were generally established by foreigners and imported American products. As the Japanese economy recovered and coin-operated amusements became popular, a large number of native Japanese companies entered the business as well. Taito, founded by Russian Jew Michael Kogan in 1953, was the first important company to enter the business in Japan, and it was soon joined by Service Games, founded in 1952 by American Marty Bromley to bring coin-operated amusements to American servicemen in Japan and later the biggest name in jukeboxes in Japan under the name Sega, and Rosen Enterprises, established by American Korean War veteran David Rosen as an instant photo booth importer in 1954 and a manager of arcades beginning in 1956. In 1964, Rosen instigated the merger of Sega and Rosen Enterprises into Sega Enterprises, which began creating its own mechanical games in 1966 with Periscope, which due to the high cost to import to the United States and Europe, set the long-standing standard play price in the arcade of twenty-five cents.

At the same time the arcade business was taking hold, important advances in electronics led to the creation of the first computers between 1937 and 1945 in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The early computers were giant mainframes that could take up whole rooms and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and, as a result, were only found at top university research facilities and government institutions. As the transistor replaced the vacuum tube and the integrated circuit allowed for easier mass production, computers began to shrink in size and come down in price, spreading across universities and being adopted by businesses in the 1950s and 1960s. It was on these mainframe machines that university students in the 1960s and 1970s would design some of the first electronic games and establish most of the basic genres still popular today.
Tennis for Two
Tennis for Two

The first known concept for an electronic game was a device called the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device patented in the United States by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1948.[5] The proposed device would have used eight vacuum tubes to simulate a missile firing at a target and would use knobs to adjust the curve and speed of the missile. The earliest programs created to run a game on a computer appear to be a checkers program created by Christopher Strachey in 1951 on the Pilot ACE and Manchester Mark I and a tic-tac-toe program called OXO created by A.S. Douglas in 1952 on the EDSAC computer to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. Also in 1951, the NIMROD, a computer designed specifically to play the game Nim, was introduced at the Festival of Britain and displayed for several months. Perhaps the first true electronic game not a representation of a pen-and-paper or board game was created in 1958 on an oscilloscope by William Higinbotham and named Tennis for Two. Designed to entertain visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory at its annual visitors day, the game displayed a tennis court in side view and required controllers with a knob and a button. In this simple tennis game, the first player chooses an angle and serves the ball after which the second player must choose an angle and attempt to return the ball over the net. While popular at the visitor day, Higinbotham never attempted to patent or market the device, which was taken apart in 1959. Whether one of the concepts above, or another one entirely, counts as the first video game, none of them received wide distribution or had an impact on the industry.

The landmark game that eventually led to the launch of both the college mainframe tradition and the video arcade game was conceived at MIT in 1961 by a group of friends including Steve Russell, Wayne Witanen, and J. Martin Graetz, members of an organization called the Tech Model Railroad Club, interested in science fiction novels and movies. When MIT replaced its aging TX-0 mainframe computer with a DEC PDP-1, which had a built-in monitor, Russell, Witanen, and Graetz wanted to create a program that would test and tax the new computer’s capabilities and drew on their love of science fiction in deciding to make a game involving spaceships. Russell was primarily responsible for the design of the game, which was finished in 1962. Called Spacewar!, the final product featured two ships dubbed the "Wedge" and the "Needle" for their shapes that two players controlled and moved around the screen while firing torpedoes at each other until one ship was destroyed. The game became more complex as Russell’s friends continued to modify it, with the most important additions being accurate gravity effects centered around a sun and a hyperspace function that would teleport the ship to a random part of the screen. DEC decided to distribute Spacewar! as a demo program with each PDP computer it sold, exposing university students across the country to the game. After Spacewar!, there was little advancement in computer games for the rest of the 1960s. While it is likely that other innovative games were created during this time period, no reliable method existed to distribute them across the country, as there was little standardization across computers and no good way to port games from one system to another. Spacewar! itself would likely not have become a national phenomenon (in university computer labs at least) if not for DEC’s decision to bundle the game with its computers. In the end, these games disappeared into oblivion as old machines broke down and old tape was erased.

In 1971, two Stanford University Students exposed to Spacewar! became the first individuals to release a commercial video game product when they hooked up a PDP-11 computer running Spacewar! to a monitor and a coin slot, named it Galaxy Game(Exhibit), and placed it in the student union with a cost of ten cents per game. After being briefly pulled for fixes, the game was in continuous operation from 1972 to 1979 when it was dismantled after the monitor began acting up. A far more important Spacewar! clone was created in 1971 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Bushnell had been exposed to Spacewar! at the University of Utah in the 1960s and also had a vision of arcades full of video games rather than mechanical ones developed after working a summer at an amusement park arcade. Through parts obtained from their employer, Ampex Corporation, Bushnell and Dabney constructed a custom dedicated system that played Spacewar! called Computer Space and then entered into a deal with a small coin-op company called Nutting Associates to create a production run of 1,500 units. The game had pages of instructions and complex controls and did not translate well from the computer lab to a mainstream audience, ending up a failure. Undaunted, Bushnell and Dabney established Atari Inc. on June 27, 1972 to continue making video arcade games.

While Nolan Bushnell was still in school, Ralph Baer, the head of the Equipment and Design Division of defense contractor Sanders Associates was able to pursue an idea he came up with during the early 1950s—the idea of playing a game on a television set. In 1966 he assembled a small team to make his concept a reality, and in 1967 they came up with a chase game in which a player represented by a dot chases another player represented by a dot through a maze. Next, a light gun was designed to shoot at a dot on the screen, and then paddles were added to manipulate the dot to create a tennis game. The final prototype was soon created that could play several games by using a series of switches to change the screen output and demonstrations were held for all the major television companies. Magnavox ended up buying the system and distributed it as the Magnavox Odyssey starting in 1972. Like the prototype, the system could play multiple games, mostly variations on the chase, shooting, and paddle games developed during design, but instead of switches, the Odyssey used circuit cards, which did not have the actual games programmed on them but controlled screen output. The system could not produce sound, had black-and-white graphics, and only contained enough processing power to create dots, paddles, and a few lines, so color overlays and accessories such as cards and dice were provided for some games. The controller consisted of three dials for horizontal movement, vertical movement, and spin, and a light gun shaped like a rifle was also sold separately. Retailing for around $100, the system was marketed poorly by Magnavox, which left consumers with the false impression that the system only worked on Magnavox televisions, and sold around 100,000 units over its lifetime, failing to carve out a meaningful place for itself in the market.

Shortly after founding Atari, Bushnell and Dabney hired Al Alcorn as the company’s first game engineer. At the time, Bushnell was working on a racing game using the physics of Computer Space and was attempting to interest pinball giant Bally Manufacturing in the game. Bushnell told Alcorn that Atari had a contract from General Electric for a ping-pong game and told him to design it. No such contract actually existed, but Bushnell considered a ping-pong game something easy to design to get Alcorn into the business. What Alcorn came back with was a tennis game in which the paddle was divided into segments to vary the angle of return and which sped up during long rallies to make them more exciting. Bushnell decided it was good enough to release and tried to talk Bally into taking it. Bally would not do so without a test run, so Bushnell set up a prototype in a bar. At one point, the machine stopped working because it was overstuffed with coins, and when Bushnell learned about this, he decided to sell it himself instead, a departure from Atari’s business model, which was to create the games and then license them to other companies for manufacturing and distribution. Named Pong, the game featured simple yet entertaining game play and therefore became an immediate success upon release in 1972, unlike the complex Computer Space. Atari sold at least 6,000 units of the game, more than the most popular pinball machines of the time could boast, and began the rise of the video game into mainstream culture. Those 6,000 machines represented only a third of the ball-and-paddle games on the market, however, as coin-op companies small and large soon released their own versions of Pong as well. Magnavox also took note of Pong, specifically the similarities between the game and its own tennis game on the Odyssey, and threatened to sue. Alcorn almost certainly did not steal from Magnavox when designing Pong, but it does appear that Bushnell attended a trade show and was exposed to the Odyssey before he assigned Alcorn the project.[citation needed] The companies soon settled, with Atari becoming the official arcade distributor of Pong in return for a modest fee. Soon after the release of Pong, Bushnell bought out Dabney to become sole owner of the company.
In 1973, Atari founded a rival company called Kee Games, headed by Bushnell’s second-in-command at Atari, Joe Keenan, that created clones of Atari products. Atari did so because arcade distributors of the day required exclusivity contracts for their areas of operation, limiting the reach of Atari’s products. Kee Games created the next big hit in video games in 1974, Tank, designed by Steve Bristow. Tank was a dueling game in which each player controlled a tank and had to negotiate a maze to destroy the tank of the other player and set off another wave of imitation when many other companies released one-on-one dueling games featuring both tanks and airplanes. The Atari/Kee Games relationship was kept a secret until uncovered in December of 1974. Tank was such a big hit, however, that everyone wanted to carry it and distributor exclusivity came to an end. The companies merged, with Joe Keenan becoming president of Atari. Atari was also responsible during this time for the first game to allow four-players (1973, Pong Doubles), the first game released as a waist-high "cocktail" cabinet (1974, Quadra Pong), the first arcade game involving pursuit in a maze (1973, Gotcha), the first driving/racing game (1974, Gran Trak 10), the first game with a scrolling playfield and a sit-down cabinet (1975, Hi-way), and the first first-person driving game (1976, Night Driver). Atari’s first big hit after Pong, however, was Breakout, essentially a single-player version of Pong in which the paddle is at the bottom of the screen and the player bounces a ball off the paddle to destroy bricks arrayed at the top of the screen. Released in 1975, Breakout sold 11,000 units.

While nearly every pinball company released a Pong clone in 1972 or 1973, very few companies remained dedicated to video game creation after that. The most important company was Bally Manufacturing, which released arcade games under its Midway label. Midway had its first big hit in 1975 with Gun Fight. Gun Fight was also the first Japanese video game imported into the American market, with Taito being the original creator of the game, which involved two cowboys on opposite sides of the screen dueling each other. Dave Nutting at Midway improved the graphics and added obstacles to the game, using the first microprocessor in an arcade game in the process, to create Midway’s hit version. In 1976, Nutting designed a submarine game called Sea Wolf, giving Midway a second hit that sold 10,000 units. Another company to tap into video games in the early days was California-based Gremlin, which had a big success in 1976 with Blockade, in which each player controlled a vehicle that drew lines on the screen and attempted to force the other player to crash into these lines. Japanese company Sega also got involved in 1976, creating the first boxing game, Heavyweight Champ, and one of the first motorcycle driving games, The Fonz. Sega and Gremlin began to jointly develop/release some games together starting in 1977, and in 1982, Sega purchased Gremlin outright in order to give itself a larger presence in the United States. 1976 also saw the first major protest against video game violence when a company called Exidy released Death Race in which the player had to run over "gremlins" that resembled human stick-figures. After an initial period of success, the video game market began to decline in late 1976 as the novelty of the games wore off.

Fonte del testo: Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera.

Negli ultimi anni i videogiochi nel mondo sono diventati l'intrattenimento più utilizzato dai giovani e non solo.

Questo successo (dovuto al gran numero di consolle immesse sul mercato e all'incredibile varietà di giochi disponibili), è destinato a non fermarsi almeno per il prossimo decennio.

Molte multinazionali si sono gettate nel mercato del videogioco (SONY MICROSOFT), e continuano ad investire somme da capogiro.