The Arcade Games:

We all remember the old and retro arcade games such as Pac-Man, Pong, Space Invaders, and many others; and if you don't, go and play them!

I already talked about the first arcade game and the first mass produced arcade in my first post. Today I'm going to continue what I started.

As I said in my first post, The Galaxy Game, which was created in 1971, was the first arcade to exist.
After that we have Computer Space, which was the first mass produced arcade game. It was released in 1971.

One year after the release of Computer Space, the famous game company Atari released their most known game, Pong, which was a complete success. This was on of the most successful arcade games during the 1970's and it helped to show people that games had.

Pong - the video game arcade

URL:http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Pong

Gunfight (1975) was the first Japanese arcade game to be sold in America. The game emulated the figths typical from western movies and it was for two players.
The new version created by Midway was the first game to ever use a microprocessor.

Breakout (1976) is US game by Atari. It is part of "games geography" due to that it was created by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (founders of apple). This was their last game before they decided to leave games and go for computers.
Many remakes and new versions of this game were made, but the best one and most famous one is called Arkanoid. 

 Arkanoid - remake from Breakout by Taito

URL: http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=Arkanoid-23673

One of the most important arcade games by far is Space Invaders (1978). This game from Taito literary turned all of Japan mad when it came out. 

The Japanese government needed to duplicate the fabrication of the coins for this arcade game due to that they ended up having a shortage of them.

Inspired by the success of Space invaders, Atari released Asteroids (1979). It was a success in the US, but nothing close to the Space invaders' madness. 

Space Invaders - video game by Taito

URL: http://spaceinvaders.mosaic.free.fr/

And last but not worst, the most famous arcade game of history, Pac-Man (1980). 

This game was designed by Tor Iwatani for Nancom, and it was based on an old Japanese tale.

It became so famous that it became the icon of the 1980's and of games. 

There are millions of new versions of this game, and after so many years, this simple game is still addicting and fun to play.

Pac-Man - Nancom's arcade video game

URL: http://gamesdbase.com/game/sinclair-zx-spectrum/pac-man.aspx

There are a few more "important" arcade games which I didn't talk about in this post, but I think that the ones I talked about will do the job.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them and I'll answer them as well as I can.

Today I wanted to talk about arcade games, but I received a message asking me about the origins of games, and why they were and are so big in the US and Japan. I discovered that the amount of things I could say about this is amazing, so I decided to write a post about it.

The simplest way to explain this is by talking about the first gaming companies. This were mainly Atari, Taito, Sega, Nintendo and Konami.

Atari was one of the first ones. It was created in 1972. During that year they released the very well known game "pong", which made Atari very famous. This company showed the potential games could end up having and encouraged other people to join to this new market.

Extra Info:
Another company that came out from Atari is a famous computer company or "phone" company called apple.

Atari Video Game company - URL of the image: http://www.giantbomb.com/atari/3010-182/

Another company that was created in america was Service Games. This company was moved to Japan and in 1965 they merged with Rosen Enterprises to create SEGA. SEGA created the fantastic saga called Sonic; saga that is still being continued till the present day.

The other three companies (Nintendo, Taito and Konami) were created in Japan.

Nintendo was created in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi and it's main purpose was the creation of playing cards until the early 1970's. 

Nintendo is very well known for the quality gaming consoles that they put into the market.

Right now Nintendo is one of the biggest and wealthiest gaming companies in the world.

Taito was a company created by Michael Kogan which was mainly in charge of the rental of jukebox machines. Taito became very famous after they released the arcade game called space invaders.

Konami was another jukebox rental company created by Kagemasa Kozuki in 1969. Kozuri changed the company into a game company in 1973. Their first game didn't appear until 1978. They created the new version for space invaders and pong at first, but as time passed their games started to get more and more creative. Frogger was their biggest success, and which made this company one of the "big ones" for the video game market.

Frogger - Konami video game

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okm0VtF2gH8

The first games:


On today's blog I want to start talking about the first games.
I myself don't know much about the first games, so I have found myself looking up things such as "the first games" on the Internet.

I found out that as in many other occasions, Wikipedia is wrong. It says that the cathode ray tube amusement device is the first game to ever be invented, which is a wrong statement due to that it wasn't a video game (not fully, at least). In  other websites such as "how-to geek" and "infoplease" I found out that the REAL first game was tennis for two, invented in 1985 by William Higinbothan.

Mr Higinbothan (Higin to his friends) realised how boring the science exhibits were at the time, and decided to change that by creating something more interactive that people could play.
Higin's game used a oscilloscope screen to display the game.

Here is a link to an online version of the game, in case any of you might want to try T.F.T. Click here

Representation of tennis for two on the present day using an oscilloscope.
URL of the image: http://www.m-e-g-a.org/research-education/research/t42-tennis-for-two/

Another important early games are Spacewar by Steve Russell and Computer Space by Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell (the future founders of Atari in 1972).

In 1972 Magnavox released Odyssey, the first home video game system.

Magnavox Odyssey - 1972 promotional film

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2EIsnr_cv4

Atari, the creator of pong, was founded also during 1972.

Gunfight was released in 1975, becoming the first game that used a microprocessor instead of hardwired solid-state circuits.

Above all of these minor improvements since TFT, the most important improvement in the video game industry was the creation of The Galaxy Game (1971), the first arcade game to ever exist. We should also give a bit of its merit to Computer Space (1971), a version of Spacewar! that became the first mass produced arcade game.

First things first. My name is José, and this is my blog.
On this blog I'll be mainly writing about games and their changes over the years.
I'll also write about the impact of consoles on the different games, and about the different genres of games.