Targets Taped to the Glass
The earliest example of a video game dates to 1947, and it is gloriously primitive.
On 25 January that year, Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for a "cathode-ray tube amusement device". Inspired by radar displays, it let a user control the curving path of a dot on the screen to simulate firing a missile at targets. The targets were paper drawings fixed onto the screen, because the machine had no way to draw them.
What followed was a run of one-off experiments, each solving the display problem differently. The Nimrod computer at the 1951 Festival of Britain used a panel of lights to play Nim. OXO, a noughts and crosses game written in 1952, had an actual graphical display. Tennis for Two, built in 1958, used an oscilloscope to show a side view of a tennis court. And Spacewar!, written by MIT students on a DEC PDP-1 in 1962, used the machine's vector display to fly two spaceships against each other.
The Brown Box
The leap from laboratory curiosity to living room came from a man working at a defence contractor.
In 1966, while at Sanders Associates, Ralph H. Baer devised a way to play a basic table tennis game on an ordinary television. With his company's approval he built a prototype known as the Brown Box. Sanders patented his innovations and licensed them to Magnavox, who sold the result in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console.
Meanwhile Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney saw Spacewar! running at Stanford and built a cheaper version in a coin-operated cabinet. That became Computer Space in 1971, the first arcade video game and the first consumer video game of any kind. The two went on to found Atari.
In 1972 came Pong, and with it the beginning of the arcade golden age that ran to the early 1980s.
The Crash That Nearly Ended It
The first boom ended badly, and the numbers are brutal.
Atari, Mattel and Coleco had all released successful home consoles. Then publishers lost control of what was being released onto their platforms and the market flooded. The North American home video game market crashed in 1983, falling from revenues of around 3 billion dollars that year to 100 million by 1985. Many of the North American companies founded in the preceding years simply closed.
Japan's growing industry was briefly shaken but had enough depth to ride it out, and the consequence shaped everything after. By the late 1980s, consoles were dominated by Japanese companies: Nintendo, Sega, and later Sony.
The computer side went a different way, with Microsoft's operating systems increasingly dominating, and multiplayer online PC games seeding the earliest eSports scene. Arcades steadily lost their technical edge and faded by the end of the 1990s.
Bigger Than Film and Music Combined
As of 2020 the global video game market had estimated annual revenues of 159 billion US dollars across hardware, software and services.
For scale: that is three times the size of the global music industry and four times that of the film industry in 2019. The medium that spent decades being treated as a children's toy is now the heavyweight of the entertainment business.
Its influence runs into hardware too. Demand for better game performance has been a powerful driver of design and innovation in personal computer components, consoles and peripherals.
The shape of the industry keeps shifting. By the 2000s, Sega had left the console business and the landscape settled around Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, with the core industry centring on expensive AAA titles that left little room for risky or experimental work. Cheap digital distribution and fast internet then opened space for independent developers in the 2010s, while smartphones and emerging Asian markets pushed the audience toward casual play.
