Video Games: a Brief History

It all began in Japan in 1889 with the Marufuku Company that was founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi. By 1907 the company was manufacturing Western playing cards. The Nintendo Playing Card Company became the company's new name in 1951. "Nintendo" means "leave luck to heaven" in Japanese. Over the next 80 years, several companies were formed and were instrumental in creating video games. The five largest companies who pioneered the video game industry are Nintendo, Atari, Sony, Microsoft and Sega.

In the beginning, Philips established a company to manufacture incandescent lamps and other electrical products while Panasonic/Bell Labs worked on a mini transistor radio. Coleco began selling a plastic-forming machine and Sony became a big success selling transistor radios in Japan.

Loral, A company that manufactured complex military electronics built the first interactive game for use on a television set. Sega was formed and produced coin-operated games and a Tokyo jukebox company. The Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York invented the first table-tennis like game and displayed it on a 15-inch monitor. The inventor, physicist Higinbotham didn't patent the device. Ten years later, in 1968, a defense contractor for the military, Ralph Baer, succeeded in creating an interactive video tennis game and modified a toy gun. He patented the video tennis game and got the credit for inventing it.

Also in the 1960's, an MIT student, Steve Russell, invented "Spacewar", the first interactive computer game. It was a Digital PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) minicomputer which displayed CRT screen graphics. Russell never profited from his "Spacewar" game. Another student at the University of Utah's engineering school, Nolan Bushnell, saw Steve Russell's "Spacewar" game three years later while working at a carnival arcade and envisioned an arcade filled with computer games. He believed his dream would never come true because he thought it would be much too expensive to make his idea a reality.