Video Games

February 4, 2000

EA releases The Sims, the best-selling PC game in history. I guess people like pretending to be other people!

January 29, 1988

The computer game Tetris makes its first appearance in the United States as a PC game. The company that released the game was Spectrum Holobyte, which had dubious licensing rights to the game. When companies became interested in licensing Tetris for other platforms besides the PC, a series of events kicked off a long legal battle, in which the big winner was eventually Nintendo, who used the game Tetris to drive sales of its new Game Boy platform.

January 15, 1968

Ralph Baer, generally considered the father of the video game industry, applies for a patent on a TV game system he designed. This patent eventually leads to the Magnavox Odssey, the first home video game machine. Ralph Baer is also well-known for many other products such as the electronic game SIMON.

December 10, 1993

Video Game developer iD software releases the game DOOM. DOOM is considered one of the most influential titles in video game history, popularizing the first-person shooter genre with its “deathmatch” multi-player mode. Its use of graphic violence and satanic imagery also made the game controversial, which of course only served to increase DOOM’s popularity.

November 29, 1972

Atari introduces their first product, Pong, which would become the world’s first commercially successful video game. The story goes that Atari’s founder Nolan Bushnell installed the game at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale California on this day. Soon they were called by the bar owner complaining that the game stopped working. Upon investigating the problem, they found that the game was jammed with quarters. At least that is the legend but regardless there were 10,000 machines installed within 4 months.

The popularity of Pong sparked the beginning of the video game industry with Atari being the leader in both arcade and home video gaming through the early 1980’s.

November 23, 2004

Blizzard Entertainment releases the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft is currently the most popular online game in history.

November 19, 2006

Nintendo releases the Wii game console to compete with the Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360. By forgoing raw computing power for increased player interaction utilizing the innovative motion-sensitive “Wiimote” controller, the Wii defied expectations and became the best-selling seventh-generation game console.

October 18, 1985

Nintendo releases the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in New York and limited other North American markets. An immediate hit, Nintendo released the game nationwide in February 1986. Along with the NES, Nintendo released eighteen games that day, including: 10-Yard Fight, Baseball, Clu Clu Land, Donkey Kong Jr. Math, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, Golf, Gyromite, Hogan’s Alley, Ice Climber, Kung Fu, Mach Rider, Pinball, Stack-Up, Tennis, Wild Gunman, Wrecking Crew, and Super Mario Bros.

October 18, 1958

William Higinbotham and Robert Dvorak, Sr. show off a tennis simulator game they called Tennis for Two. Developed on a Donner Model 30 analog computer using an oscilloscope, it is the first known electronic game to use a graphical display. Higinbotham and Dvorak developed the game to show off to visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory where they worked. The game was only shown off twice, during the laboratory’s annual visitor’s day. While hundreds of visitors lined up to play the game when it was made available, little was known about the game for decades. While somewhat similar in gameplay to the later hit Pong, there is no known direct relationship between the games.