• The first video games were created in major universities to advance scientific research and train students, according to our partner The Conversation.

  • It was not until the early 1970s that the first video game devices began to be distributed through the first home consoles, arcade machines or portable liquid crystal electronic games.

  • The analysis of this phenomenon was carried out by Julien Pillot, professor and researcher in Economics and Strategy at Inseec - professor and associate researcher at the University of Paris Saclay.

You are probably one of the millions of players around the world who have fun playing games such as

Fortnite

,

Mario

or

Fifa

, on media as varied as consoles, PCs or smartphones. But long before it became one of the very first cultural industries in the world, and a gigantic market, the video game was a most confidential innovation (very few people played).

Indeed, you must understand that the first computers were very expensive, very bulky and had ridiculous powers in comparison to the machines that you handle today.

This is why it will hardly surprise you that the first video games were created in large universities, not for fun, but to advance scientific research and train students.

VIDEO:

The evolution of video games from 1952 to 2018.

It was on the basis of these scientific research objectives and this rudimentary technological context that the first video games appeared.

For example, the oldest recorded electronic game is

Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device

(which means: cathode ray tube game device) and was invented by physicists Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Mann in 1947, there are over 70 years !

Drawing inspiration from military technology, it simulated artillery fire against virtual air fleets represented by dots on a screen.

Expensive technology

It was not until the early 1970s that the first video game devices were really distributed on a large scale, whether through the first home consoles, arcade machines, or portable liquid crystal electronic games.

Why ?

Because before that date, the technology was too expensive and had not yet been miniaturized enough to be accessible.

VIDEO:

This is what

Pong

looked like

, one of the first video games, does that make you want?

The birth of the consumer video game industry is probably to be positioned in 1972, when the American manufacturer Magnavox launched the first Odyssey game console, and the Atari company was created with the ambition to produce and market video terminals. arcade to be operated in arcades or bars.

The particularity of these two companies was to offer a ping-pong game in which each player, equipped with a joystick, directs a bar, symbolizing a racket, being able to move on a vertical axis on the screen, and must prevent a ball (represented by a pixel) to cross its screen.

The game, innovative and fun for the time, was a great commercial success.

A success first of all confidential

But beware !

We are far from the figures of the great successes of today.

Pong

, in its arcade version, has sold 10,000 copies, when

Home Pong

, its home console version was sold a few hundred thousand copies.

We are far from the 150 million copies of

MineCraft

passed, or the 200 million players of

Fortnite

 !

A landscape from the game MineCraft © Mojang AB via maxpixel.net (Creative Commons Zero - CC0)

But what you have to remember is that these great planetary successes of

Mario, Sonic, Tomb Raider, Halo, Call of Duty, Apex Legend

and other

Zelda

would never have been possible without these pioneers, scientists and manufacturers, who have developed the technologies necessary for the programming and then the democratization of video games.

Our file "VIDEO GAMES"

These pioneers were the first to understand that there was a significant market behind video game entertainment.

And it is because they made this somewhat crazy bet that they showed the way and inspired a whole generation of young developers who were going to give video games its golden letters in the 1980s. is already another story.

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»Asks Gabriel (7 years old)

This analysis was written by Julien Pillot, professor and researcher in Economics and Strategy at Inseec - professor and associate researcher at the University of Paris Saclay.


The original article was published on The Conversation website.

Declaration of interests

Julien Pillot is coordinator of the trans-partisan think tank "Le Jour d'Après" which intends to participate in debates on the structural reforms necessary for the modernization and efficiency of our social, economic and institutional model, by overcoming partisan divisions.

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