HISTORY OF GAMING
Rachel Davey

1960’s
This was the first console of the 60’s and it is called ‘Brown Box’
invented in 1967 it was a rectangular brown box with two attached
controllers. It was invented by Ralph H. Baer also known as the ‘father
of video games’ he developed the brown box so it could be hooked up
with any ordinary TV sets. There were only six simple games for the
console, namely ping –pong , tennis, handball, volleyball, chase games
and a light-gun game.

1970’S
• Although the first computer games appeared in the 1950s,they were
based around vector displays, not analog video. It was not until 1972 that
Magnavox released the first home video game console which could be
connected to a TV set-the Magnavox Odyssey, invented by Ralph H. Baer.
The Odyssey was initially only moderately successful, and it was not until
Atari's arcade game Pong popularized video games, that the public began
to take more notice of the emerging industry. By the autumn of 1975
Magnavox, bowing to the popularity of Pong, cancelled the Odyssey and
released a scaled down version that played only Pong and hockey, the
Odyssey 100

1980’S
• Throughout the early 1980s, other companies released video game
consoles of their own. Many of the video game systems were
technically superior to the Atari 2600, and marketed as improvements
over the Atari 2600. However, Atari dominated the console market in
the early 1980 In 1983, the video game business suffered a much
more severe crash. A flood of consoles, low quality video games by
smaller companies (especially for the 2600), industry leader Atari
hyping games such as E.T. and an 2600 Pac-man that were poorly
received, and a growing number of home computer users caused
consumers and retailers to lose faith and interest in video game
consoles

1990’S
• Sega and Nintendo would be discontinued in 1996.
• Nintendo released games like Donkey Kong Country that could display
a wide range of tones (something common in fifth-generation games)
by limiting the number of hues onscreen, and games like Star Fox that
used an extra chip inside of the cartridge to display polygon graphics.

2000
• Sony's PlayStation 2 was released in North America on October 26,
2000 as the follow-up to its highly successful PlayStation, and was
also the first home game console to be able to play DVDs. As was
done with the original PlayStation in 2000, Sony redesigned the
console in 2004 into a smaller version.

2001
• Microsoft's Xbox, released on November 15, 2001 in North America,
was the company's first video game console. The first console to
employ a hard drive right out of the box to save games, and had
similar hardware specifications to a low-end desktop computer at the
time of its release. Though criticized for its bulky size, which was
easily twice that of the competition, as well as for the awkwardness of
the original controller that shipped with it, it eventually gained
popularity due in part to the success of the Halo franchise. The Xbox
was the first console to include an Ethernet port and offered high
speed online gaming through the Xbox LIVE service.

2005
• Microsoft kicked off the seventh generation with the release of the
Xbox 360 released on November 22, 2005 in the United States. It
featured market leading processing power until the Sony PlayStation 3
release, one year later. While the original Xbox 360 "Core" did not
include an internal HDD, most Xbox 360 models since have included
at least the option to have one.

2006
• Sony's PlayStation 3 was released in Japan on November 11, 2006, in
North America on November 17, 2006 and in Europe on March
23, 2007. All PlayStation 3s come with a hard drive and are able to
play Blu-ray Disc games and Blu-ray Disc movies out of the box.
• The Nintendo Wii was released in North America on November
19, 2006, in Japan on December 2, 2006, in Australia on December
7, 2006, and in Europe on December 8, 2006. It is bundled with Wii
Sports and Wii Sports Resort in all regions except for Japan. Unlike
the other systems of the seventh generation, the Wii does not support
an internal hard drive, but instead uses 512 MB of internal Flash
memory and includes support for removable SD card storage.