In 1958, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton New York, a man by the name of William Higinbotham created a game called “tennis program” or more popularly known as “tennis for 2”. The game was played on an oscilloscope attached to an analog computer. Even though it was very basic, and boring by today’s standards, the game is considered to be the very first video game ever created. Three later in 1961, a group of MIT students wanting to prove the power of their self-created computer, created a game called space war. The leading programmer for the game, Steve Russel, has become credited as the man who se

t the stage for video games, because his program became the first electronic game to be circulated from computer lab to computer lab across the world. Then in 1966, The US government decided to fund a project where video games would be created in order to be used strictly as military training tools, and not for consumer electronics. Just to prove how serious of a project this really was it is now known that it was even labeled as “TOP SECRET”. Although the US government had no intention of ever creating a consumer market for video gaming one company did. The same year a company known as SEGA released the first arcade game, an electronic shooting gallery game called Periscope.

While the home gaming counsel market started to fade away, In 1983 Nintendo released their first counsel known as “Family Computer” (Famicom) in Japan. Even though the gaming market was collapsing around them Nintendo managed to sell 500,000 Famicom units in the first 2 months of its release. In 1984 Atari stopped production of their VCS system and decided to focus all their attention on computers rather than the gaming industry. This left Nintendo as the sole survivor of a genocide where they were the only one’s left standing. They began developing a new version of their Famicom system NES or otherwise known as Nintendo. They designed the system to have more of the look of a video component rather than the toy image that previous systems had had. It was 8 bits, it was about the size of three Encyclopedia books stacked together, was grey in color, had a slot on the top left corner for the games to be inserted inside, had a reset button and a power button located on the lower left hand side, and two controller ports located on the right hand side of the system. It even had a special lockout chip that only let licensed manufacturers release games that worked for the system. The game cartridges were oddly shaped squares with groves on the front side, and a chip located on the rear end. You would simply place the cartridge inside the Nintendo push down and play your game. Some of the early successful games for the system were Super Mario Brothers and Duck hunt. Duck hunt even had a gun used along with the game as a controller. However the basic controllers for the system were small and rectangular shaped with 4 buttons, An ‘A’ button, a “B” button, and “Start and Select” buttons. The controllers also contained a directional pad that was the source of control throughout the games, making it the first system to use a directional pad instead of joystick technology.

While SEGA had made advances into the arcade game industry, by the early 70s there still wasn’t a home based video gaming counsel of any sort. While most people involved with the gaming industry, around that time, knew that the creation of a home gaming counsel was very possible, they questioned whether or not there was any future in it. After all, the very fi

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