When the Industrial Revolution swept Western civilization two centuries ago, the technological advances involved weren’t simply about mass production. They also promoted mass consumption and the emergence of leisure time—both of which created moneymaking opportunities for media makers. By the late nineteenth century, the availability of leisure time had sparked the creation of mechanical games like pinball. Technology continued to grow, and by the 1950s, computer science students in the United States had developed early versions of the video games we know today.

In their most basic form, digital games involve users in an interactive computerized environment where they strive to achieve a desired outcome. These days, most digital games go beyond a simple competition like the 1975 tennis-style game of Pong: They often entail sweeping narratives and offer imaginative and exciting adventures, sophisticated problem-solving opportunities, and multiple possible outcomes.

But the boundaries were not always so varied. Digital games evolved from their simplest forms in the arcade into four major formats: television, handheld devices, computers, and the Internet. As these formats evolved and graphics advanced, distinctive types of games emerged and became popular. These included action games, sports games, shooter games, family entertainment games, role-playing games, adventure games, racing games, strategy games, fighting games, simulation games, computerized versions of card games, fantasy sports leagues, and virtual social environments. Together, these varied formats constitute an industry that analysts predict will reach $111 billion in annual revenues worldwide by 2015—and one that has become a socially driven mass medium.4

Mechanical Gaming

In the 1880s, the seeds of the modern entertainment industry were planted by a series of coin-operated contraptions devoted to cashing in on idleness. First appearing in train depots, hotel lobbies, bars, and restaurants, these leisure machines (also called “counter machines”) would find a permanent home in the first thoroughly modern indoor playground: the penny arcade.5

Arcades were like nurseries for fledgling forms of amusement that would mature into mass entertainment industries during the twentieth century. For example, automated phonographs used in arcade machines evolved into the jukebox, while the kinetoscope (see Chapter 7) set the stage for the coming wonders of the movies. But the machines most relevant to today’s electronic gaming were more interactive and primitive than the phonograph and kinetoscope. Some were strength testers that dared young men to show off their muscles by punching a boxing bag or arm wrestling a robotlike Uncle Sam. Others required more refined skills and sustained play, such as those that simulated bowling, horse racing, and football.6

Another arcade game, the bagatelle, spawned the pinball machine, the most prominent of the mechanical games. In pinball, players score points by manipulating the path of a metal ball on a playfield in a glass-covered case. In the 1930s and 1940s, players could control only the launch of the ball. For this reason, pinball was considered a sinister game of chance that, like the slot machine, fed the coffers of the gambling underworld. As a result, pinball was banned in most American cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.7 However, pinball gained mainstream acceptance and popularity after World War II with the addition of the flipper bumper, which enables players to careen the ball back up the play table. This innovation transformed pinball into a challenging game of skill, touch, and timing—all of which would become vital abilities for video game players years later.

The First Video Games

Not long after the growth of pinball, the first video game patent was issued on December 14, 1948, to Thomas T. Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann for what they described as a “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device.” The invention would not make much of a splash in the history of digital gaming, but it did feature the key component of the first video games: the cathode ray tube (CRT).

CRT-powered screens provided the images for analog television and for early computers’ displays, where the first video games appeared a few years later. Computer science students developed these games as novelties in the 1950s and 1960s. But because computers consisted of massive mainframes at the time, the games couldn’t be easily distributed.

However, more and more people owned televisions, and this development provided a platform for video games. The first home television game, called Odyssey, was developed by German immigrant and television engineer Ralph Baer. Released by Magnavox in 1972 and sold for a whopping $100, Odyssey used player controllers that moved dots of light around the screen in a twelve-game inventory of simple aiming and sports games. From 1972 until Odyssey’s replacement by a simpler model (the Odyssey 100) in 1975, Magnavox sold roughly 330,000 consoles.8

In the next decade, a ripped-off version of one of the Odyssey games brought the delights of video gaming into modern arcades. These establishments gather multiple coin-operated games together and can be thought of as a later version of the penny arcade. The same year that Magnavox released Odyssey, a young American computer engineer named Nolan Bushnell formed a video game development company, called Atari, with a friend. The enterprise’s first creation was Pong, a simple two-dimensional tennis-style game, with two vertical paddles that bounced a white dot back and forth. The game kept score on the screen. Unlike Odyssey, Pong made blip noises when the ball hit the paddles or bounced off the sides of the court. Pong quickly became the first video game to become popular in arcades.

In 1975, Atari began successfully marketing a home version of Pong through an exclusive deal with Sears. The arrangement established the home video game market. Just two years later, Bushnell started the Chuck E. Cheese pizza–arcade restaurant chain and sold Atari to Warner Communications for an astounding $28 million. Although Atari folded in 1984, plenty of companies—including Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft—followed its early lead, transforming the video game business into a full-fledged industry.

Arcades and Classic Games

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, games like Asteroids, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong filled arcades and bars, competing directly with traditional pinball machines. In a way, arcades signaled electronic gaming’s potential as a social medium, because many games allowed players to play with or compete against each other, standing side by side. To be sure, arcade gaming has been superseded by the console and computer. But the industry still attracts fun-seekers to businesses like Dave and Buster’s, a gaming–restaurant chain operating in more than fifty locations, as well as to amusement parks, malls, and casinos.

To play the classic arcade games, as well as many of today’s popular console games, players use controllers like joysticks and buttons to interact with graphical elements on a video screen. With a few notable exceptions (puzzle games like Tetris, for instance), these types of video games require players to identify with a position on the screen. In Pong, this position is represented by an electronic paddle; in Space Invaders, it’s an earthbound shooting position. After Pac-Man, the avatar (a graphic interactive “character” situated within the world of the game) became the most common figure of player control and position identification. In the United States, the most popular video games today assume a “first-person” perspective, in which the player “sees” the virtual environment through the eyes of an avatar. In South Korea and other Asian countries, many real-time strategy games take an elevated “three-quarters” perspective, which affords a grander and more strategic vantage point on the field of play.

Consoles and Advancing Graphics

Today, many electronic games are played on home consoles, devices specifically used to play video games. These systems have become increasingly more powerful since the appearance of the early Atari consoles in the 1970s. One way of charting the evolution of consoles is to track the number of bits (binary digits) that they can process at one time. The bit rating of a console is a measure of its power at rendering computer graphics. The higher the bit rating, the more detailed and sophisticated the graphics. The Atari 2600, released in 1977, used an 8-bit processor, as did the wildly popular Nintendo Entertainment System, first released in Japan in 1983. Sega Genesis, the first 16-bit console, appeared in 1989. In 1992, 32-bit computers appeared on the market; the following year, 64 bits became the new standard. The 128-bit era dawned with the marketing of Sega Dreamcast in 1999. With the current generation of consoles, 256-bit processors are the standard.

Of course, more detailed graphics have not always replaced simpler games. Nintendo, for example, offers many of its older, classic games for download onto its newest consoles even as updated versions are released, for the nostalgic gamers as well as new fans. Perhaps the best example of enduring games is the Super Mario Bros. series. Created by Nintendo mainstay Shigeru Miyamoto in 1983, the original Mario Bros. game began in arcades. The 1985 sequel Super Mario Bros., developed for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, became the best-selling video game of all time (holding this title until 2009, when it was unseated by Nintendo’s Wii Sports). Graphical elements from the Mario Bros. games, like the “1UP” mushroom that gives players an extra life, remain instantly recognizable to gamers of all ages. Some even appear on nostalgic T-shirts, as toys and cartoons, and in updated versions of newer games.

Through decades of ups and downs in the electronic gaming industry (Atari folded in 1984, and Sega no longer makes video consoles), three major home console makers now compete for gamers: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Nintendo has been making consoles since the 1980s; Sony and Microsoft came later, but both companies were already major media conglomerates and thus well positioned to support and promote their interests in the video game market.

Nintendo released a new kind of console, the Wii, in 2006. The device supported traditional video games like New Super Mario Bros. However, it was the first of the three major consoles to add a wireless motion-sensing controller, which took the often-sedentary nature out of gameplay. Games like Wii Sports require the user to mimic the full-body motion of bowling or playing tennis, while Wii Fit uses a wireless balance board for interactive yoga, strength, aerobic, and balance games. Although the Wii has lagged behind Xbox and PlayStation in establishing an online community, its controller enabled a host of games that appealed to broader audiences, and upon its release, it became the best-selling of the three major console systems. In 2012, Nintendo introduced the Wii U, which features the GamePad: a controller with an embedded touchscreen, on which games can be played without a television set (making it like a handheld video player).

Veteran electronics manufacturer Sony has the PlayStation series, introduced in 1994. Its current console, the PlayStation 4 (PS4, launched in 2013), boasts more than 110 million users on its free online PlayStation Network. Sony’s PlayStation Plus is a paid subscription service that adds additional features, such as game downloads, to the PlayStation Network. Sony introduced PlayStation Move, its handheld remote motion-sensing controller, in 2010.

Microsoft’s first foray into video game consoles was the Xbox, released in 2001; it was linked to the Xbox LIVE online service in 2002 and released as Xbox 360 in 2005. Xbox LIVE lets its 48 million subscribers play online and enables users to download new content directly to its console. In 2013, Microsoft released the Xbox One, with an upgraded Kinect (a motion-sensing controller first introduced in 2010), as an advanced gaming device and voice-controlled entertainment system. By 2014, Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One were the most popular of the new generation of consoles, with the Wii U lagging in third place in sales.

Each of the three major digital game consoles has its niche. Sony’s PlayStation is mostly about gaming, although like the other two consoles, it offers television entertainment features. Microsoft’s Xbox is also about gaming, but Microsoft also wants its console to be the entertainment hub of the house. Wii features more devices and family-oriented games (the Super Mario Bros. are still an omnipresent franchise for Nintendo). All three of the consoles have motion-controlled sensors, online networks, and Internet entertainment links to services like Netflix and Hulu.

Although the major consoles share some game content, not every popular game is multiplatform (that is, one that is released on all three platforms)—so game offerings become a major selling point for a particular system. For example, Destiny (by Activision Blizzard), Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (by Ubisoft), and Child of Light (by Ubisoft) come in versions for all three consoles (and personal computers running Microsoft Windows, too). But the console makers also create or license games just for their own platform: Titanfall and Halo 5: Guardians for the Xbox One, inFAMOUS Second Son for the PlayStation 4, and Mario Kart 8 for the Wii.

Gaming on Home Computers

Like the early console games, very early home computer games often mimicked (and sometimes ripped off) popular arcade games, like Frogger, Centipede, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders. Computer-based gaming also featured certain genres not often seen on consoles, like digitized card and board games. The early days of the personal computer saw the creation of electronic versions of games like Solitaire, Hearts, Spades, and Chess, all simple games still popular today. But for a time in the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, personal computers held some clear advantages over console gaming. The versatility of keyboards, compared with the relatively simple early console controllers, allowed for ambitious puzzle-solving games like Myst. Moreover, faster processing speeds gave some computer games richer, more detailed three-dimensional (3-D) graphics. Many of the most popular early first-person shooter games, like Doom and Quake, were developed for home computers rather than consoles.

As consoles caught up with greater processing speeds and disc-based games in the late 1990s, elaborate personal computer games attracted less attention. But more recently, PC gaming has experienced a resurgence, due to the advent of free-to-play games (like Spelunky and League of Legends), subscription games (such as World of Warcraft and Diablo 3), and social media games (such as Candy Crush Saga on Facebook)—all trends aided by the Internet. With powerful processors for handling rich graphics, and more stable Internet connectivity for downloading games or playing games via social media sites and other gaming sites, personal computers can adeptly handle a wide range of activities.