The Industry in a Blink: a History of Video Games

In order to fully understand the state of the industry now, I feel that it is important to review the history of the video game industry to illustrate its growth, and to help us understand the trends of today.

Let's start by defining what I mean by "the video game industry":
- The series of producers and developers of video games, in respect to the home/personal consumer.

By definition, I will be excluding the arcades, and for the purpose of this blog, anything before the "First Generation". So let's get our brief history started:

1972
• January: Magnavox releases the Odyssey, the very first home video game console. It was an impressive feat, but its games weren't really what we consider games today, instead, they were more like TV assisted board games, relying on colorful plastic overlays to give rules and goals. Commercially, the Odyssey failed.^[1]

1975
• Christmas Season: Atari, in conjunction with Sears, produces Pong, which becomes a major hit, despite the poor sales of the Odyssey. Atari later reproduced Pong branded under their own name, instead of under the Sears brand.^[1]

1977
• Due to the popularity of Atari's Pong, other developers began to produce their own versions of Pong. With so much of the same, the developers of these Pong consoles began selling at a loss, and for the first time, the industry experienced a crash.^[2]

1983
• The industry was now an actual industry, and there were a variety of consoles on the market, the biggest names, of course, being Atari with their 2600 and 5200 systems, and the Colecovision, manufactured by Coleco.^[3] Today, the Atari 5200 is notorious for its poor design, and at the time, commanded a higher price than the average consumer wished to pay. The lack of sales combined with an overall lack of quality software caused the much larger crash of 1983.^[1]

This particular crash is important for a variety of reasons, number one on that list being that it was the direct result of the market being over saturated with games that, to quote Roy D'Silva, "...were low on quality, high on advertising products which tried to bank on the popularity wave of video game consoles." This important concept will be covered in my next blog post, which will be tomorrow (Friday, October 24).


References:
[1] Roy D'Silva: History of Home Video Game Consoles (Accessed on October 25, 2012)
[2] Michael Miller, April 1, 2005: A History of Home Video Game Consoles (Page 1)
[3] Michael Miller, April 1, 2005: A History of Home Video Game Consoles (Page 3)