VIDEO GAMES

Video-game consoles, small handheld game devices, and coin-operated arcade games are special computers built exclusively for playing games. To control the games, players can use joysticks, trackballs, buttons, steering wheels (for car-racing games), light guns, or specially designed controllers that include a joystick, direction pad, and several buttons or triggers. Goggles and other kinds of virtual reality headgear can provide three-dimensional effects in specialized games. These games attempt to give the player the experience of actually being in a jungle, the cockpit of an aeroplane, or another setting or situation.
The first video games, which consisted of little more than a few electronic circuits in a simplified computer, appeared in the early 1970s as coin-operated cabinet games in pubs and arcades. In 1972 the Atari Company introduced a game called Pong, based on table tennis. In Pong, a ball and paddles are represented by lights on the screen; the ball is set in motion and by blocking it with the paddles, players knock it back and forth across the screen until someone misses. Pong soon became the first successful commercial video game. Arcade games have remained popular ever since.
Also in 1972 the Magnavox Company introduced a home video-game machine called the Odyssey system. It used similar ball-and-paddle games in cartridge form, playable on a machine connected to a television. In 1977 Atari announced the release of its own home video-game machine, the Atari 2600. Many of the games played on the Atari system had originally been introduced as arcade games. The most famous included Space Invaders and Asteroids. In Space Invaders, players have to shoot down ranks of aliens as they march down the screen, while in Asteroids, users are required to destroy asteroids before they crash into their ship. The longer the player survives, the more difficult both games become. After Atari’s success with home versions of such games, other companies began to compete for shares of the fast-growing home video-game market. Major competitors included Coleco with its ColecoVision system, and Mattel with Intellivision. Some companies, particularly Activision, gained success solely by producing games for other companies’ video-game systems.
After several years of enormous growth, the home video-game business collapsed in 1983. The large number of games on offer confused consumers, and many video-game users were increasingly disappointed with the games they purchased. They soon stopped buying games altogether. Failing to see the danger the industry faced, the leading companies continued to spend a great deal of money on product development and advertising. Eventually, these companies ran out of money and left the video-game business.
Despite this decline, the arcade segment of the industry continued to thrive. Pac-Man, which appeared in arcades in 1980, was one of the major sensations of the time. In this game, players manoeuvre a button-shaped character with a large mouth around a maze full of tiny dots. The goal is to gobble up all the dots without being touched by one of four pursuing ghosts. Another popular game was Frogger, in which players try to guide a frog safely across a series of obstacles, including a busy road and a river.
In the mid-1980s, Nintendo, a Japanese company, introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The NES started a new boom in home video games, due primarily to two game series: Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. These and other games offered more advanced graphics and animation than earlier home video-game systems had, re-igniting the interest of game players. Once again, other companies joined the growing home video-game market. One of the most successful was Sega, also based in Japan. In the early 1990s, the rival video-game machines were Nintendo’s Super NES and Sega’s Genesis. These systems had impressive capabilities to produce realistic graphics, sound, and animation.
Throughout the 1990s Nintendo and Sega competed for dominance of the American home video-game market, and in 1995 another Japanese company, Sony, emerged as a strong competitor. Sega and Sony introduced new CD-ROM systems in 1995, the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation. A year later, Nintendo met this challenge with the cartridge-based Nintendo 64 system, which has even greater processing power than its competitors, meaning that faster and more complex games can be created. In 1998 Sega withdrew the Saturn system from the US market because of low sales.Microsoft Corporation joined the games console market in November 2001 with the launch of the Xbox in the United States, followed by Japan and Europe by March 2002. Xbox is the first console to feature a hard drive and also has a DVD-drive, CD-quality sound, and high-quality graphics; its critics claim that it is not a true gaming machine but a cut-down personal computer. In March 2003 Xbox Live—a subscription-based service that enables owners of the console to play games online through a broadband connection—was launched. Nintendo’s GameCube, a competitively priced alternative for younger game players, was introduced at around the same time as the Xbox. Both hoped to compete with Sony’s PlayStation 2, which hit the market in 2000 and cornered games sales in the early part of the century. In the spring of 2005 Sony unveiled its latest device, the PlayStation 3 (PS3) (due to be released in early 2006), while Nintendo is to reveal its Revolution machine. Keeping apace, Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 in the autumn of 2005. This new generation of devices promises realistic video as part of the gaming element among other innovations