The History of Computer Games

Computer games are part of our lives. People love playing them. Do you know the history of computer games? It started with a man called Edward U. Condon. He designed a computer that played the game ‘Nim’. In this game, people tried to avoid picking up the last matchstick.

People continued to invent games. In 1959, at MIT, an American university, students created the ‘Mouse in the Maze’ game. Users first drew a maze with a light pen, then a mouse. This mouse searched for cheese. An American student, Steve Russel, invented the ‘Spacewar’ game in 1962. This game is important because it is the first computer-based video game. In 1972, Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn of Atari developed a tennis game. The name of this game was ‘Pong’. When they tested it in a café, it stopped working because people played it too much.

Al Alcorn is the creator of Atari games. He created the first Video Computer System in 1977. It was called the Atari 2600, and it had joysticks, games in colour, and difficulty levels. Toru Iwantani invented the well-known video game, Pac-Man, in 1980. This game became the best-selling game of all time. Computer games changed in 1995 when Sony released the PlayStation. Modern games started with the invention of Will Wright’s ‘The Sims’ and Sony’s PlayStation 2 in 2000.