Everything has a beginning, and as strange as it may seem, those games with millions of polygons and incredible textures that you are used to playing on brand new next generation consoles also had a beginning. Since the first video game (Pong) the world has changed a lot. Both the graphics and the sound, as well as the plot of current video games have evolved surprisingly fast and in a sensational way, and although it can be said that the first video game appeared about 50 years ago, the origins of this fantastic world go back much further, as well as the companies that founded it.
Without further ado, LET THE STORY BEGIN:
The beginning:
The first video game was invented in the year 1958, its author Bill Nighinbottham, is therefore the first video game programmer in history and to him we owe that consoles exist. But for him it was not so important to create his game (in which he did not invest more than a week): it was a representation of a very poor tennis game that he presented to a scientific fair in his city, he called it Tennis for two and although at the fair the invention aroused much interest he did not consider that it would take him anywhere and therefore he did not bother to register it. Taking advantage of Nighinbottham's mistake in 1972, Nolan Bushnell founded a company called Atari and published the game under the name Pong. Who doesn't know the famous game with the little square pretending to be a ball and the two sticks pretending to be rackets? (left). Well, this is the first of the first, the very first video game. Pong.
But although Pong was the first game, it was not the first to see the light of day. The first commercial arcade game came out a year earlier and was created by Nolan Bushnell himself before founding Atari. It was a game for 1 or 2 players and it was called Computer Space. The evolution began to be noticed 4 years later, in 1975, with the release of the first color game, Indi 800, which allowed 8 players to play simultaneously. It was also an Atari game.
A year later Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both Atari programmers, developed a game that, like Pong, has gone down in history as one of the great classics. What almost nobody knows is that this game was only a single-player version of the already well-known Pong: Breakout (right), the famous brick game. In 1978 the two Steves founded Apple Computer independent of Atari and so, thanks to Pong, the friendly apple (Apple logo) has now become the best known brand in the computer universe.
But let's go back even further, to the Middle Ages (well, not so much) to the year 1889, more than 115 years ago. -Why so far back? you may be asking yourself. Well, read on...
In Kyoto (Japan) a company manufactured cards for the Japanese game Hanafunda (handmade cards, very detailed and very beautiful, by the way). The company was none other than Nintendo (yes, the same Nintendo that created Mario Sunshine or Metroid Prime!). The founder was the great-grandfather of the current president: Fusajiro Yamauchi. In a few years the business was expanding and by the 40's the cards were already distributed in American lands, maintaining the success that was growing. Soon they signed agreements with Disney and other companies to add their designs to the playing cards and little by little Nintendo became big. In the 60's they began to distribute toys and in 1975, associated with Mitsubisi, Nintendo began to create the closest thing to a video game. Finally, 3 years later they released their first consoles: TV Game 15 and TV Game 16 with typical games like tennis, cars... etc. In 1980 the Game and Watch, (today collector's items) the first portable consoles in the world, precursors of the Game Boy, began to be distributed.
That same year Shigeru Miyamoto, a young Nintendo programmer created for arcade the now also super classic Donkey Kong (below) (who doesn't know it?). The main character was a little monkey named Jumpman who had to jump over barrels to reach his beloved Princess, kidnapped by a giant monkey. As a result of the tremendous success of the game, Jumpman changed his name to Mario, and? and things of life, the plumber Mario is one of the most famous characters in the world of video games and Nintendo's mascot ever since.
Thank you for reading ®