Video games grew from a spare-time project on a room-sized lab computer into a global industry, and the path between is full of surprises: a console born from a scrapped partnership, a solo hobby that became the best-selling game ever made, and a landlord who still was not quite sure why a video game plumber carried his name. These thirty-six stories move through the consoles, games, creators and milestones that got the industry here, correcting a few cherished legends on the way.
Every tile in a Video Games game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Consoles
nine stories
1A console with no color, so it borrowed some
On the tile: Odyssey1972
The Magnavox Odyssey reached stores in September 1972 as the first home video game console, built from an idea engineer Ralph Baer had sketched six years earlier. Its display could only show a few white blocks and a line, so Magnavox shipped translucent plastic overlays that clung to the television screen by static, painting on a tennis court, a haunted house or a roulette wheel depending on the game. The system sold 69,000 units in its first year and 350,000 by the time Magnavox discontinued it in 1975.
After the 1983 crash, American retailers wanted nothing to do with video games, so Nintendo avoided the term entirely. The 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System hid its cartridge slot behind a front-loading door styled like a videocassette recorder, and Nintendo called cartridges Game Paks and the machine a Control Deck. A toy robot named R.O.B., which nudged pieces during two special games, gave toy buyers something to point to besides a video game console. The disguise worked, and stores agreed to stock it as a novelty toy instead.
3Built from a partnership Nintendo walked away from
On the tile: PlayStation1991-1995
Sony and Nintendo spent years building a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo, tentatively called the Play Station. At the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, Nintendo announced a rival deal with Philips instead, catching Sony off guard on the show floor. Sony's engineers pressed ahead on their own, and in December 1994 released a console in Japan under the name left over from the abandoned add-on. It reached the United States the following September, having grown out of a partnership its rival had just walked away from.
When Nintendo designed the Game Boy, engineer Gunpei Yokoi rejected the newest chips in favor of cheap, well-understood ones, a philosophy he called lateral thinking with withered technology. The 1989 handheld ran in four shades of gray-green on a screen that could blur a falling object, and it needed four AA batteries. Sega's Game Gear answered with a backlit color screen that drained six batteries in three to five hours, while the Game Boy kept playing for roughly 30. Bundled with Tetris, it outsold every flashier handheld built to beat it.
Every other home console of the early 1980s plugged into a television, but the Vectrex carried a nine-inch monitor built directly into its case, drawing sharp vector lines instead of the blocky pixels raster consoles produced elsewhere. Players could still snap on translucent color overlays for extra atmosphere. It launched in late 1982 for 199 dollars, remaining the only home console ever built around a dedicated vector display, but the video game crash arrived within a year. Milton Bradley cut its price twice, lost more than 30 million dollars, and discontinued it in 1984.
Coleco's 1982 console had hardware strong enough to reproduce arcade games at home, but its boldest move was business, not engineering. Rather than sell Nintendo's arcade hit Donkey Kong separately, Coleco paid 200,000 dollars up front plus two dollars a unit for the rights and packed a copy in with every ColecoVision. It worked: more than 500,000 systems sold by Christmas 1982, and sales passed a million in early 1983. An add-on module let the console play Atari 2600 cartridges too, which brought a patent suit from Atari that ended with Coleco licensed under its rival's patents.
SNK built the Neo Geo AES around the same hardware as its arcade cabinets, so a game looked and played the same whether it was fed quarters or plugged in at home. That accuracy came at a price: the console reached Japan in 1990 and American stores in 1991 at 649.99 dollars, the most expensive home console released to that point once inflation is counted, with cartridges around 200 dollars each. The Neo Geo never reached a mass audience, but no other machine of its day brought the arcade home so exactly.
When the Wii launched in the United States in November 2006 at 250 dollars, it was the least powerful major console of its generation: roughly 1.5 to 2 times as capable as the five-year-old GameCube, with no high-definition output while the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 chased sharper detail. Nintendo bet instead on a motion-sensing remote and the bundled Wii Sports, aiming at people who had never owned a console, mothers included. The bet paid off: the Wii sold 101.63 million units, Nintendo's best-selling home console until the Switch passed it in 2021.
9Named for the technology it was built to showcase
On the tile: Xbox2001
Microsoft's console started life as an internal pitch nicknamed the DirectX Box, after the graphics software it was built to showcase, and the name was simply shortened over email. When it launched in November 2001, it shipped with a controller so large it earned the nickname the Duke, the result of a circuit board that arrived from a supplier bigger than engineers had planned for. Bill Gates himself sold the first unit at a midnight event in Times Square. Microsoft redesigned the controller within a year, but the Xbox name never changed.
Spacewar took about 200 hours to write, roughly six weeks. Steve Russell, a former MIT research assistant, and friends from the MIT computer crowd finished it in 1962 on a PDP-1, a machine listing at $120,000, cheap beside the million-dollar mainframes of the day. Two ships circled an astronomically correct starfield, pulled by a central star's gravity, and fired torpedoes the gravity ignored. Players steered with control boxes they wired themselves. Digital Equipment Corporation liked it enough to demonstrate it for customers and to print a brochure in 1963 about the game and the computer.
Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell handed engineer Allan Alcorn a simple table-tennis project mainly to see what he could do with it, since Alcorn had never worked on a video game before. The prototype went into Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale in 1972, and before long the bar called to report it was broken. Alcorn opened the cabinet and found the coin mechanism jammed, stuffed so full of quarters that it could not take another one. What began as practice became Atari's first product and the first commercially successful video game.
3A homework assignment that outlived its classroom
On the tile: Oregon Trail1971
Don Rawitsch was student-teaching an eighth-grade history class in Minneapolis in 1971 when he needed a lesson on westward expansion. He started drawing a trail game on paper until his Carleton College roommates, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, suggested programming it instead. The three wrote it on a teletype terminal with no graphics, just typed choices about oxen and river crossings, and it debuted in Rawitsch's classroom that December. Minnesota's state computing agency later adopted and expanded it, turning a two-week class project into one of the most played educational games ever made.
Will Crowther was a programmer and an avid caver who had helped map Kentucky's Mammoth Cave with his wife, Patricia. After their marriage ended, he wrote a program his two daughters could play when they visited: cave rooms described in plain text, explored by typing short commands. He worked on Colossal Cave Adventure across 1975 and 1976, and it spread over the ARPANET to universities and companies. It became the first well-known adventure game, and cavers say much of Crowther's original map matches the real Bedquilt section of the cave.
The story goes that Toru Iwatani looked at a pizza with a slice taken out and saw a hungry yellow circle. He has told that version for decades, but in a 1986 interview he said it was only partly true: the shape also came from rounding off kuchi, the Japanese character for mouth. The design goal is not in doubt. Iwatani wanted a cheerful game about eating rather than shooting, one that might draw women and couples into the arcades, and the 1980 result gave games one of their most recognizable characters.
Alexey Pajitnov built Tetris in 1984 on an Elektronika 60 at a Soviet computing center, which meant the state, not Pajitnov, controlled who could sell it. A broker named Robert Stein sold rights to British and American publishers that he had never actually secured. The tangle grew until publisher Henk Rogers flew to Moscow, talked his way into Elorg, the agency with a monopoly on Soviet software exports, and came away with the handheld rights for Nintendo. Atari Games, licensed through the muddled chain, had to pull its own Tetris cartridges from stores in 1989 under a federal injunction.
7The carpenter named after a landlord chasing rent
On the tile: Donkey Kong1981Legend
In 1981, Nintendo's American arm was renting a Tukwila, Washington warehouse from a local developer named Mario Segale. The story goes that Segale turned up demanding overdue rent just as staff were naming the carpenter who dodges the barrels in their new arcade game, Donkey Kong, and they named him on the spot. A former Nintendo warehouse manager later told it differently, calling the name an office joke about a landlord nobody had met. Either way, Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed in 2015 that Mario was named for Segale, who once remarked that he was still waiting for his royalty checks.
8The cartridge that remembered, so players did not have to
On the tile: Zelda1987
Console games too long to finish in one sitting used to send players off with a password to copy down and retype later. When The Legend of Zelda reached American stores in 1987, its cartridge hid something else: a button-cell battery and a memory chip that held a saved game with the power off. It was the first console game sold in North America with an internal battery for saving progress. The idea suited a game built for wandering and mapmaking, and by the early 1990s battery saves were common.
id Software gave away the first of Doom's three episodes in 1993 and let anyone copy it onto a bulletin board or a floppy disk and hand it to a friend. Buyers had to order the rest from id directly. The giveaway traveled further than store shelves could have: by June 1996, id's Jay Wilbur put the number of shareware downloads at 20 million. The four-player mode picked up a name along the way. John Romero called those chaotic sessions deathmatch, and the word stuck to competitive shooters ever after.
1Seven prototypes between a sketch and a store shelf
On the tile: Ralph Baer1966
German-born engineer Ralph Baer was waiting at a New York bus terminal on September 1, 1966, when an old idea returned: games played on an ordinary television. He wrote a four-page proposal, and his employer, the defense contractor Sanders Associates, gave him 2,500 dollars and two colleagues. With technician Bill Harrison and engineer Bill Rusch he worked through prototypes, reaching the seventh by January 1968, nicknamed the Brown Box for the wood-grain vinyl Harrison stuck to it. Magnavox licensed the design, and it reached stores in 1972 as the Odyssey.
2The arcade machine built without a computer inside
On the tile: Nolan Bushnell1971
Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney were Ampex engineers when Bushnell showed his office mate Spacewar on a computer at Stanford's artificial intelligence lab, and the two set out to build a coin-operated version. A four-thousand-dollar minicomputer could not refresh the screen fast enough, so Bushnell decided the machine needed no computer at all, only custom circuits doing one job. Nutting Associates manufactured the result in 1971 as Computer Space, the first arcade video game sold commercially, and moved about 1,500 cabinets. The pair left the next year to found Atari.
Shigeru Miyamoto grew up in Sonobe, in the Kyoto countryside, and from an early age he explored the natural areas around his home. One day he found a cave. He hesitated for days before he went inside, which may be the most useful thing a game designer can remember: the pause at the entrance, and then going in anyway. Those childhood expeditions shaped his later work, and they show most plainly in The Legend of Zelda, a game of woods and caves that pays a player for walking into the dark.
Carol Shaw joined Atari in 1978 as a microprocessor software engineer, back when games rarely credited anyone. After moving to Activision, she designed and wrote River Raid, a scrolling jet combat game for the Atari 2600 that arrived in 1982 and earned her a platinum cartridge the next June for a million copies sold. It won a 1984 Arkie Award for best action game, and several boxes printed her name, an uncommon credit for the era. In 2017 The Game Awards named her an Industry Icon.
Dona Bailey wrote code for General Motors dashboards and cruise controls when she talked her way into Atari's coin-operated games division in 1980, the only woman programming there. She shared design credit for Centipede with Ed Logg, wrote about half its code and chose the pastel greens and violets that made the 1981 cabinet stand out in a dark arcade. It became one of the golden age's biggest sellers, and Logg later said the game was aimed at the women's market and would not have gotten there without her. Bailey left Atari two years later.
6A detective story drawn by hand, one room at a time
On the tile: Roberta1980
Inspired by Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Roberta Williams sketched seventy scenes of rooms, doors and clues, then handed them to her husband Ken, who wrote the code to put pictures on a screen where other adventure games offered only text. Mystery House appeared in 1980, built on an Apple II borrowed from Ken's brother and sold for $24.95 in Ziploc bags holding a floppy disk and a sheet of instructions. It was the first product of On-Line Systems, the company that grew into Sierra On-Line.
Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, bought a pentomino set, twelve flat shapes each built from five squares, and played with it at his desk. Turning it into a computer game, he decided twelve shapes were needlessly complicated, so he cut each piece down to four squares, which left seven, and set them falling one at a time. He named the result by joining tetra, Greek for four, with tennis, his favorite sport, and Tetris was working in 1984.
8Faking smooth motion on a computer built for spreadsheets
On the tile: John Carmack1990
In 1990, home computers were not expected to scroll smoothly the way arcade and console games did, since their graphics cards redrew the whole screen too slowly for it. Programmer John Carmack found a workaround, since named adaptive tile refresh, that redrew only the small pieces of the screen that had actually changed and used the graphics hardware itself to shift the rest. He built it to power id Software's first game, Commander Keen, proving a PC could scroll as fluidly as a console cartridge and setting Carmack on the path to Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
9Strangers in Central Park helped pick Sega's mascot
On the tile: Sonic1991
Looking for a new mascot, Sega's design team ran an internal contest that produced an armadillo, a dog, a man in pajamas who would become Doctor Eggman, and a rabbit whose ears could stretch out and grab things. Artist Naoto Ohshima's blue hedgehog design won, partly because a rolling attack move suited a spiky creature better than a soft one, and partly through an unscientific but memorable test: Ohshima carried the designs to New York and asked strangers in Central Park to pick a favorite. The hedgehog won that poll too, and Sonic the Hedgehog reached consoles in 1991.
1When American publishers nearly killed video games
On the tile: The 1983 Crash1983
American home video game revenue peaked at about 3.2 billion dollars in the early 1980s, then collapsed to roughly 100 million dollars by 1985, a drop of almost 97 percent. Stores had filled with rushed, low-quality cartridges from publishers chasing a booming market, and shoppers stopped trusting the label entirely. Atari alone lost some 356 million dollars and laid off 3,000 of its 10,000 workers by the middle of 1983. The console business did not recover in the United States until Nintendo relaunched Japan's Famicom under a new name, reaching American stores late in 1985.
After the 1983 crash, Atari trucked hundreds of thousands of unsold cartridges from its El Paso plant to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, crushed them and poured concrete on top. The New York Times reported the dumping at the time, but for thirty years the details survived mainly as rumor, and the man who helped organize the eventual dig recalled that even Atari said it had not happened. In 2014 a documentary crew and a team of archaeologists excavated the site, recovering more than 1,300 cartridges, including copies of the widely panned E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Centipede and Pac-Man.
3The first tournament awarded a magazine subscription
On the tile: Space Olympics1972
On October 19, 1972, Rolling Stone writer Stewart Brand ran what Guinness World Records now recognizes as the first video game tournament, at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Accounts put the field at fifteen to two dozen players, who competed at Spacewar, the decade-old space combat game, in a five-player free-for-all and a team event. A doctoral student named Bruce Baumgart won the free-for-all, and his prize was modest: a year's subscription to Rolling Stone, the magazine covering the event for a feature on hacker culture.
4A museum decided your favorite game was also design
On the tile: MoMA2012
In November 2012, New York's Museum of Modern Art announced it was adding fourteen video games, from Pac-Man and Tetris to Portal and Dwarf Fortress, to its architecture and design collection. Curator Paola Antonelli framed the move carefully: are video games art, she asked, they sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what the museum chose. Games were judged on their underlying behavior, aesthetics, space and sense of time rather than treated as memorabilia, and where original code could not be preserved, the museum collected the hardware and cartridges instead.
The Strong museum in Rochester, New York, opened the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2015, judging nominees on their longevity, geographic reach, influence and icon status rather than sales figures alone. Only six games made the inaugural class: Pong, Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., Doom and World of Warcraft. They were chosen from a field of fifteen finalists that also included Minecraft, Pokemon, The Sims and The Legend of Zelda, proof that even an all-time favorite is not guaranteed a first-round induction.
At the Evo 2004 fighting game tournament, Daigo Umehara faced Justin Wong in a Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike match with his character down to a last pixel of health, where even blocking would have finished him. Wong launched a fifteen-hit super attack. Umehara parried every hit, each one timed within a fraction of a second, then counterattacked and won the match outright. A tournament organizer posted the clip under the arbitrary title Evo Moment 37, hinting at a long highlight reel, and the name stuck; it has since been viewed tens of millions of times.
Before 1995, video games were a sideshow at the Consumer Electronics Show, often parked in an outdoor section away from the main hall. When the Interactive Digital Software Association planned a show of its own, CES answered with a rival game-only show in Philadelphia, so the association moved its event to the Los Angeles Convention Center on the same mid-May dates and forced exhibitors to choose. Before the nonrefundable deposits came due, more than 180 exhibitors had signed with Los Angeles. CES backed out, and the first Electronic Entertainment Expo drew more than 50,000 people.
8An arcade scoreboard that became an official record book
On the tile: Twin Galaxies1981-1983
In 1981, Walter Day spent four months visiting more than a hundred arcades, copying down the high score posted on every machine, then opened an arcade of his own in Ottumwa, Iowa, and called it Twin Galaxies. In February 1982 he released that database as the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard, the closest thing the young hobby had to an official record book. The next January his small-town arcade hosted the North American Video Game Olympics, where Ben Gold won what Guinness World Records still counts as the first video game world championship, filmed for network television.
Mortal Kombat's graphic finishing moves and a filmed scene of a woman being attacked in Night Trap drew enough public complaints that the United States Senate held hearings on video game violence between December 1993 and March 1994. Facing the threat of government-imposed regulation, the industry moved to police itself, launching the Entertainment Software Rating Board in September 1994 to assign age and content ratings voluntarily. Its first labels ran from Early Childhood to Adults Only; the familiar E for Everyone arrived in 1998, replacing a rating called Kids to Adults.