The Video Game is 50 Years Old

JupiterKid

When Pong was launched by a fledgling Atari in November 1972, 50 years ago this month, it was an overnight sensation and from there began the age of the video/computer game.

Arcades flourished for a long while in the late 20th Century but eventually the home game console took over the market. Two generations of adults have now grown up on video games.

With half a century of video games passed now, where will the next 50 years take us? Did virtual reality, much touted back in the 1990s, ever really take off?

What was your first video game? Do you still regularly play computer games, either by yourself or with others online? Do you have a favourite one at the moment?

And....would you still play Pong? 😎😁😁👍

Gregor Samsa

My first video game was the handheld Entex Space Invaders, probably got it in 1980 or '81

Not into games much, but I occasionally play Asphalt 8 and Alto's Odyssey on the Apple TV.

I still sometimes play Pong on my watch

Tom Mann Centuria

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119914653#Comment_119914653

I've been looking for one of those Entex Space Invaders, my brother owned one back in the day too. 3 or 4 years ago you could get one for half nothing and I never bothered, now I'm looking prices have gone silly.

Gregor Samsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119914661#Comment_119914661

Unfortunately, that pic isn't my one. Of all my childhood toys, I've two teddies and 3 Star Wars figures left, which my kids play with now.

Tom Mann Centuria

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119914674#Comment_119914674

My brothers one was slightly different, it was black and didn't have all the knobbly bits around the buttons. It's sad we don't hang on to stuff from our childhood, but it all meant nothing to me in my late teens, twenties and even early thirties, then nostalgia takes over!

I Blame Sheeple

AOE 2

wolololololololololo

Star Bingo

Pong was badarse I still break out the Binatone.

noahungry

Had no idea Pong was that old! I also play it on my watch, usually while waiting for someone, since I'm blessed with many close friends who are always late. 

o1s1n

Technically the videogame is older, the first videogame was made in 1958.

The first commercial videogame was Computer Space, which came out a year before Pong.

JupiterKid

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119915086#Comment_119915086

Pedantic but true. I believe there were computer games of sorts among the 1960s early mainframe programmers, but these were not widely known or available.

I heard of Computer Space coming out in 1971, but it was prohibitively expensive, not very user friendly and was a failure.

Pong, on the other hand, was the real beginning of the era of the video game. In its first few weeks of operation in November/December 1972, the arcade machines were jamming up with coins as it was so popular, particularly with college students at the time. 😁

It also made Atari and Noel Bushnell an absolute fortune!

Greyfox

First game was Super Mario bros, instantly the most addictive thing in the world and for me the most important piece of entertainment that has ever been released

Had pong on the Atari in the mid 70s, but almost certainly not the 50 yr old original version. Then went through the ZX81, Dragon 32, Amstrad 464, learnt to code Basic and got into IT, Sega Mega Drive, PS1, Xbox, Wii, Xbox 360, Wii U, Xbox One, PS4 and Switch. And there I'll stop, tbh I haven't got the will or the reactions to game any more.

I think 3 things over that time struck me as being truly revolutionary - writing your own code on computers, the leap forward in graphics and controllers with the Mega Drive et al, and live gaming with the Xbox.

I remember fondly many games, Pong of course, Classic Adventure, Manic Miner and Sorcery on the Amstrad, new sports of NHL and NFL on the Mega Drive, Halo 2 of course, the first great live game, the revolutionary controls of Moto GP on the Xbox which as far as I know were never repeated, the free roam of Red Dead Redemption and Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim.

Star Bingo

Love the mustard and walnut veneer.

xxxxxxl

October 1958 actually.

Donald Trump

For all the computer gamers. Just to help you reminisce some more

BattleCorp

When Pong was launched by a fledgling Atari in November 1972, 50 years ago this month, it was an overnight sensation and from there began the age of the video/computer game.

1972 didn't come to my town until the early 80's. I remember going into an electrical shop on the way home to play it as there was a demo model set up in the shop. I thought it was amazing. That was back in the day when my parents rented a telly, believe it or not.

Esel

I have that Pong game somewhere!

Blue850

I got this one Christmas in the early 1980s, it ate batteries at an alarming rate, so my uncle got it to run off a Hornby railway transformer with the wires that connect to the rails soldered to the battery terminals, how we didn't burn the house down...

Strumms

A friend of mine got an Atari around 1984 and it was like a spaceship arriving….

beyond futuristic to us then… we’d go play football on the road and come back see if it had loaded properly..

Tom Mann Centuria

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119923600#Comment_119923600

Those little beauties loaded instantly, the 8 bit computers of the day on the other hand........

Strumms

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119923704#Comment_119923704

They might have been supposed to but his didn’t 🥹

Hyperbollix

Was playing an Atari 2600 with my cousin in the early 90's. We thought it was the pinnacle of gaming tech. Sheltered rural chaps that we were. Think we graduated up to Megadrives around the time the Playstation came out!

ceadaoin.

Ghosts and goblins on my cousins nintendo. There was a part I never could get past. Downloaded an emulator years ago, and still couldn't progress. Hardest game ever.

The first computer I had myself was an amstrad. The only game I can really remember playing on that was prince of persia. Moved on to consoles then and have fond memories of playing sonic and aladdin on mega drive and later ,tomb raider, gta vice city and resident evil on Playstation. My child is of the age where she is into gaming and I recently dipped my toe back in and completed the latest resident evil on ps5. They're a bit different these days 😄

We also have a vr headset and it's pretty cool, especially the ones that get you moving, like beat Saber. Beyond anything I could have imagined back in the 90s

xxxxxxl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119923704#Comment_119923704

lol do we not all remember the seizure inducing colours of tape loading. Turn over the tape and at the end it hangs. 20 mins wasted.

Boscoirl

got an Atari 2600 for Christmas in the early 90s. Was gutted I wanted Subuteo

Potential-Monke

It's been a good 50 years. Ups and downs, highs and lows, and to look at Pong above, and now be at the graphical levels of modern AAA games, it's quite a short time. We had Pong in the house, but it wasn't an official Pong console. After much searching, I found out it was called the Optim Sport T-338. Many hours playing the "different" games on it.

The rest of the siblings, all older, weren't that interested in gaming, but the parents still ended up buying multiple Atari 2600 (Jr's apparantly, would be called Slim by todays wording):

We apparantly kept spilling drinks on them, which immediately killed them. I think she said they ended up buying 4, and the price was equivalent to around €700 each adjusting for inflation. Siblings lost all interest soon and I took over as the only gamer in the house. I used to visit a neighbour who were good family friends, and their 4 years older than me daughter had a NES, so I got plenty of use out of that.

Then, Christmas either '94/'95, while the rest of the family went to the pub for Xmas eve, mam stayed at home with me as I was still too young to be in a pub/little bollix that would only causes issues in a pub. I was thick, of course, that I was being excluded from the pub fun, but I quickly and immediately forgot about everyone and anyone else when mam sprung the SNES Super Mario All-Stars bundle out to me. I will never forget the yellow box and the fact I was now an owner of a games console! They had to force me to bed at some ungodly hour, only for me to wake up an hour or 2 later to start playing again. This console cemented my love of gaming:

Never got into Sega. A mate in secondary school had a Megadrive once it came out. I tried a few games on it, but Sonic and the other Sega games just weren't doing it for me. Sonic felt like a pish-poor Mario to me at the time, and Mario was leagues ahead of it. Many memories of going to that game shop on Roches Street in Limerick to rent SNES games. Can't remember what it was called, there's a travel agents there now, just below the Eir customer care building.

Anyway, a few years later, mam being the legend that she is, upgraded me to a PS1. In another DID NOT EXPECT THAT! moment, my sister worked in a hairdressers and I was waiting in there for her to finish and mam bringing us both home on Xmas eve. Mam had fecked off somewhere, I thought nothing of it. When she came back, and most likely because I was in foul form for some reason, she immediately showed me my Xmas present. The whole population of that hairdressers saw pure childhood excitement right then. I'll never forget it, because it was the year that the electricity went for a week over Xmas. We were driving home, me having read every inch of every booklet already, and lights were out on houses. We got near home and noticed lights on there, so I thought I'd be fine. Electricity was on, I hooked everything up, heard the start of that amazing PS1 start up sound and bang, electricity gone for a week. It was horrible, but once it came back you couldn't get me off of it. Destruction Derby 2 and Tomb Raider 1 & 2 kept me going for a long time. Mind blown with the level of realistic graphics compared to the SNES.

That hasn't changed since then. I've had the PS2, PS3, X360, Wii, PS4, PS4 Pro, XSX and PS5 since. I've spent thousands on gaming peripherals over the years, steering wheels, fancy controllers, aim controllers, etc. Bought into PSVR when it came out and it really was a different experience. While VR has not really taken off yet, it still has a market that plenty of people are providing content for, and the upcoming PSVR2 may help rejuvenate the platform.

Now, thanks to how crap humanity is in general, I'm unsocial and spend most my time gaming. I've lived 100s of different lives. Experienced varied and amazing worlds. I continue to have my mind blown by certain games; Subnautica is a stunning game which took over me for a few weeks. God of War and recently Ragnarok shows how amazing action-adventure games can be, almost film like at times. Racing games are near photo realistic. Sports games are... well, they're predatory, full of MT's and barely change but people still buy them in the millions.

I'm very excited for the future of gaming. I don't think I'll get it in my lifetime, but I'd love something like Ready Player One.

taxAHcruel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119923704#Comment_119923704

A those days where you ran down the magnetic data on a Commodore Game casette so much that the only way to get the game to load was to find some way (in my case wedging the tape desk under the open door of my bedroom wardrobe) to put a lot of pressure on the top of the tape reader in order that the tape was pushed down and a relatively clean part of the tape was being read by the system.

Ubbquittious

Atari Jaguar

Esel

Have an original (US) Pong somewhere!

Sgt Hartman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119969555#Comment_119969555

I remember the shop in Roches Street Limerick. It was called The World of Video and Games club. You needed a region converter for many of the SNES titles there as they were for the US model SNES. I spent a fortune in that shop renting Final Fight on the SNES almost every week.

i first got hooked on video games all the way back in 1986 when I first played Kung Fu Master and Double Dragon on the arcade machines in my local shop. I got an Atari 2600 in 1989, a NES with Super Mario Brothers 3 in 1992 and a SNES with Street Fighter 2 Turbo edition on 1994. I got an N64 in 1999 with Zelda Ocarina of Time, a PS1 in 2001, a PS2 in 2002, a GameCube in 2005, an Xbox 360 in 2007, a PS4 in 2016 and a PS5 this year. I’m currently hooked on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey which I missed out on when I first got released in 2018. My least favourite of all the consoles I had was actually the PS1 as I thought the graphics looked very messy and ugly in most of the games.

Bobson Dugnutt

I still play Candy Crush everyday.

niallpatrick

First played any video game sometime in the late 70's when I was 7 maybe 8 in Dundalk in a family friendly bar that did meals, the pong machine was a table top version. First console was the Grandstand something?, the console with the sliders for swapping games. Then astro wars, what a great game played it to death and I mean death.

I'm 52 and still game still build my own comps and have VR as well with the quest 2. I get the piss taken for it and I do have other hobbies. Quest 2 I can put on my backed wireless headphones link it to the quest with a 1/4 inch jack and escape reality, block almost everything out.

Feisar

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121383833#Comment_121383833

What you did there, I see it.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119969555#Comment_119969555

The Super Nintendo was a superb console and the bundle I received had not only Super Mario All-Stars, but Super Mario World as well. That was really all anyone might need to keep them going for a good few months.

Prior to that, I owned a Sege Game Gear, which I think I'm now ready to admit was a deeply unsatisfying piece of hardware, from the screen to the battery life and the selection of titles available. I regret not having gotten a Nintendo Gameboy instead, which would have been far better, all told, but I think I was just too enticed by the colour screen of the GG. Many years later, I picked up an original GB, and it was great to play it, but I can't help feeling that I would have more properly got into gaming if I'd gotten the GB instead of the GG way back when.

It's possible my decision to pass up the Gameboy was based on some of my very earliest Christmas memories which featured a true horror of computerised entertainment - those absolutely dreadful standalone LCD games like 'Basketball'. They'd always have generic names like that, a printed background, static sprites and you could barely figure out what the fúck was going on. I think those left me very skeptical that anything monochrome/LCD could be in any way decent.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121383526#Comment_121383526

Not because of the tape but because the head in the tape player had gone out of alignment. 20 seconds with a fine screwdriver would have sorted it.

I had a Spectrum (16K at first, then got the 32K RAM pack for it, then later on the 128K). Way faster to load from tape than a C64 and more reliable too, a tape of a tape of a tape would usually work... a tape of a tape of a tape of a tape would sometimes work... eventually got an Amiga a few years later, that was something else. Maybe 5% of the games I played were paid for... can't really do that with a console.

Son is getting a PS5 on Monday 😀 looking forward to having the odd go myself

I do find it interesting that the computer I'm using now has a million times more memory than the first one I used, has 42 times as many display pixels, is at least 10,000 times faster and, after inflation, is cheaper... and includes storage and display which cost a lot extra back then. Oh and if you wanted connectivity you bought a 1200 bit/s modem which cost nearly as much as your computer.

Potential-Monke

Yer gonna get a hop with how quick some games load now! And the quick resume, when it works, is amazing. So happy to have been alive for the "beginning" of gaming and getting to see it evolve. I'd imagine younger kids don't get wowed as easily as I do. Currently getting lost exploring the world in Avatar Frontiers of Pandora. Terrible story, but the world is amazing and just great to explore. Going from Pong to Pandora in 50 years is a fantastic feat. If I had empathy, I'd feel sorry for those who can't get into gaming.

RiderOnTheStorm

I remember my old ZX Spectrum with fondness. Started me on a long road of gaming. In the (late) 90s I remember an email going around the office where there was emulator software & games to play on it for the C64 .... as an attachment to an email! I got a kick out of the progress where the memory / software was so small that instead of a machine & tape / disc , it was an attachment

As well as increase in memory, graphics, speed, complexity, etc .... modern games on Xbox / PS5 etc take (nearly) all fingers & thumbs working in unison to make decent progress. There is a great sense of satisfaction when it starts to come together and its a tiny bit like palyong a piano. Muscle memory is just like 'brain says reload, lock on target, jump & fire' and then the fingers just do it .... thought becomes action. A long way from Pong :-)

Dramatik

I remember my parents having a tough time getting me off one of these, that I found in Switzers on Grafton St. Thought it was the coolest thing ever.

GreeBo

Anyone else used to drop into Roches Stores after school to play the SNES that they used to have setup to demo? Good times.

Deebles McBeebles

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121523691#Comment_121523691

Yeah right, "the odd go" 😉

PS5 is top class, dread to think how many hours I've played it this year.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121527119#Comment_121527119

It was a NES in my day but same deal. I played the first 30 seconds of Super Mario 1 on it until the staff would tell you to piss off.

victor8600

My first video game was a Lode Runner clone in my school's computer class. But games didn't interest me all that much, that is until I got my own PC and discovered strategy games. I have spent countless hours in Wacraft, Starcraft, Dune II, Civilization(s), and so on, and then World of Warcraft came out and all these games were put aside for several years.

Damien360

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121383526#Comment_121383526

You could adjust the heads with a very small Phillips head screwdriver but it required drilling a small hole about 2cm below the centre of tape door mechanism. We.did that and considering it's the days before internet, I haven't the foggiest idea how we got that information.

It made copying games on a dual tape machine handy as you just had to adjust to find what part of the magnetic tape it was located on. Loved the C64. Found it in my parents attic about 10 years ago, but it couldn't fully boot without weird letters across the screen. Tape deck is long gone. Learned to programme Basic on that machine.

Had the Atari with Pong, then C64, Sega Mega drive, Xbox and Xbox360, PSP, PSVita, PS1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Never had Nintendo's.

SuperBowserWorld

Played Space Invaders in the 70s in an arcade as a child. No idea at the time what a revolution had just started in technology or what exactly I was supposed to do.

Then some pong clone game as a Christmas present that we were all blown away by. Very very simple tennis, Soccer, ... For a few day anyway. 😁

Then more arcade games. In a rural Irish town. Arcades were excellent and social places. My favourite games included BattleZone, Crush Roller, Defender, Phoenix, Time Pilot, Ghosts n Goblins, Bomb Jack... Amazing. Even the names are amazing. 😁

I won an Oric Atmos home computer. Which was lucky cause there was no way my family could afford a computer. 😁 Mostly typed games into that. And learned to programme. Was one good game called Zorgans Revenge. Also a good defender clone.

Then summer job and an Amstrad CPC with green screen. I think Renegade, Head Over Heels, ... are all that stand out there. I reminder having to load levels one by one off the tape for Renegade. 😁

Then I remember buying a Mega drive as a student and being disappointed by Sonic and some ice hockey game. Kinda ended video game playing for years. 😁

Then with a proper job got a SNES with some of the best games ever. Super Mario World, Super Mario All Stars. My faith was restored. 😁

Then fell off gaming and came back later to get an N64 with the 2 other best games ever, Ocarina of time and Super Mario 64.

Then fell away again. Back for Wii for the genius of Super Mario Galaxy. Then Wii U later... Switch ..

Went crazy and got Xbox Series X and PS5 during covid. Was too much. Consolidating and selling stuff now and taking time out to finish one of the best games ever, Tears of the Kingdom, the sequel to that other great game, Breath of the wild.

So, yeah, still Nintendo, for anyone who wants to revisit the joy and wonder of being a child. 👍

Gatling

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119914653#Comment_119914653

Had an ice hockey version of that handheld

Gatling

Started off with pong in the very late 70s ,early 80s we had some systems with sports stickmen on the console it's self , then we got an early sega master system which was completely ground breaking for me at least,Alex the kidd , super hang on(card) not cartridge , duck hunt with light gun ,then an amstrad 464 , before ending up with mega drive and Super Nintendo,fell properly I love with games again when the original PlayStation appeared

Potential-Monke

This video made waves recently, the developers had to come out and prove it was indeed a game (in very early development yet). The future is looking real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK76q13Aqt0