(1) Introduction

Electronic games are interactive application software played for entertainment or educational purposes. Video games differ in design but can include vibrant color and sound, realistic movement, visual effects; some even employ human actors. There are two broad classes of electronic games: (1) video games, which are played on specially designed coin-operated arcade machine, handheld devices, or video-game systems that are plugged to television screens; and (2) computer games, which are played on personal computers.

Electronic games are a popular pastime for both children and adults. Categories include strategy games, sports games, adventure games, card and board games, puzzle games, fast-action arcade games, and flying simulations. Software programs that employ game-play elements to teach reading, writing, problem solving, and other basic skills combine fun with education and are sometimes called edutainment.

Video and computer games grew in popularity in the late 20th century, as the power of computers increased. Since their invention in the late 1950s and 1960s, electronic games have become a multibillion-dollar industry that uses the latest computer technology to produce ever-more realistic games. Electronic game sales were estimated at $9.4 billion in the United States in 2005. In the same year, several studies showed that the majority of video-game players were aged 18 or older.

(2) Early Efforts

In 1958, Willy Higginbotham, an engineer at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (the USA), used an oscilloscope (an instrument for visually representing electrical current) to create what is considered the first electronic game. In this game – which he called Tennis for Two – players used knobs to control rectangular paddles as they batted a ball back and forth over a vertical line representing a net. Higginbotham never attempted to market or patent his game.

Steven Russell, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created the first computer game – Spacewar! – in 1962. In Spacewar! two players dueled using tiny spaceships that flew around a screen representing accurate star maps. Like Higginbotham, Russell did not patent or market his game. He used it for testing computers during installations.

While attending the University of Utah in the mid-1960s, an engineering student named Nolan Bushnell got to know about Spacewar! In 1968, Bushnell moved to Silicon Valley and experimented with reproducing Russell’s game without using a computer, which at the time were too large and expensive for a commercial game. Eventually, he created a version of Spacewar! for using in arcade machine. He persuaded a company called Nutting Associates to manufacture the game, and in 1971, the company began marketing the first video arcade game: Computer Space.

(3) Video Games

In mid-1972, Nolan Bushnell founded Atari Corporation. His first product was a game called Ping-Pong. Pong became the first commercially successful¹ video game. But the Pong fad² only lasted a couple of years because people were tired of playing a game that was predictable and that they learned so easily. Then in 1979 came Space Invaders, an electronic game manufactured by the Taito Corporation in Japan. Space Invaders quickly became a hit.

Space Invaders was not alone in the arcades for very long. It was followed by another Japanese game: Pac Man. In this game, players guided a ravenous yellow circle through a maze, while it ate dots and avoided monsters. Namco, the Japanese company that created Pac-Man, sold more than 300,000 of the game machines worldwide, making it the most popular arcade game of all time. Then there appeared Defender, Centipede, Scramble, Donkey Kong, Star Castle, Asteroids, Missile Command, and an ever-increasing variety of electronic versions of sports and card games.

Many of the arcade games also became available for play at home. Some were played on home computers; others used the television screen as a monitor; some were self-contained, hand-held, battery-powered, or table-model games. Pong, manufactured by Atari, was available early as an arcade game and for home television.

The coin-operated video game business boomed. In 1981, Americans spent 75,000 person-years and $5 billion, playing video games at an estimated 4,300 arcades in the USA.

In 1982, Walt Disney studios released a movie entitled Tron. In it, a video game fanatic is taken into the microchip and circuitry world of the game itself. The film is symbolic of the millions of people who became addicted to³ playing electronic games. The fad with the games was so great that children skipped school and adult workers took long lunch hours in order to pass as much time as possible with Pac Man, Asteroids, and other games. This obsession, of course, led to a reaction. Schools demanded that arcades be moved away from their vicinity, or they refused to allow students outside during lunch hours. Some towns closed the arcades or limited their number. In the Philippines, the reaction was so strong that President Ferdinand Marcos decreed in 1981 that all machines be destroyed.

By the end of 1983, however, interest in video games had dried up⁴. About 2,000 game parlors in the USA had closed, and many had cut the cost of playing the machines.

Notes: ¹to be commercially successful – пользоваться большим спросом;

²fad – увлечение;

³become addicted to – стали заядлыми любителями;

⁴to dry up – проходить.