Arcade / Old School / Vintage And Modern Video Systems / Games

The majority of early computer games ran on university mainframe computers in the United States and were developed by individuals as a hobby. The limited accessibility of early computer hardware meant that these games were small in number and forgotten by posterity.
OXO, a graphical version tic-tac-toe, was created by A.S. Douglas in 1952 at the University of Cambridge, in order to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. It was developed on the EDSAC computer, which uses a cathode ray tube as a visual display to display memory contents. The player competes against the computer.
In 1958 William Higinbotham created a game using an oscilloscope and analog computer.Titled Tennis for Two, it was used to entertain visitors of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.Tennis for Two showed a simplified tennis court from the side, featuring a gravity-controlled ball that needed to be played over the "net," unlike its successor-Pong. The game was played with two box-shaped controllers, both equipped with a knob for trajectory and a button for hitting the ball. Tennis for Two was exhibited for two seasons before its dismantlement in 1959.
In 1959-1961, a collection of interactive graphical programs were created on the TX-0 machine at MIT
Mouse in the Maze : which allowed players to place maze walls, bits of cheese, and, in some versions, martinis using a light pen. One could then release the mouse and watch it traverse the maze to find the goodies.
HAX: By adjusting two switches on the console, various graphical displays and sounds could be made.
Tic-Tac-Toe: Using the light pen, the user could play a simple game of tic-tac-toe against the computer.
In 1961, a group of students at MIT, including Steve Russell, programmed a game titled Spacewar! on the DEC PDP-1, a new computer at the time.The game pitted two human players against each other, each controlling a spacecraft capable of firing missiles, while a star in the center of the screen created a large hazard for the crafts. The game was eventually distributed with new DEC computers and traded throughout the then-primitive Internet. Spacewar! is credited as the first influential computer game.
In 1966, while sitting bored at a bus stop, Ralph Baer rekindled his idea for an interactive video 'game' machine. Refining his ideas into a four-page document, Baer engaged co-worker Bill Harrison in the project, where they both worked at military electronics contractor Sanders Associates in New Hampshire. They created a simple video game named Chase, the first to display on a standard television set. With the assistance of Baer, Bill Harrison created the light gun and developed several video games with Bill Rusch in 1967. Ralph Baer continued development, and in 1968 a prototype was completed that could run several different games such as table tennis and target shooting. After months of secretive labouring between official projects, Baer was able to bring an example with true promise to Sanders' R & D department. By 1969, Sanders was showing off the world's first home video game console to manufacturers
In 1969, AT&T computer programmer Ken Thompson wrote a video game called Space Travel for the Multics operating system. This game simulated various bodies of the solar system and their movements and the player could attempt to land a spacecraft on them. AT&T pulled out of the MULTICS project, and Thompson ported the game to Fortran code running on the GECOS operating system of the General Electric GE 635 mainframe computer. Runs on this system cost about $75 per hour, and Thompson looked for a smaller, less expensive computer to use. He found an underused PDP-7, and he and Dennis Ritchie started porting the game to PDP-7 assembly language. In the process of learning to develop software for the machine, the development process of the Unix operating system began, and Space Travel has been called the first UNIX application

The first commercially viable video game was Computer Space in 1971, which laid the foundation for a new entertainment industry in the late 1970s within the United States, Japan, and Europe.
In September 1971, the Galaxy Game was installed at a student union at Stanford University. Based on Spacewar!, this was the first coin-operated video game. Only one was built, using a DEC PDP-11 and vector display terminals. In 1972 it was expanded to be able to handle four to eight consoles.
Also in 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created a coin-operated arcade version of Spacewar! and called it Computer Space. Nutting Associates bought the game and manufactured 1,500 Computer Space machines, with the release taking place in November 1971. The game was unsuccessful due to its steep learning curve, but was a landmark as the first mass-produced video game and the first offered for commercial sale.
Bushnell and Dabney felt they did not receive enough earnings by licensing Computer Space to Nutting Associates and founded Atari, Inc. in 1972 before releasing their next game: Pong. Pong was the first arcade video game with widespread success. The game is loosely based on table tennis: a ball is "served" from the center of the court and as the ball moves towards their side of the court each player must maneuver their paddle to hit the ball back to their opponent. Atari sold 19,000 Pong machines, creating many imitators.
The first home 'console' system was developed by Ralph Baer and his associates. Development began in 1966 and a working prototype was completed by 1968 (called the "Brown Box") for demonstration to various potential licensees, including GE, Sylvania, RCA, Philco, and Sears, with Magnavox eventually licensing the technology to produce the world's first home video game console. The system was released in the USA in 1972 by Magnavox, called the Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey used cartridges that mainly consisted of jumpers that enabled/disabled various switches inside the unit, altering the circuit logic (as opposed to later video game systems that used programmable cartridges). This provided the ability to play several different games using the same system, along with plastic sheet overlays taped to the television that added color, play-fields, and various graphics to 'interact' with using the electronic images generated by the system. A major marketing push, featuring TV ads starring Frank Sinatra, helped Magnavox sell about 100,000 Odysseys that first year.
Philips bought Magnavox and released a different game in Europe using the Odyssey brand in 1974 and an evolved game that Magnavox had been developing for the US market. Over its production span, the Odyssey system achieved sales of 2 million units.
The first generation of video games did not feature a microprocessor, and were based on custom codeless state machine computers consisting of discrete logic circuits comprising each element of the game itself. Later consoles of this generation moved the bulk of the circuitry to custom "pong on a chip" IC's such as Atari's custom Pong chips and General Instruments' AY-3-8500 series.

In the history of video games the second generation (sometimes referred to as the early 8 bit era or to a lesser extent, the 4 bit era) began in 1976 with the release of the Fairchild Channel F and Radofin 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System.
Programs were burned onto ROM chips that were mounted inside plastic cartridge casings that could be plugged into slots on the console. When the cartridges were plugged in, the general-purpose microprocessors in the consoles read the cartridge memory and executed whatever program was stored there. Rather than being confined to a small selection of games included in the game system, consumers could now amass libraries of game cartridges. However video game production was still a niche skill. Warren Robinett, the famous programmer of the game Adventure, spoke on developing games "in those old far-off days, each game for the 2600 was done entirely by one person, the programmer, who conceived the game concept, wrote the program, did the graphics-drawn first on graph paper and converted by hand to hexadecimal-and did the sounds.
Three machines dominated the second generation of consoles in North America, far outselling their rivals:
The Video Computer System (VCS) ROM cartridge-based console, later renamed the Atari 2600, was released in 1977 by Atari. Nine games were designed and released for the holiday season. The console would quickly become the most popular of all the early consoles.
The Atari 2600 was the dominant console for much of the second generation, with other consoles such as the Intellivision, Odyssey 2, and ColecoVision also enjoying market share.
In 1979, Activision was created by disgruntled former Atari programmers "who realized that the games they had anonymously programmed on their $20K salaries were responsible for 60 percent of the company's $100 million in cartridge sales for one year".It was the first third-party developer of video games.
The Intellivision, introduced by Mattel in 1980. Though chronologically part of what is called the "8-bit era", the Intellivision had a unique processor with instructions that were 10 bits wide (allowing more instruction variety and potential speed), and registers 16 bits wide. The system, which featured graphics superior to the older Atari 2600, rocketed to popularity.
The ColecoVision, an even more powerful machine, appeared in 1982. Its sales also took off, but the presence of three major consoles in the marketplace and a glut of poor quality games began to overcrowd retail shelves and erode consumers' interest in video games. Within a year this overcrowded market would crash.

The computer gaming industry experienced its first major growing pains in the early 1980s as publishing houses appeared, with many honest businesses-occasionally surviving at least 20 years, such as Electronic Arts-alongside fly-by-night operations that cheated the games' developers.
The Golden age of video arcade games reached its zenith in the 1980s. The age brought with it many technically innovative and genre-defining games developed and released in the first few years of the decade

Pac-Man is an arcade game developed by Namco and licensed for distribution in the United States by Midway, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980.
Immensely popular from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is considered one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games, and an icon of 1980s popular culture.
Upon its release the game subsequently became a social phenomenon that sold a bevy of merchandise and also inspired, among other things, an animated television series and a top-ten hit single.
When Pac-Man was released, the most popular arcade video games were space shooters, in particular Space Invaders and Asteroids. The most visible minority were sports games that were mostly derivative of Pong. Pac-Man succeeded by creating a new genre and appealing to both genders
Pac-Man is often credited with being a landmark in video game history, and is among the most famous arcade games of all time.
The character also appears in more than 30 officially licensed game spin-offs,as well as in numerous unauthorized clones and bootlegs.
Pac-Man has the highest brand awareness of any video game character among American consumers, recognized by 94 percent of them.
Pac-Man is one of the longest running video game franchises from the golden age of video arcade games, and one of only three video games that are on display at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. (along with Pong and Dragon's Lair).
Now been that i was born in 1975 lol i can rember this been one of the 1st games i got tought how to play.

Dragon's Lair is a laserdisc video game published by Cinematronics in 1983 & was the first Laserdisc video game to be released. It featured animation created by Ex-Disney animator Don Bluth. Most other games of the era represented the character as a sprite, which consisted of a series of bitmaps displayed in succession. However, due to hardware limitations of the era, artists were greatly restricted in the detail they could achieve using that technique; the resolution, framerate and number of frames were severely constrained. Dragon's Lair overcame those limitations by tapping into the vast storage potential of the laserdisc, but imposed other limitations on the actual gameplay.
The game's enormous contrast with other arcade games of the time created a sensation when it appeared, and was played so heavily that many machines often broke due to the strain of overuse. It was also arguably the most successful game on this medium and is aggressively sought after by collectors. Now this i know was true i was at a arcade that this game was all ways broke lol it would last 2 or 3 days and then they had to fix it lol & some times the disk would skip alot some times.
This was also one of the very 1st games that took $0.50 to play .Now i know alot of the games now days take 1 or 2 $. But back in 83 $0.50 was alot for a game. But i still did pay it alot lol. But the thing that did suck was if i got a 1$ lol i could only play 2 games of it

Tron was manufactured and distributed by Bally Midway in 1982.
It is based on the Walt Disney Productions motion picture Tron released in the same year. The game consists of four subgames inspired by the events of the science fiction film. It features some characters and equipment seen in the film, e.g. the Light Cycles, battle tanks, the Input/Output Tower. The game earned more than the film's initial release
n 1983, Midway released the sequel arcade game Discs of Tron, which was inspired by the disc throwing combat sequence of the film. Another sequel followed in 2003 with the computer game Tron 2.0. On January 10, 2008 the game was released for Xbox Live Arcade ported from Digital Eclipse and branded by Disney Interactive.
In the 2010 film Tron: Legacy, the arcade game makes a brief appearance, but is displayed as being manufactured and distributed by the in-universe company ENCOM International instead of Bally Midway. It is also displayed as such on the "ENCOM International" promotional website for the film.
Tron was distributed in four types of cabinets: the standard upright, the mini upright, the cocktail (table) version and a sit down enclosed cabinet. The upright cabinet is designed as movie tie-in. It has, as a special feature, two blacklights and fluorescent lines painted on, resembling the blue, red etc. circuit lines from the film Tron. In a darkened room or arcade the lines glow. The sit down enclosed cabinet is the rarest of all the cabinet types. The sit down plays a part in the 2010 Tron: Legacy movie. Walt Disney Pictures searched for 3 years with no luck until they found a video game collector in Slayton, Minnesota who rented his sit down game to Walt Disney Pictures.
This 2 was another game that i won alot of $ off of ppl at the arcades bucuse thay thought a lil kid like my self could not play as well as the older kids in the arcades lolol i showed them lmaoooo

This generation of consoles would start the war of Nintendo vs. Sega & would be a war that Nintendo would later on win.The third generation began in 1983 with the Japanese release of the Family Computer (later known as the Nintendo Entertainment System in the rest of the world). This generation marked the move from single-screen or flip-screen graphics to scrolling graphics, which would prove to be a pivotal leap in game design.Although the previous generation of consoles had also used 8-bit processors, it was at the end of this generation that home consoles were first labeled by their "bits". This also came into fashion as 16-bit systems like the Mega Drive/Genesis were marketed to differentiate between the generations of consoles. In the United States, this generation in gaming was primarily dominated by the NES/Famicom. The end of the 3rd generation of video games comes as 8-bit consoles become obsolete in graphics and processing power compared to 16-bit consoles.

As the Nintendo Vs Sega war went on Sega regained ground by releasing its next-generation console, the Mega Drive/Genesis, which was released in Japan on October 29, 1988, in the U.S. in August 1989 (renamed as the Sega Genesis) and in Europe in 1990, two years before Nintendo could release the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) When The Super Famicom was released in Japan in 1990 and like its predecessor it was an instant success. Despite a three-year lag the Super Famicom quickly picked up the slack.In order to prepare for the new onslaught of Nintendo hardware, Kalinske enacted a two-tier plan. First was to drop the price from $190 to $150. And the second was to bundle in a new first-party, mascot-featuring game to compete with Nintendo's Mario franchise....Sonic the Hedgehog.
Packed it in with the Mega Drive/Genesis consoles as well as dropping the price.In doing that, Sega had a new mascot in order compete with Nintendo's immortal character: Super Mario. By 1994 Sega and Nintendo were neck-and-neck in the market, though Sega actually had a slight edge between 1991 and 1993.
So As the years went by, games of the fourth generation were starting to show their age.So Nintendo took a different method. The Super FX chip is a 3D rendering processor that renders polygons. Star Fox (Starwing in Europe) was the first to use the chip, and had 3D graphics through a mix of polygons and sprites
Over all In the end the Super Nintendo was the winning console of the fourth generation.With 49 million units shipped, it didn't outsell the predecessor Famicom/NES, it did outsell both the Sega Genesis and the TurboGrafix-16 combined.
This would be the last console Nintendo would release which beat its competitors in sales until the release of the Nintendo Wii in late 2006.
All in all, the Genesis was a successful game console and to this day has its share followers. But as it competition got the better of it desperate measures left a bad effect on Sega. The failure of its expensive add-ons and the capital loss from that would be the beginning of the end for Sega as a console developer, as this was the last comercially successful console released by Sega.

The fifth-generation era is most noted for the rise of fully 3D games.While there were games prior that had used three dimensional environments it was in this Generation that many game designers began to move traditionally 2D and pseudo-3D genres into 3D. Super Mario 64 on the N64, Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation, and Tomb Raider on the Saturn are prime examples of this trend.3D became the main focus in this Generation as well as a slow decline of Cartridges in favor of CDs.
The first fifth generation consoles were the Atari Jaguar and the 3DO. Both of these systems were much more powerful than the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) or Mega Drive known as Genesis in North America.
Neither of these consoles were serious threats to Sega or Nintendo though. The 3DO cost more than the SNES and Genesis combined & the Jaguar was extremely difficult to program for leading to a lack of games that used its extra power.
It was not until Sega's Saturn, Sony's PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 were released that fifth generation consoles started to become popular
.After the dust settled in the fifth generation console wars, several companies saw their outlooks change drastically. Atari which was already on shaky ground after setbacks to Nintendo in the previous generation, ended up being purchased by JT Storage and stopped making game hardware. Sega's loss of consumer confidence (coupled with its previous console failures) in North America set the company up for a similar fate in the next round of console wars.

While the fourth generation was nearing its end it was time to think ahead.Sega and newcomer Sony had already announced their consoles, and Nintendo had let out to the public a juicy tidbit on a new project under the codename "Ultra 64."
Like the name implies the system is a 64-bit console which runs on ROM cartridges.
Released in North America on September 29,1996 as Nintendo's answer to the growing dominance of the PlayStation.In Japan & the US almost a full year after the Japanese release in Europe, it was close to two years behind its Sega and Sony competitors, much like its predecessor, the SNES, did against its NEC and Sega counterparts. Also, like the SNES utilized the word "super" in its game titles, the Nintendo 64 utilized the number 64 in many of its titles, especially first- and second-party products.
It was the only one generally recognized in that class despite the 64-bit Atari Jaguar.The Nintendo 64 (N64) was very innovative at the time and brought new concepts to the main stream. The system is the first console since the Atari 5200 to sport four controller ports integrated into the system right out of the box & is well-supported with a lot of games containing 4-player modes.
The "Rumble Pak" is a trend that was copied by the PlayStation later in its lifespan & then became commonplace in every subsequent console from all developers afterwards.The concept of attaching accessories to the controller was copied by the Sega Dreamcast and Xbox.
The 64 featured a number of smash-hit games exclusive to the system, and has over 55 Player's Choice (million-seller) titles.The launch game was Super Mario 64 & sold 11 million copies.
The 64 had a Great first-person-shooter Goldeneye which set a new standard for All FPS games from then there on.
Super Mario Kart was a hit on the SNES & was kept alive in a 64-bit sequel Mario Kart 64.Star Fox 64 would be one of the first3D games that was released with real 3D gameplay.
The Nintendo 64 is not without its limitations though. As games grew more and more complex, the memory demands grew with it.Since there is only so much space on cartridge circuit boards, finding ways to fit in popular new features like pre-rendered backgrounds and full-motion-video (FMV) sequences became a challenge. Nintendo developed a memory cartridge called Expansion Pak to replace the original Jumper Pak in the frunt of the console to add additional memory.
These trend-changes would lead to the demise of the cartridge concept, and the Nintendo 64 is the last home console released by Nintendo (or any other developer) to use cartridges.In the end, the Ninendo 64 was a successful console, selling almost 33 million units. But at the same time it was the least-selling Nintendo console up to this point. It would mark the first time Nintendo failed to stomp-out its competition newcomer Sony with the PlayStation.

In the late 1980s, Nintendo was hard at work in developing its generation-dominator, the Super Famicom (SNES outside of Japan), in order to compete with NEC's TurboGrafx-16 and Sega's Genesis.Just like the Famicom before it, Nintendo wanted to make a disc-based add-on for the Super Famicom. Nintendo and Sony (who pioneered the CD format) got together in a joint venture for a CD ROM drive.
However, Sony and Nintendo had a falling out; Sony issued a contract to Nintendo late in the peripheral's development, stating that all intellectual property rights to the CD based games would be exclusively owned by Sony.The two companies split & Nintendo in a vengeful move contracted bitter-rival company Phillips.
The Phillips drive also failed. While Sony initially had no intention of entering the market, seeing the success of the now cartridge-only Super Nintendo selling in the eight-digit range revived Sony's interest.Taking the CD ROM technology out of the junk drawer, Sony further developed it into something new.The implications of which would turn electronic gaming as we know it from a mindless toy into an all-age all-demographic hobby.
Released in Japan in 1994 and late 1995 in the North America, Europe, and Australia, the Sony PlayStation was an immediate success.
Towards the end of the Fifth Generation, the PlayStation 2 was announced. In order to clear out the company's inventory, Sony marketed a redesign in 2000; the inexpensive Sony PSOne. It is a drastically smaller console, but is the same as the standard PlayStation internally.
In the end, the PlayStation was a massive success in every market it was sold. Even a year after its successor was released PlayStation games were still being made. Its massively successful design over the presumed higher-performance Nintendo 64 is one reason why Nintendo abandoned cartridges. Sony's success also deepened the trouble in Sega's hardware division. The PlayStation firmly planted Sony's newfound presence in the console market, and proved that a longstanding reputation in the Sega and Nintendo names would not make them immune to a newcomer's impact in the world of gaming. They came, they saw, they conquered.

Here today, ready for tomorrow with a brand new, leaner machine. Wi-Fi is built-in for easier connection to the world of entertainment on Xbox LIVE, where HD movies and TV stream in an instant. It's ready for the controller-free experiences of Kinect - you don't just play the game, you are the game. Xbox 360 is more games, entertainment and fun.



Xbox 360 4GB Console (See all Xbox 360 Consoles)



Xbox 360 4GB Console with Kinect (See all Xbox 360 Consoles)



Xbox 360 250GB Console with Kinect (See all Xbox 360 Consoles)