- The history of computer games, including key events or releases
1950 – 1959
with these years the first computer made was called OXO by Alexander Douglas. It was made by the influence of tic-tac-toe that he made for his thesis on human computer interaction. However people don’t think that this was the first proper computer game, most people think that it was a game called Tennis for Two which was made in 1992 by William Higginbotham. It was meant to show players the effect of gravity and what it does to the objects. This picture shows the actual game and the equipment needed to make it.
In the second half of the decade a lot of people and companies started to realise what you could do on computers to make the games. In the 1966 a game called Periscope was released by Sega, it was more of an arcade game but it showed what kind of things you can do on those machines.
2000-2009
In 2000 song produced the playstation 2, the specs were much higher again, it had 32MB memory available and could draw up to 65 million polygons per second, excellent sound qualities and a double layered DVD drive that could also play DVDs. The network adapter made it possible to play online games but has never been playstation main attraction. In 2000 Nintendo also came out with the game Cube, the decided not to focus not the specs meaning the machine was weaker, didn’t support DVDs or couldn’t connect to the internet. However because of their it meant that it was a lot cheaper than the other one and focused more on the casual gamers. In 2001 Microsoft entered the game market with the Xbox, it was near enough a PC in a game console box, it was a very powerful machine. Had 64MB of memory, a DVD drive and could draw 30 million polygons per second. Sony wanted to share the handheld playstation portable in 2004. It was a very powerful machine with 32MB of memory, a screen resolution of 480×272 pixels, full 24-bit colour, wifi connection and video disks that made it possible to play movies on it. However not many people wanted it as they felt it was better to play at home on a bigger screen and also because a lot of the 3D games aren’t well suited to play on a small handheld device. In 2009 sony created the PSP Go that had a very different design and only focused on the downloadable content and in total over 60 million units have been sold.
2010-2011
In 2010 Microsoft and sony responded to the success of the control mechanism of the Wii. Sony introduced the move that had similar functionality, however Microsoft went further on introduced Kinect that measured the full body movement using the cameras. In 2010 the development of tablets appeared and has been followed by the iPad 2. Many manufactures are producing tablets and people expected 2012 to be the year of the tablets because the prices dropping dramatically. The stereoscopic 3D was also developed over the past 2 years. which is very helpful for games meaning they can make the 3D parts of the game a much better quality and more people will be wanting to play the game. As a result of this this Nintendo introduced the 3DS in 2011 that uses a parallax barrier. this contains slits so that the left eye can only see half of the pixels and the other eye sees the other half. By doing this each eye can see its own picture meaning stereoscopic 3D can be created. However the disadvantage of this is that the player has to hold the device at the correct position in front of the eyes to get that effect. Over the last 2 decades the gaming world has diversified a lot, people now play games on divides ranging from simple phones to dedicated game consoles. You can play casual games with a low production budget and AAA console games with budgets close to 100 million dollar. In the US alone people spend about 25 billion dollars on games.
In 2016 sony released a much more powerful console called the Playstation 4 Pro, it was the first console which was able to do a 4K video output. In 2017 Nintendo released the Wii U successor, the nintendo switch which is the only thing to allow TV-based and handheld gaming. In late 2017 microsoft released the 4K console, Xbox, Xbox one X.
The main thing that has obviously changed is the graphics quality. It went from black-and-white to colour. Much higher resolutions, many more colours and much better animations. The improvment in the graphics didn’t automatically led to improve the game or satisfaction, for example pong is still a good game to play. In some of the more modern games you can feel less in control becuase the animations can’t be interrupted.
- Different genres of computer games
– Action games.
– Adventure games.
– Role-playing games
– Simulators
– Strategy games
– Sports games
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