A. Brief History

• Early 1960's: Space War and other games developed at MIT using mainframe computers
• Late 60's-Early 70's: Using large computers William Creowther creates Adventure. Big hit.
• 1973-75: Nolan Bushnell forms Syzygy. Arcade version of Space War amd fails. IntroducesPong, a big hit. Renames company - Atari
• 1977: Atari (now owned by Warner Communications) introduces Atari. 2600 VCS. Home videogame boom begins. Apple II
• 1979: Programmers from Atari startActivision
• 1981: IBM PC
• 1982: Videogame market crashes. Atati lays off 50%
• 1983: Mattel loses $225 M
• 1984: Macintosh
• 1985: Nintendo introduces a new video game unit. 16-bit microprocessor revolution marches on. Atari ST
• 1986: Commodore releases Amiga but was never a success.
• 1987: IBM PC with bettergraphics adapters becomes a viable platform for games.
• 1991: Nintendo debuts Super-NES
• 1992: explosion in PC gaming
• 1993: pentium chip launched
• 1994: Panasonic ships Real-3DO, ushering the 32-bit console, Atari ships Jaguar 32-bit player, Id Software released Doom (Shareware distribution method).
• 1995: Sega ships the Sega Saturn 32-bit console. Explosion in Internet/WWW.
• 1996: Ultra 96 from Nintendo.

Now: Impact of Java, Shockwave, Netscape 2, Javascript and other multimedia technologies yetr to be seen.