Video games trivia | 100 did you know facts (part 1)

More and more people are starting to play video games. Now, that you can play them through your mobile phone, it is easier for everyone to start getting into them.

So let’s find out some trivia and facts about video games.

A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a two or three-dimensional video display device such as a touchscreen, virtual reality headset or monitor/TV set
Since the 1980s, video games have become an increasingly important part of the entertainment industry
Whether they are also a form of art is a matter of dispute
The electronic systems used to play video games are called platforms
Video games are developed and released for one or several platforms and may not be available on others
Specialized platforms such as arcade games present the game in a large, typically coin-operated chassis, were common in the 1980s in video arcades
They declined in popularity as other, more affordable platforms became available
These include dedicated devices such as video game consoles, as well as general-purpose computers like a laptop, desktop or handheld computing devices
The input device used for games, the game controller, varies across platforms
Common controllers include gamepads, joysticks, mouse devices, keyboards, the touchscreens of mobile devices, or even a person’s body, using a Kinect sensor
Players view the game on a display device such as a television or computer monitor or sometimes on virtual reality head-mounted display goggles
There are often game sound effects, music and voice actor lines which come from loudspeakers or headphones
Some games in the 2000s include haptic, vibration-creating effects, force feedback peripherals and virtual reality headsets
Since the 2010s, the commercial importance of the video game industry has been increasing
The emerging Asian markets and mobile games on smartphones in particular are driving the growth of the industry
As of 2018, video games generated sales of US$134.9 billion annually worldwide
These were the third-largest segment in the U.S. entertainment market
They were behind broadcast and cable TV
The history of video games goes as far back as the early 1950s
Then academic computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations as part of their research or just for recreation
At M.I.T. in the 1960s, professors and students played games such as 3D tic-tac-toe and Moon Landing
These games were played on computers such as the IBM 1560, and moves were made by means of punch cards
Video gaming did not reach mainstream popularity until the 1970s and 1980s
Then video arcade games and gaming consoles using joysticks, buttons, and other controllers, along with graphics on computer screens and home computer games were introduced to the general public
Since the 1980s, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern popular culture in most parts of the world
One of the early games was Spacewar!
This video game was developed by computer scientists
Early arcade video games developed from 1972 to 1978
During the 1970s, the first generation of home consoles emerged, including the popular game Pong and various “clones”
The 1970s was also the era of mainframe computer games
The golden age of arcade video games was from 1978 to 1982
Video arcades with large, graphics-decorated coin-operated machines were common at malls and popular
Affordable home consoles such as the Atari 2600 and Intellivision enabled people to play games on their home TVs
During the 1980s, gaming computers, early online gaming and handheld LCD games emerged
This era was affected by the video game crash of 1983
From 1976 to 1992, the second generation of video consoles emerged
The third generation of consoles, which were 8-bit units, emerged from 1983 to 1995
The fourth generation of consoles, which were 16-bit models, emerged from 1987 to 1999
The 1990s saw the resurgence and decline of arcades, the transition to 3D video games, improved handheld games, and PC gaming
The fifth generation of consoles, which were 32 and 64-bit units, was from 1993 to 2006
During this era, mobile phone gaming emerged
During the 2000s, the sixth generation of consoles emerged (1998–2013)
During this period, online gaming and mobile games became major aspects of gaming culture
The seventh generation of consoles was from 2005 to 2012
This era was marked by huge development budgets for some games, with some having cinematic graphics
The launch of the top-selling Wii console, in which the user could control the game actions with real-life movement of the controller
The rise of casual PC games marketed to non-gamers
And the emergence of cloud computing in video games
In 2013, the eighth generation of consoles emerged, including Nintendo’s Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, Microsoft’s Xbox One, and Sony’s PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita
PC gaming has been holding a large market share in Asia and Europe for decades and continues to grow due to digital distribution
Since the development and widespread consumer use of smartphones, mobile gaming has been a driving factor for games
As they can reach people formerly uninterested in gaming, and those unable to afford or support dedicated hardware, such as video game consoles
The term video game has evolved over the decades from a purely technical definition to a general concept defining a new class of interactive entertainment
Technically, for a product to be a video game, there must be a video signal transmitted to a cathode ray tube (CRT) that creates a rasterized image on a screen
This definition precluded early computer games that outputted results to a printer or teletype rather than a display, any game rendered on a vector-scan monitor, any game played on a modern high definition display, and most handheld game systems
From a technical standpoint, these were more properly called “electronic games” or “computer games”
Today, however, the term “video game” has completely shed its purely technical definition and encompasses a wider range of technology
While still rather ill-defined, the term “video game” now generally encompasses any game played on hardware built with electronic logic circuits that incorporates an element of interactivity and outputs the results of the player’s actions to a display
Going by this broader definition, the first video games appeared in the early 1950s
They were tied largely to research projects at universities and large corporations
The first electronic digital computers, Colossus and ENIAC, were built during World War II to aid the Allied war effort against the Axis powers
Shortly after the war, the promulgation of the first stored program architectures at the University of Manchester (Manchester Mark 1), Cambridge University (EDSAC), the University of Pennsylvania (EDVAC), and Princeton University (IAS machine) allowed computers to be easily reprogrammed to undertake a variety of tasks
This facilitated commercializing computers in the early 1950s by companies like Remington Rand, Ferranti, and IBM
This in turn promoted the adoption of computers by universities, government organizations, and large corporations as the decade progressed
It was in this environment that the first video games were born
The computer games of the 1950s can generally be divided into three categories: training and instructional programs, research programs in fields such as artificial intelligence, and demonstration programs intended to impress or entertain the public
Because these games were largely developed on unique hardware in a time when porting between systems was difficult and were often dismantled or discarded after serving their limited purposes
They did not generally influence further developments in the industry
For the same reason, it is impossible to be certain who developed the first computer game or who originally modeled many of the games or play mechanics introduced during the decade
There are likely several games from this period that were never publicized and are thus unknown today
The earliest known chess computer program was developed by Alan Turing and David Champernowne called Turochamp
It was completed in 1950 but not actually implemented by them on a computer
The earliest known idea for a fully electronic game is a “Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device” in US patent #2,455,992
The earliest known electronic computer games actually implemented were two custom built machines called Bertie the Brain and Nimrod, which played tic-tac-toe and the game of Nim, respectively
Bertie the Brain, designed and built by Josef Kates at Rogers Majestic, was displayed at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1950
While Nimrod, conceived by John Bennett at Ferranti and built by Raymond Stuart-Williams, was displayed at the Festival of Britain and the Berlin Industrial Show in 1951
Neither game incorporated a cathode ray tube (CRT) display
Before these, automated games like the simple chess simulator El Ajedrecista (1914) and Nimrod’s predecessor Nimatron (1940) had been created as electro-mechanical devices
The first games known to incorporate a monitor were two research projects completed in 1952
These were a checkers program by Christopher Strachey on the Ferranti Mark 1 and a tic-tac-toe program called OXO by Alexander Douglas on the EDSAC
Both of these programs used a relatively static display to track the current state of the game board
The first known game incorporating graphics that updated in real time was a billiards game programmed by William Brown and Ted Lewis specifically for a demonstration of the MIDSAC computer at the University of Michigan in 1954
Perhaps the first game created solely for entertainment rather than to demonstrate the power of some technology, train personnel, or aid in research was Tennis for Two
It was designed by William Higinbotham
It was built by Robert Dvorak at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958
It was designed to entertain the general public at Brookhaven’s annual series of open houses
The game was deployed on an analog computer with graphics displayed on an oscilloscope and was dismantled in 1959
Higinbotham never considered adapting the successful game into a commercial product, which would have been impractical with the technology of the time.
Ultimately, the widespread adoption of computers to play games would have to wait for the machines to spread from serious academics to their students on U.S. college campuses
The mainframe computers of the 1950s were generally batch processing machines of limited speed and memory
This made them generally unsuited for games
Furthermore, they were costly and relatively scarce commodities, so computer time was a precious resource that could not be wasted on frivolous pursuits like entertainment
At the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), however, a team led by Jay Forrester developed a computer called Whirlwind in the early 1950s that processed commands in real time and incorporated a faster and more reliable form of random access memory (RAM) based around magnetic cores
Based on this work, two employees at the lab named Ken Olsen and Wes Clark developed a prototype real time computer called the TX-0 that incorporated the recently invented transistor
This ultimately allowed the size and cost of computers to be significantly reduced
Olsen subsequently established the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) with Harlan Anderson in 1957
He developed a commercial update of the TX-0 called the PDP-1
Lincoln Laboratory donated the TX-0 to MIT in 1958
MIT provided a similar level of access to the computer for students as it did for the TX-0
This resulted in the creation of the first (relatively) widespread, and thus influential, computer game, Spacewar!