It paved the way for gameplay found in Super Mario Bros. Pitfall! was an early platform game, and though it technically didn’t side-scroll, it was certainly an early version of it. They went on to produce some of Atari’s best-selling games like Pitfall!, where you navigated through a jungle and collected treasures. Several Atari programmers defected in 1980 and created Activision, the world’s first independent video game developer and distributor. It is considered by some to be the first virtual reality arcade game because it featured 3D wireframe graphics and players had to look through a “periscope” to play the game. In 1980, Battlezone was one of the first video games to use vector graphics technology, and visuals became smoother and cleaner. Video games now had the ability to feel suspenseful and formidable, and this happy accident laid the foundation for future gameplay. The aliens sped up, as did the 4-note soundtrack. As you blasted away aliens, fewer aliens on the screen meant a lighter load on the processor and, in turn, faster rendering. But this wasn’t intentional it was actually a glitch due to technical limitations. It was the first game that introduced a difficulty curve-it got more challenging as you played. It also paved the way for modern video games by pioneering the “shoot-em-up” genre and using music as a device to influence players’ emotions. (Urban legend says it caused a national shortage of 100-yen coins in Japan.) With its blocky, iconic aliens, it visually defined the look of commercial video games. Space Invaders, an arcade game about shooting aliens, became immensely popular all around the world in 1978. He spawned an entirely new gaming genre called interactive fiction, hypertext, or interactive storytelling, which laid the foundation for future adventure games and role-playing games.
In 1975, programmer Will Crowther created a text-only, interactive game called Colossal Cave Adventure, where players entered text commands to explore a virtual cave and solve puzzles. Making $3.2 million in profit, Pong was the the first commercially successful arcade game, and it ushered in video games as a new form of entertainment. In fact, people even lined up outside bars in the morning to play it. But soon it began appearing in pubs, bowling alleys, and JC Penney stores. Pong was originally developed as an internal training exercise it wasn’t even meant to be sold commercially.
PongĪtari’s first product in 1972-a simple table tennis arcade video game called Pong-came with just one instruction: “Avoid missing ball for high score.” It was an early strategic game that introduced the concepts of resource management and risk management to players. In the early 1980s, it was released as a stand-alone game to the public on the Apple-II, making its way into schools everywhere and becoming a pioneer of the edutainment genre.
In 1971, Oregon Trail was created by several young student teachers as a way to get their students interested in the 19th-century pioneer journey out west.
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And as a bonus: You can play all of these retro games online for free right within your web browser. These are just a few of the many video games that pioneered new genres and technology, laid the foundation for modern-day gaming, and spawned iconic franchises that are still successful today. But just a few decades ago, our primitive video games consisted of nothing more than pixelated blobs and bouncing lines. We can sync games to the cloud without even batting an ultra HD eye. Landscapes are sprawling and stunningly immersive. Today, we live in a pixel-perfect era of 4K video games. We often write about how much technology has changed the way we work, but how has it affected the way we play games? While IT admins and tech lovers are usually at the forefront of sophisticated technology, sometimes it can be rewarding to step back and think about how far we’ve come.