by Erik Setser

Created on: May 17, 2009

Up until 1971, video games were limited to computer platforms. At that point, a group of students from Stanford built a coin-operated version of "Space Wars." The following year, Atari took the idea to market with a coin-operated version of Pong, precluding the home version. Imitators sprang up over the years, among them Donkey Kong, Space Invaders and Galaxia. Children of the 1960s and early 1970s were witnesses to the genesis - no pun intended - of the video game industry.

Home consoles began to develop around the late 1970s, including Colecovision and Intellivision. But it wasn't until the 1983 release of the Nintendo Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System, released 1985 in America) that the market took on a life of its own. The jump in hardware capabilities from the Colecovision (1982) to the Famicom/NES was largely responsible for this. This put children of the 1970s before the birth of the home console era.

Then, in the late 1980s, 1989 to be exact, Nintendo opened up yet another market with the development of the Game Boy and thus the advent of portable gaming. Simple two-colored hand-held games were already popular, but with this, one could play several different games through a single piece of hardware. This event, went on to spawn competition such as the Lynx and the Sega Gamegear, placed the children of the early 1980s as witnesses to the dawn of mobile gaming.

Since then, revolutions in the gaming industry have been minimal. With how quickly technology develops in all fields, a new style of gaming, such as massive multiplayer online or motion sensory, doesn't seem quite as special as when home technology and information moved much more slowly. That is to say, it doesn't feel quite so much like leaps and bounds when it's happening in all fields of technology and doesn't even have time to sink in before the next one comes along.

But, maybe that's just my age showing. People were talking about playing games online via dial-up modem back in the mid-1990s. So multi-player online gaming never seemed to be as big of a deal to me as the marketers presented it to be. It wasn't an advent or a revolution. They were taking someone else's technical advances and applying it to their own existing technology and struggling market.

The existing markets did develop further. Pictures became sharper. 8-bit gradually grew to 64-bit. Electronic midis were replaced with actual music. Games, other than ones based on movies, began to have plots to them. The industry

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