Electronic games have been blamed
for low grades, bad behavior and even poor health. If you listen long enough,
electronic games are responsible for all the problems that our young people are
experiencing today. Electronic games are here to stay. People have been trying
to play games on computers almost since the days of the very first computer.
In pursuit of this idea, researchers and
scientists designed rudimentary games that could be played on the huge, clumsy
computers of the 1950s and 1960s. The first real electronic games as a consumer
product were built as games coin-operated arcade games in the early 1970s. In
1971, Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney and Al Alcorn formed the first game company,
Atari.
Soon after, they produced the first game console and their first electronic game, Pong, as an arcade game. This success led Atari and other companies to begin work on home game consoles that could be connected to televisions. In 1979 the company, Activision, was formed by former Atari game designers.
They decided to leave the development of equipment for playing electronic games to other people. It was the first company to establish an electronic game software development and sales business. Before long, a series of game companies sprung up trying to develop software for the nascent electronic game industry. Consumers turned away en masse, and the home electronic game industry faded and slipped.
Nintendo also offered a feature that allowed the console to record game action so that a player could pause the action of a game. Electronic games, today, have achieved the status of an art form. Curiously, most electronic games look like board games.
As electronic games matured, they
began to attract a more mature audience. Many of the most popular board games
have been adapted into electronic game formats. Electronic games are no longer
just for children.
