While many of the high-technology breakthroughs in electronics have been focused on advances in the fields of science and business, the video game industry has also grown rapidly, due to sophisticated electronic devices.
The concept of video games had its beginnings on September 1, 1966, with Ralph Baer, a consumer products engineer at Sanders, a defense contracting firm located in Nashua, New Hampshire. While sitting in a New York bus terminal, Baer thought of the sixty million television sets in the United States and struck on the idea that games using the sets could be a lucrative proposition. He immediately set to work developing a game in his spare time, and three months later produced a basic game similar in which a spot chasing another around the screen. After showing his prototypes for other games to Sanders executives, Baer and two other engineers, William T. Rusch and William L. Harrison, devised a basic paddle and ball game. By the end of 1967, they had also come up with a video hockey game. On April 25, 1972, Baer and his associates were issued a patent for their creations. Shortly thereafter, Baer licensed his video game technology to Magnavox and the video game industry took off.
Another early pioneer was Noland Buschnel, an American engineer who introduced the game Pong in 1972. An electronic tennis game, Pong became very popular, particularly in arcades. Buschnel formed his own company, known as Atari and in 1976, Warner Communications bought Atari for $28 million and began offering video game cartridges for the home television.
PacMan, a game similar in concept to Baer's first prototype, was introduced in 1983, the product of a joint effort by the Namco Company of Japan and Midway of the United States. With hundreds of thousands of games already sold, PacMan remains one of the most popular video games ever created; however, that claim to fame may be upstaged with the introduction of home video games from Nintendo. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) offers players a wide array of game choices, joysticks, wireless remote controls, and many other options. As computer technology continues to advance, the future direction video games will take is unclear. The use of three-dimensional graphic displays, video and laser disks have already begun to appear in the latest games. With the rapid increases in computer chip speeds and capacities, as well as speech recognition/synthesis technology, future video games are certain to bear little resemblance to their crude counterparts of the 1960s.
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