Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1966
Rudolph Baer, a defence engineer, started to investigate the
possibilities of using TV as a platform for interactive games. Its first
use, in
, was with a simple tennis game in which flat paddles
knock a square shape back and forth. In
1967
a company in Japan,
SEGA (short for Services and Games) released its first arcade
game, called the
Periscope
. SEGA was the result of a merger in
1966
1964
between a photo-booth company, Rosen Enterprises Ltd, started
in Japan by an American ex-serviceman, and a Japanese vending
machine company, Nihon Goraku Bussan. At the beginning of the
1970
s a company called Magnavox purchased Baer's television tech-
nology and started to develop
Odyssey
, the first TV plug-in device to
play video games. At the same time Bushnell attempted to develop
Spacewar
as an arcade game, as well as an arcade tennis game,
Pong
(illus.
).
Pong
is probably the first computer game to be a major commer-
cial success. Its reception led to the development of similar games by
rival companies and started the beginnings of the computer games
industry. In
48
1974
Atari developed a home version of
Pong
, which
48 The footballer Steve Heighway playing the computer tennis game
Pong
on a
Videomaster games console (the first home-video game system) in 1977.
