Gaming is a relatively new concept to the world judging on how recently it became mainstream with the introduction of consoles. But what about when consoles weren’t around? Did gaming exist back then?
It all starts in 1972 with Pong, a table tennis-themed arcade developed by Atari. It was a two-dimensional game where the player controls an in-game paddle by moving it vertically across the left or right side of the screen. They can compete against another player controlling a second paddle on the opposing side. Players use the paddles to hit a ball back and forth. The goal is for each player to reach eleven points before the opponent; points are earned when one fails to return the ball to the other. It was one of the earliest arcade games and the first one to have success, and, soon after its release, several companies began producing games that closely mimicked its gameplay. Eventually, Atari's competitors released new types of video games that deviated from Pong's original format to varying degrees, and this, in turn, led Atari to encourage its staff to move beyond Pong and produce more innovative games themselves.
After seeing Pong’s success, many companies tried to develop their own arcade games to either be as successful as Pong or surpass it in popularity. The late 1970’s and early 1980’s are considered to be the “golden age of arcade games” because of how popular and widespread they were in restaurants, cafes, and later on arcade houses which were rooms filled with these and other coin-operated machines. This period of time is also when big franchises we still hear about today surfaced: Pac Man, Donkey Kong (which would later turn into the Super Mario Bros. franchise and the Donkey Kong franchise), Streetfighter, and many others.
These games were really simple though because of the obstacles that hardware imposed. It was basically impossible to port the games to any kind of console to have at home. Arcades were heavy, clunky and you constantly needed to “feed” it money to play. The first cartridge console that had more advanced games would only be available years later in 1983. The Nintendo entertainment system (NES for short) was the first 8-bit console on the market. Although not perfect, people now could have an accessible console at home that didn’t cost any money to play. It was revolutionary and once again led to innovation in the entertainment industry.
In conclusion, gaming existed already before consoles were a thing but it used to be way more expensive and some specific games could not be available near you, making it impossible for you to play them. Even so, modern gaming owes a lot of its success to these arcade machines and all the people that played them.
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