15 FACTS TO UNDERSTAND THE VIDEOGAME INDUSTRY

In the world more than 1,200 million people are considered gamers. Only in Latin America there are more than 115 million

  1. The story begins with ...

There are several debates about what was the first game in history. Some such as Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device by Thomas Goldsmith or Alan Turing Chess are considered the first pieces of electronic entertainment.

However, Tennis for two , created in 1958 by physicist Willy Higinbotham of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, is considered by most to be the first video game in history. Unlike computers, telephones or consoles, this game required an oscilloscope to be played.

  1. My first little machine

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created in 1971 the first little machine in history, used a black and white television as a screen and ran a game called Computer Space. The player controlled a small space rocket and had to dodge the missiles and destroy the alien ships.

  1. The first console was not Atari

Although many consider the Atari Pong as the first home console in history, three years before it, Ralph Bear launched Magnavox Odyssey. He had a total of 27 games that were released for the console.

  1. Atari arrives at home

In 1975 Bushnell and Dabney launched the Atari Home Pong console. The first units were sold at Sears under its Tele Games brand. The console was a recreation of the coin machine of the same name.

  1. A successful market

In 1977 Atari launches the Atari 2600 the first console to use a microprocessor and cartridges with circuits that contained the games. The console back then sold for $ 299. Atari positioned itself as one of the most important companies in the industry. That same year Activision became the first game developer for Atari.

  1. The first great game in the world

In 1982 Namco released the most successful game for the Atari 2600 console: Pac-Man . According to the magazine Electronic Games Magazine of 1982, the game became the most sold so far with more than seven million units.

Facts: The first person to reach the highest possible record in the game belongs to Billy Mitchell of Florida in 1999. Reaching the record of 3,333,360 points took more than six hours and to achieve it he had to pass 256 Pac-Man scenarios without losing none of the special fruits and without losing a single life.

  1. The first console war

In 1986 the first real console war was lived. Nintendo enters the market with the NES, Sega introduces its Sega Master System and Atari launches the Atari 7800 to keep the players engaged.

Fun fact: Nintendo is the oldest game company. The company known worldwide for characters like Mario Bros and Donkey Kong, was founded in 1889 and was known in the Japanese country for making the deck of cards for the game Hanafuda.

  1. Laptops enter the big leagues

The Game Boy was also not the first portable console in history, but the first successful one. According to Time magazine of 1989, the Nintendo console managed to sell more than one million units during its first weeks. The device was sold with the popular skill game Tetris.

  1. Is me Mario

The one that would become the iconic image of Nintendo, Mario Bros, did not have his own game until 1983 with Mario Bros and in 1985 with Super Mario Bros. His first appearance was in the Donkey Kong game of 1981, as Jump Man .

The character, created by Shigeru Miyamoto, has appeared in more than 200 games so far and has sold more than 210 million units of the famous Italian plumber's games.

Fun fact: Nintendo has never revealed Mario's full name. At one time it was thought that the name of the plumber and his brother, Luigi, was also Mario because of the fact that the saga commonly refers to the Mario brothers.

  1. Sonic is our rooster says Sega

The Japanese also Sega launched in 1991 the first Sonic game to compete with the popular figure of Mario among children. The character has appeared in games, television series and comics and it is estimated that his games have sold more than 80 million units worldwide.

  1. Twin Towers

Rockstar, creators of one of the most controversial sagas in the history of videogames: Grand Theft Auto confirmed that prior to the release of GTA 3 eliminated a character named Darkel, for the recent attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. The character was not a terrorist, but a vagabond who asked the player to put explosives in corporate buildings to blow them up.

  1. Sony decides to enter

In 1994, Sony decided to give Nintendo and Sega a headache with their first video game console, the PlayStation. Unlike its predecessors, the console was the first to use a CD format and not cartridges for games. According to Sony, the one named Play 1 was the first video game console in history to exceed the figure of 100 million units.

In 2000, Sony released the next version of the console, the PlayStation 2 which to date remains the best selling home console in history with 155 million units worldwide.

Fun fact: The PlayStation 1 was designed as a Nintendo console with Sony electronic components, when Nintendo rejected them the company decided to venture into the market anyway.

  1. The legend of ET

The game based on the famous 1983 film ET for the Atari 2600 console is considered one of the worst in history.

For years, he was considered a legend of the industry and responsible for Atari's financial crisis, which even led the company to collect all the units that were not sold and bury them in the Alamo Gordo desert in New Mexico.

In 2013, the myth was confirmed when Zak Penn, as part of his documentary about the game, obtained permission from the state to carry out the excavation. As a result they managed to subtract more than 728,000 copies of desert ET. Penn commented at the time to the AP agency that some of them still worked.

  1. The advantage over the cartridge

Final Fantasy VII, one of the best-selling RPGs on the PlayStation 1, was designed for the Nintendo 64 console. However, because the console still used the format of cartridges the space to store the title was insufficient. The player should have bought 13 cartridges, instead of the four CDs in which it was stored for PlayStation.

Fun fact: Final Fantasy, one of the most famous franchises in the video game market, got its name because it was the "Last Hope" in the face of the possible bankruptcy of its developer Squaresoft, because its previous titles had not generated attention.

  1. Also by chance

Microsoft's Xbox was initially known as DirectXbox and the Redmond company did not conceive it as a console, but merely as a device to show the video game development industry the advantages of programming graphics under Microsoft's Direct X technology.