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- The Company "Nintendo" starts out as a playing card company, the name means "Leave Luck to Heaven".
- Ralph Baer, and military engineer, is instructed to "build the best TV set in the world". Baer suggests some sort of built in interactive game to set their TV set apart. Management ignores the idea. It takes him almost 20 more years to get his products distributed.
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1954 |
Korean War Veteran, David Rosen sees the popularity of mechanical coin-operated games on US military bases in Japan. He then starts Service Games, in order to export these games and naked his own machines. The name SEGA was stamped on the machines, and eventually became Nintendo's main competitor. |
| 1958 |
To prevent visitors from the Brookhaven National Labs in New York from getting bored, physicist Willy Higinbotham invents a table tennis game that is displayed on a oscilloscope. He improves the invention later by using a 15-inch monitor display. Believing that he invented nothing, he doesn't patent the device.
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1961 |
MIT Student Steve Russel creates Spacewar, the first interactive computer game.
 
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| 1972 |
- Nolan Bushnell starts his own company named "Atari" which is equivalent to the word "check" in chess.
- Bushnell believes that simpler games are the way to proceed, so he commissioned the making of a simple table tennis game. The game known as the first game, EVER, "Pong".
- When the plans for PONG are dismissed by established arcade game manufacturers, he decides to create the game himself and sets it up in a local bar. The unit breaks in two weeks because the coin return is jammed with quarters.
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| 1977 |
Atari introduces the first widely popular home system, the Atari 2600. It retailed for $249 dollars. In the same year, Atari opened opened the first Chuck E. Cheese.
 
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| 1980 |
- Space Invaders is released. Causes sales of the Atari 2600 to skyrocket and becomes one of the most popular games of all time.
- The first console "War" Occurred during this year, when Mattel introduced its Intellivision Machine. As became precedent for later wars, the console that was released later resulted in better hardware and better graphics.
- Many Former Atari Employees left over credit disputes and went on to form "Activision" the first 3rd party developer.
- Namco releases the arcade version is PAC-MAN. This is still the most successful arcade game of all time. There were at least 300,000 Pac Man units worldwide, and there were also this many "counterfeit" Pac Man units sold. FUN FACT!!: The game was originally named PUCK MAN until the developers foresaw vandals scratching out part of the letter "P" and therefore scaring parents away.
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| 1981 |
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1982
Aka
"The Crash" |
- Coleco introduces the "Coleco-Vision" which had much better sound and graphics than the Atari and was heavily supported by Nintendo. Coleco later releases an adapter that allowed Atari games to be played in the Coleco System.
- Atari releases a highly anticipated homer version of Pac-Man. However, their version looked nothing like the arcade version. This seriously tarnished the image of Atari and signaled the failure of Atari and the video game industry as a whole.
 
Left: Pac Man-Arcade Right: Pac Man-Atari 2600
- Atari releases the game for "ET: The Extra-Terrestrial" The game was rushed to meet release dates and completely programmed in 6 months. Atari was expecting to sell out the game, and created more cartridges than there were actual Atari Consoles in homes. The game was a critical and commercial failure and further tarnished Atari's image. Millions of copies of E.T. and other Atari games were famously deposited in a New Mexico Landfill.
- . In the early 1980s Atari owned 80% of the video game market, they accounted for 70% of Warner's operating profits. On December 1982, Warner stock had plummeted to two-thirds of its previous value, and Warner closed out the quarter with its profits down a mind-boggling 56%. (Even worse, a minor scandal erupted when it was revealed that Atari's president and CEO had sold 5,000 shares of Warner stock a mere 23 minutes before announcing Atari's disappointing sales figures.) Atari racked up over half a billion dollars ($536 million) in losses in 1983, and by the end of 1984 Warner had sold the company. With such losses, prices were slashed, and every surviving game company could not compete. Pretty soon, the entire medium had "died".
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