Atari Pong to the Nintendo Wii

Reading “The Home Video Game Industry: Atari Pong to the Nintendo WII”, was quite interesting. I was around long enough to know most of the names of the video game machines and when around they came out. The very first video game machine I had was an Atari and the last one me and my family have is the Nintendo WII.

I was quite surprised to find out that the very first video game machine created was by the Japanese in the early 1960’s. It seems as though they are always one step ahead of the United States. David Rosen, who once was in the U.S. Air Force, was hired by the Japanese company named Sega and he designed the first game called Periscope.

However this case started out speaking of a man named Nolan Bushell. He had created a company named Atari. That is when he created a game called “Pong” that allowed someone to plan with one hand. The game was considered to be just like a table tennis game, only on a screen.

It was by 1976 that other companies have followed his lead and companies named RCA, Coleco, and Fairchild. The companies were competition for Atari. It was a consist battle between the money made off of video games machines and video games for years.

A lot of video games started out in an arcade before they made it into people homes. The one’s created for the arcades were coin-operated. It was only $.25 to play one. Paying only 25 cents to play a game is something I remember doing when I was a kid.

Later on in the 1970s a company named Nintendo became a competitor in the video game world. Also, in 1978 they were producing coin-operated video games, one named “Donkey Kong”. It became a great hit.

Prices and technology continued to rise throughout the years. In the 1980’s there was a machine created by Nintendo that only cost $75. This machine had a controller, console, and plug-in cartridge that contained 2 computerized custom chips (8-bits) and a graphic-processing unit. Nintendo’s machines were ahead of Atari with the amount of memory in them. They contained 2,000 bytes of random access memory (RAM).

One of Nintendo’s games that were always a great success was when they made with an ordinary carpenter named Mario. Mario was a big nosed man with a bushy mustache, and had red coveralls with a red cap. He had a pet ape who takes off with his girlfriend. Mario has to save her without getting hurt by running up ramps, climbing ladders, & jumping off elevators while his ape is throwing things at him. Even later on Nintendo created Mario a brother named Luigi. The Mario Brothers were created to perform plumbing and tackle anything that came their way while searching for Princess Toadstool.

By 1990, the market for home video games was worth $5 billion worldwide, and Nintendo controlled 90% of the share. It was then that by 1992 they had a gross profit of $1 billion. This