How has Gaming Evolved?
Gaming has been one of the fastest evolving entertainments all over the world. Despite the fact that video games did not exist until the later half of the twentieth century, technology has advanced so much since then that they have come to represent the cutting edge of human inventiveness. In the 1950s, computers had a number of game-like programmes, but these were largely recreations of tabletop games. Alan Turing, a British mathematician and Enigma code cracker, attempted in Manchester in 1951 to adapt Turochamp, a chess game capable of playing versus a human, for the Ferranti Mark 1. Regrettably, he died before it could run on its own. Tic-tac-toe and training programmes were popular in the 1950s, with William Higinbotham's temporary installation Tennis for Two paving the way for Pong a few years later. Someone broke the mold next decade.
By the beginning of the 1990s, everything in the world of gaming was moving at breakneck speed. Sega, Nintendo, Atari, and even Sony are dabbling in the home console market. To give the new SNES console more oomph, games like Star Fox and Virtua Racing experiment with 3D-rendering polygons instead of 2D sprites using processors implanted in the cartridges themselves.
Toru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man, designed a game about eating food with attractive mascot creatures traversing a maze in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience of women and girls. This sparked the development of games like Q*bert and Donkey Kong, which introduced us to Mario and paved the path for Nintendo's dominance of the 1980s gaming market. Prior to the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1983, home consoles attempted to replicate the arcade experience, which failed miserably. Basically everything we utilise for modern gaming had been introduced by the mid-90s. Joysticks and D-pads on gamepads, home consoles and PCs, and even online bouts are all available. But, of course, no one came to a halt there. The size of games has grown enormously due to technological advancements in graphics cards, which have jumped from 64-bit processors to 128-bit processors to multi-core CPUs.
We've progressed from stumbling into 3D worlds to soaring through virtual reality realms thanks to breakthroughs in graphics technology. And the internet's pervasiveness in our life has spawned new genres such as MMOs and, more recently, the Battle Royale genre, which has swept the globe thanks to Fortnite. The problem with game evolution is that even the building blocks began off looking like the current gaming we know today, but it's the small advancements that have lead to massive sweeping alterations along the way.