As a dad we’ve found there’s an expectation that you’ve got to know it all – no matter what or where you are!

So when you next find yourself in a video game situation you can still be an expert, even if you do luck  out with Super Mario, with the  inside scoop on where it all came from.

With video games embedded in popular culture – and on the anniversary of its invention – Steve Polak presents a retrospective of the games console.

Do you remember the first time you played a videogame? For some of us it was a recent experience, while for others it might have been a long time ago. Amazingly, for a cultural form that has been with us for such a seemingly short time, home videogame consoles are almost as old at television. In fact, it was four decades ago this year that Ralph Baer built and played the first home video game on a machine he called the ‘Brown Box’. Powered by D-cell batteries and connected to a black-and-white TV, the modest invention was the beginning of a home entertainment revolution.

To mark this milestone, we’ve compiled a brief history of some of the key technologies, titles, games, companies and people that fuelled the development of home videogaming over the last forty years.

1972,

The first videogame console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was released on an unsuspecting America. The unit sold quite well even though people purchased it mainly out of curiosity. Over 100,000 were sold in the first two years. There was a tennis-style game that you could play on the Odyssey and overlays you stuck on your TV to provide a backdrop to the graphics. The box-like paddle controllers were incredibly cumbersome. The Odyssey missed the mark by being too complex and ahead of its time for consumers in 1972. Amazingly, Frank Sinatra promotes the machine.

In a Californian pub called Andy Capps, Atari gives the public the first opportunity to play the first videogame to become a hit. The game was an incredibly simple tennis game with two stick-like bats and a square ball. Pong was an instant success. The game featured one simple instruction: ‘Avoid missing ball for high score’. It was this simplicity that worked.

Pong’s success also led to the first lawsuit over intellectual property in a videogame. Magnavox sued Atari claiming that Pong was a copy of their Odyssey game. Magnavox won, but Atari only had to pay a small licensing fee to Magnavox for every Pong game they released. Atari got off lightly and made a fortune in the process.

1974

Home Pong is released. The first Atari home console played Pong and nothing else. It was the first home game system to feature colour graphics and it sold by the truckload, earning Atari the then unheard of profit of three million dollars.

1977

The Atari 2600 console is released.  The 2600 was inspired by systems such as the Odyssey in that you could program it to play different games by using a variety of cartridges. The system was also the first machine to feature portable joysticks you could connect to the device. Atari pulled off another first too, drawing on its substantial lineup of successful arcade videogames and releasing home versions of these.

1978

Space Invaders is released in Japan. Within a year it is a huge hit. It was the first videogame to feature a high score.

1979

Warren Robinett created the first ‘Easter Egg’ in a game by building a special room in the seminal Atari 2600 classic Adventure where you could find his name. Warren wanted recognition in the game for his work and was worried he’d get fired for making the special room, but was determined to do it anyway. The Easter Egg was found by mistake by a 12-year-old boy from Utah, and it became something of a badge of honour if you knew how to locate it. Before long, hidden treats were intentionally placed in other Atari games, and now Easter Eggs are a common and popular find in most games.

Several disgruntled Atari employees realise they are driving the company’s economic success and that they could take their skills with them and make games independently, reaping all of the rewards. Activision was formed and its games quickly gained a reputation for quality and innovation. Atari sued Activision, but apart from being forced to pay Atari a royalty, Activision was allowed to continue making games for the 2600. Without this development companies like Eidos, Konami, Ubisoft and many others might not have existed. The birth of third-party games developers changed the industry forever, and many other companies quickly formed to take advantage of the ‘gold rush’ years as just about anything developed for the 2600 would sell, no matter how good or bad it was.

Berzerk, the first game to contain speech is released in the arcades. Home console versions didn’t feature the speech.

1981

A little known Japanese artist called Shigeru Miyamoto creates his first game, Donkey Kong. The game features a plucky carpenter who eventually became Mario, the most popular plumber in the world.

1982

The first games console to use speech is the Intellivision, with its Intellivoice adaptor that delivers speech to some games.

Electronic Games, the first magazine completely dedicated to the medium, is launched in the US.

1983

The videogame industry crashes and burns. Too many poor-quality games are released and consumers walk away in droves. There are stories of some games, such as Atari’s ET, being driven by the truckload to a landfill in the Arizona desert (http://atari.digital-madman.com/). These tales are unproven, but the filling of bargain bins with product from collapsed game companies actually has a good long-term effect. It inspires companies such as Nintendo to look to control the quality of the games published on their console.

1984

Bucking the trend of English speaking markets is Japan, where Nintendo releases its first games console, the Famicom, to huge success. In a first for the industry, game developers couldn’t just make games for the system and pay Nintendo a royalty; instead games had to go through an approval process tightly controlled by Nintendo. So good are the games and the console that, a year later, the Famicon (renamed the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES) spearheads the rebirth of the games industry in the US. The NES also featured the first ‘lock out’ chip that made it impossible for unauthorised games to work on the machine.

1989

Mattel releases the Power Glove, a revolutionary control system for the NES that monitors player’s movements and makes them part of gameplay. The system doesn’t work very well, but it is still successful until the flow of Power Glove games dries up. The Power Glove is the precursor of the Wii controller, released almost 20 year later.

A serious competitor to the Nintendo ‘8 bit’ NES arrives. The Sega Genesis (later to be called the Mega Drive) is a games machine that uses 16 bit technology. This means the graphics are far better, with more colours on screen and stereo sound.

The GameBoy arrives. This handheld unit would change the face of portable home entertainment forever and it ships with the incredibly addictive Tetris, a game developed by Russian scientist Alexey Pajitnov.

1990

Nintendo releases its answer to the Genesis. The new SNES (or Super Nintendo Entertainment System) is also a 16 bit machine, but is able to display more colours (256), has clearer sound and can perform a number of special effects that put it technically ahead of the Genesis (which can display only 56 colours). The great schoolyard debate about which console is best rages across the globe.

1991

A Japanese arcade company called Capcom releases a new type of fighting game. Street Fighter features a comic book-style stable of fighters and incredibly fluid animation. The game is a technical masterpiece. Street Fighter introduces for the first time the idea of special ‘hidden’ attack moves the player has to learn. The game is a massive seller when it comes to the home consoles.

1992

The PlayStation is born. Sony had been in the process of working out a deal with Nintendo to develop a CD ROM device for its console when Nintendo announced publicly that it would partner with rival company Phillips instead. Ken Kutaragi, the Sony engineer working on the project, was certain Sony could produce its own games machine and convinced Sony CEO, Norio Ogha, to proceed with PlayStation. A bitter rivalry between Sony and Nintendo was born.

Mortal Kombat arrives. The game was not the first fighting game to feature digitised photographic style animation (that game is the abysmal SNES title Pit Fighter), but it was the first game to do it well. The game also introduces a new idea – the ‘fatality’ – a gory death move players can perform killing vanquished opponents.

The Sega Genesis is the first games console to use a CD ROM. A cumbersome add-on to the Genesis, the ‘Mega CD’ delivers video playback and sound that was, for the time, incredibly clear. The Mega CD’s technology is poor by today’s standards and the system failed as there weren’t enough games that exploited the technology. The Mega CD ushered in the age of optical data storage.

This would become the new standard for games consoles, replacing memory chip-based cartridges.

1993

Atari releases its last ever  games console. The Jaguar is a terrible flop, with poor games, average technology and shoddy controllers. The console is never officially sold in Australia.

1995

Sega’s ‘proper’ CD ROM console, the Saturn, arrives in Australia. The hefty price of $799 puts some off, but amazing new 3D games such as Virtua Fighter mark a major new phase in home gaming. The 3D era has begun.

The PlayStation also arrives, and after a slow start, overtakes the Saturn as the games machine of choice. The PlayStation features better 3D processors than the Saturn and developing games for the PlayStation is also easier. A decent flow of game releases from Sony buries the Sega machine as releases for the Saturn slow to a trickle.

1996

Nintendo leapfrogs the ‘32 bit’ technology that powers the Saturn and PlayStation. The new Nintendo machine is powered by a 64 bit processor. The machine is a huge hit once released, largely because of the new brilliant 3D game Mario 64. A new standard of 3D gameplay is set. Mario 64 is still an amazing game even today.

1998

Sega has one more crack at the console market by releasing the impressive Dreamcast. The console is the first games machine in Australia to deliver online access, however this is only via a dial-up service and the setup process is awkward. The Dreamcast is a hit for a while as the games are superb, but again Sega is mown down by industry juggernaut Sony. The expected release of the PlayStation 2 makes the game development community wary about investing too much in the Dreamcast. The Sega machine loses impetus and disappears.

2001

The PlayStation 2 is released in Australia. Despite a disappointing initial software lineup the machine wins many converts. It is extremely powerful and is the first console to include an onboard DVD player. The PS2 sells to large numbers of people who appreciate its versatility when it comes to watching movies and playing games.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates decides he wants a piece of the home console pie. After specifying that a new Microsoft console needs to have twice the power of the PS2 Gates is pleased when the Xbox is released. It clearly delivers better visuals than any other machine on the market. The Xbox is also the first console to feature a hard drive as a part of the machine. This new storage system makes it possible to program games with much larger worlds.

Nintendo goes in another direction. Rather than trying to deliver multimedia home entertainment with DVD playback and the most powerful graphics, the GameCube is presented as a cheap, but extremely effective games machine. This ploy helps endear the console to younger gamers, but older home entertainment loving consumers tend to opt for other machines.

2006

Even though the Xbox is clearly the most powerful console in the market and the machine is chipping away at Sony’s dominant market share, Microsoft decide to hurdle the competition with a more powerful machine again. The Xbox 360 delivers stunning games in high definition. The console also has a larger hard drive, the option to network it with your PC and even better broadband access functionality. Even mobile phone connectivity is a part of the plan.

Nintendo walks a different path with its new console. The Wii is a brilliant machine that once again eschews the ‘home entertainment’ tag as it doesn?t play DVDs or audio CDs. Instead, the console is all about a very cool new style of gameplay. You use the Wiimote controllers to play all sorts of games by waving your arms, as well as pushing buttons. Games are now physically good for you.

2007

Sony’s PS3 arrives in Australia. The machine is the most expensive and arguably the most powerful in the market, capable of playing high definition Blu-ray video discs, surfing the internet, creating  slide shows from digital photos, as well as store and music and video files

The HD DVD add-on for the XBox 360 enables it to play high definition movies.

2008 and beyond…

Videogames have come an enormous way in the last 40 years, but this is only the beginning. The 70s animated feature TRON portrayed a world in which people could be transported into a virtual reality world controlled by a computer, giving that person a complete ‘out of body’ experience and putting them inside a totally different reality. In such a world, the gamer wasn’t just controlling the action on a screen but living the whole experience as if it actually happened!

With the development of neurological implant technology this seemingly incredible idea might just become reality. It could conceivably allow the creation of games that were 100 percent convincing; games that felt like they were absolutely real.

Dads’ Club acknowledges and thanks all the dads  at  www.gadgetguy.com.au