Video games are interactive platforms, meaning you do everything inside them. There are about 5 million video games worldwide, and that’s a lot! Also, video games come from franchises, which are large groups of video games that have the same theme, like “The Legend of Zelda” or “Super Mario” and “Mario Kart”. Video games can be on anything, such as servers, mobile phones, arcade machines, handheld consoles, or on PC. Sometimes, if you have a fancy TV, you can play games with the remote like “Crossy Road” or “Beach Buggy Racing”. Examples of video game consoles include the NES, the SNES, the Wii, the Wii U, the Xbox, the PS5, Nintendo Switch, and the GameCube. Finally, my favorite games are “The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword”, “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess”, and “Mario Kart 8 Deluxe”.
William Higinbotham invented the first video game on October 18, 1958, called “Tennis for Two.” Before that, in 1950, the famous mathematician/engineer Claude Shannon began to believe that computers could be programmed to play chess by themselves. His proposal inspired computer scientists to create computers that could do things themselves, like chess and other games. These games were only created as demonstrations, but after being developed for a bit, they could be played by engineers with free time. A few years later, three people named Steve Russel, Alan Kotok, and Martin Graetz created the game “Spacewar!” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “Spacewar!” was a game where spaceships shoot torpedoes at each other, and the background was true star maps. To conclude, “Spacewar!” and other early video games were certainly a big step forward in the history of interactive games.
