One of the fastest growing industries for the past half-century has been the video game industry. An industry that did not even exist sixty years ago is now worth well over one-hundred billion dollars. Video games have come a long way from their beginnings in the 1950s and will continue to advance. The evolution of video games has had many steps and it started with the development with the earliest video games. These games were introduced public arcades and then video game home systems were developed, all though there has been much controversy with parents deciding whether home systems are healthy for children to play, and now there are rumors over the newest form of gaming known as virtual reality.
In the year 1958, a scientist named William Higinbotham who worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. He was planning on releasing something that would attract one of the largest crowds to the lab's annual visiting day. This experiment that he displayed was considered one the first video games ever. This game was called "Tennis for Two ", which was played by two players on a flat horizontal line with a much shorter vertical line in the middle which served as a virtual tennis net. A ball was bounced back and forth by the players over the virtual net, just as they would in a normal game of tennis. An invention known as a cathode tube ray which used, "a specialized vacuumtube in which images are produced when an electron beam strikes a phosphorescent surface, " (Rouse) was used to create the images which were projected on the screen. The ability to make the ball move was created by adjusting knobs on a controller pad which would change the curve of the light ray the cathode ray tube produced. This entertaining game caused hundreds of people to line up and play it.
As gaming began to increase in popularity, things such as arcade rooms started popping up on street corners.