For 50 years the gaming industry has witnessed one of the most rapid growths of any enterprise in the world. As well as, seeing many dramatic ups and downs throughout its journey, it has turned into a multi billion dollar juggernaut industry. In fact, while many industries have seen profit losses and recession in recent years, the gaming industry has experienced a significant growth in sales and profits. From Pong to Madden the visual presentation of games has improved quite impressively. This program will follow the evolution of video games from their early roots, to today, and what is coming tomorrow.
In 1958, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton New York, a man by the name of William Higinbotham created a game called "tennis program" or more popularly known as "tennis for 2". The game was played on an oscilloscope attached to an analog computer. Even though it was very basic, and boring by today's standards, the game is considered to be the very first video game ever created. Three later in 1961, a group of MIT students wanting to prove the power of their self-created computer, created a game called space war. The leading programmer for the game, Steve Russel, has become credited as the man who set the stage for video games, because his program became the first electronic game to be circulated from computer lab to computer lab across the world. Then in 1966, The US government decided to fund a project where video games would be created in order to be used strictly as military training tools, and not for consumer electronics. Just to prove how serious of a project this really was it is now known that it was even labeled as "TOP SECRET". Although the US government had no intention of ever creating a consumer market for video gaming one company did. The same year a company known as SEGA released the first arcade game, an electronic shooting gallery game called Periscope.