Video games were first created and developed by students or lecturers as a hobby during time at university but were only accessible via the universities mainframe. Due to the limited amount of computer hardware early in the age of the video games they were considerably small in number and often forgotten and left.
It wasn’t until 1961 when a group of students from MIT fronted by Steven Russell created what you could really call the first computer game, the game was called spacewar and it was created on the DEC PDP-1 which was a relatively new computer at the time. The game pitted two humans against each other, each player controlled a space craft which could fire missiles but just to add some more fun in to it there was a black hole in the centre which they had to navigate around whilst trying to destroy each other.
In 1966 Ralph Baer created what is now considered to be a simple game known as chase that displayed on a standard television and was the first game to ever do this. With a lot of help from Baer, Bill Harrison created the light gun in 1967.
Through the years there were many other innovations that led to computer games becoming the phenomenon it is today. One of these innovations was known as the golden age of arcade games which if you think about it the arcade game is basically the starting block for what would later become the console.
It is weird when you think that what we use for fun started as a hobby to keep people amused during university.
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