Internet History Keeper
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Era 11972–198212 stories
Arcades, first consoles and mainframes
Video games leave the labs: the first home console, arcades, multiplayer games on university mainframes, the first third-party developers and home computers.
Atari
The company that invented mass-market video games as a business: the Pong arcade game of 1972 and the 2600 home console.
What Wikipedia does not have: The company's name is a term from the game of Go, not something invented from scratch.
Magnavox Odyssey
The world's first home video game console: an engineer at a military contractor came up with playing tennis on a television in 1966 and turned it into a product by 1972, but Magnavox sold it only through its own dealers, and…
What Wikipedia does not have: The patent application got ahead of the product by a year and a half.
PLATO
The University of Illinois teaching system, conceived in 1960 to fight functional illiteracy, which students quickly turned into the first mass platform for multiplayer games, chats, and forums.
What Wikipedia does not have: A language for lessons accidentally became a language for games.
Activision
Four programmers left Atari because they were given neither author credit nor royalties for their games, and in 1979 they founded the first third-party publisher in history to make games for someone else's console.
What Wikipedia does not have: The royalty proposal was drawn up by one person, Alan Miller, after he studied music industry contracts
Infocom
A company of ten MIT graduates and staff members that turned Zork, a text game from a mainframe, into a cult of the home computers of the early 1980s, then nearly drowned itself in developing Cornerstone, a business database, and…
What Wikipedia does not have: The technology that saved the games' portability sank Cornerstone.
Sierra On-Line
A two-person family company that invented graphic adventure games at a kitchen table in 1979, grew into the publisher of King's Quest, made to order for IBM, and was sold at its peak in 1996 to a corporation that collapsed two…
What Wikipedia does not have: The game was literally packed in Ziploc bags.
Commodore
The company that went from repairing typewriters to the best-selling home computer in history, the Commodore 64.
What Wikipedia does not have: The purchase of MOS Technology was a stock deal, not a $60 million cash purchase, as is often written.
Electronic Arts
Trip Hawkins left Apple and in 1982 founded Electronic Arts to sell games the way music is sold, with the developer's name and photo on an LP-style cover.
What Wikipedia does not have: Among EA's first investors was Jerry Moss, co-owner of the music label A&M Records.
MicroProse
The company that invented the flight simulator as a genre and turned the name of its game designer Sid Meier into a commercial brand: Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, Civilization.
What Wikipedia does not have: Stealey never flew the F-15.
Sinclair Research
The British company of Clive Sinclair that in 1980–82 drove down the price of the home computer three times in a row (ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum) and in doing so created a whole generation of teenage programmers, the \"bedroom…
What Wikipedia does not have: Manic Miner, the best-known game for the ZX Spectrum, was not written on a Spectrum.
Origin Systems
The studio that the Garriott family founded in 1983 around the game designer Richard \"Lord British\" Garriott.
What Wikipedia does not have: Origin spent some years as a New Hampshire studio.
GEnie
In 1985 a General Electric subsidiary decided to earn extra money on mainframes that sat idle in the evenings, following the example of CompuServe but aiming to undercut its price and beat it on games.
What Wikipedia does not have: Air Warrior beat Ultima Online by ten years, and it grew not out of GEnie but out of a student project on a different mainframe.
Era 21983–19904 stories
After the crash: new consoles and home computers
The 1983 crash, the return of trust through quality control, the console war, pay-by-the-hour online games, Tetris and the fight for its rights, shareware.
Bullet-Proof Software
A tiny Japanese studio run by one Dutchman that in 1989 beat the Maxwell media empire and a London middleman in the race for the rights to Tetris, and won not with money but with a personal friendship with the game's author and a…
What Wikipedia does not have: The formal co-owner of 50% of the company never once showed up at the office.
Nintendo
A Japanese playing-card company founded in 1889 that, after a hundred years of diversification, failures, and chance discoveries, became a video game platform: after the US market crash of 1983 Nintendo restored the industry's…
What Wikipedia does not have: The name "Ultra Hand" was Yamauchi's own idea
Sega
An American business placing coin-operated machines on military bases in Japan that by 1965 had become the Japanese arcade giant Sega Enterprises; in the console war of the late 1980s it attacked Nintendo with direct advertising…
What Wikipedia does not have: Sega's success was almost entirely American, not Japanese.
Tetris
Elorg
The game was invented in 1984 by a Soviet programmer in his spare time on a text terminal with no graphics.
What Wikipedia does not have: Tetris was created not for sale but as a test of a decommissioned machine's power.
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