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Video Game History: Technology, Business and Play
A plain-language overview of the themes running through game history: hardware limits, business models, creative communities and the changing ways people play.
Software and Applications
Video Game History
Themes in the history of games: consoles, home coders, genres and sound.
Bedroom Programmers and the Home Computer Game Boom
How hobbyists in the late 1970s and 1980s wrote and sold games for cheap home computers, especially in Britain, and what the bedroom coder era did and did not look like.
Computer Role-Playing Games and Their Roots
How digital role-playing games grew from tabletop ideas of the 1970s and from mainframe programs, and how the genre moved from university systems to home computers.
Game Consoles and the Cartridge Era
How dedicated home game machines worked, why swappable cartridges mattered, and how the cartridge era rose in the 1970s and 1980s before discs took over.
Game Engines and Reusable Game Software
How shared code and tools let developers build many games on the same foundations, from early reusable routines to modern engines, with benefits and trade-offs.
Online Multiplayer Games and Shared Worlds
How games moved from a single screen to many players over networks, from shared mainframes and text worlds to modems, local networks and persistent online worlds.
Pixel Art and Sprites: Making Pictures With Little Memory
How small grids of colored dots and movable sprites let early games show pictures with tiny amounts of memory, and how those limits became a lasting art form.
Sound Chips and Game Music
How limited sound hardware in early game machines and home computers shaped the style of game music, from simple beeps to synthesized chiptunes.
Text Adventures and Interactive Fiction
How games played by typing commands and reading descriptions began on 1970s mainframes, spread to home computers, and continue today as interactive fiction.
Related topics
More in software and applications
Engineering Software Computers as tools for design, simulation and making things. Graphics and Games Pictures, animation, games and virtual worlds made by computers. Business Software How firms came to track customers, money and marketing with computers. Learning and Language Computers used for teaching and translating. Sound and Speech Computers making music and understanding spoken words. Programming Languages How people came to write instructions for machines, and why so many languages exist.