Tuesday, September 30, 2008

A Journey From Video Game To Online Computer Game.

Video games have been a significant force in society and one of the most popular leisure, more or less a solitary pursuits in those days of the late '70's and early 80's that relied on graphic improvements and better ways of shooting the enemy. There were games like Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision, Sega and Nintendo. With the rise of the Internet and online games however, lots of things changed, including the ability to download games and playing online games, making games a more of social activity, with lots of players, or opponents playing with each other from the different corner of the world thus making people from the different parts of the world come closer and interact with each other while playing.

It was Magnavox and their "Odyssey" system in 1972, which were the earliest video games that included twelve simple games with graphic overlays. It was very simple and needed lots of improvement. Seeking the opportunity Nolan Bushnell along with Al Alcorn, the founder of Atari created Pong complete with built in paddles, and a speaker and released it in the market after one year, which came out to be a great success. At the same time another video game Atari dominated the market. Among the other video games that were famous worldwide were Pac Man, the yellow blob that ate up dots and avoided squid-like ghosts, Space Invaders, Super Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and other classics.

With the running time industry was trying for more efficient system and as a result the entire industry adopted the implementation of the microprocessor due to which these systems produced groundbreaking and innovative graphical and auditory effects that had never been seen before. Millions of dollars were spent on video arcade machines and on home video game systems. Atari's VCS/2600 system still dominated the market throughout 1982, when the gaming market experienced a crash due to the loss of public interest in video game specific consoles, and sales dropped.

The video game history took a new turn with the end of the reign of Atari and with the two innovations in the year 1984. The two innovations were reduction in cost of Dynamic RAM (DRAM) chips, which allowed more memory, and the production of higher power 8-bit processors, which lowered the prices of the previous chips. Sega and Nintendo of Japan entered the console market and would battle over the next five years for dominance. Recently in this advance age of technology where the gaming market is saturated with hi-tech online computer games battle for domination is still in existence and this could be seen between PlayStation 2, the X box and the Game Cube.

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