Video games have been around for 50 years, with the very first video game being “Spacewar” made in 1962. However, Atari’s “Pong” made in 1972 is considered to be the very first modern video arcade game, with the basic concept of hitting a ball to the opponent’s side, similar to tennis. Games were very basic in the 80s, with games such as “Space Invaders” and Namco’s arcade game “Pac-Man”, both 2D games.  Suddenly, in the 90s technology was starting to rapidly develop, and so did video games, allowing video games to have more diversity with the new technology.

The very first 3D game was Apogee Software and Formgen’s game called “Wolfenstein” made in May 1992 and it was also the first shooter and the first, first person shooter. This game created a whole new genre of video games, it lead on to games such as Call of Duty, Battlefield and Rainbow Six Siege, all successful games, still growing in numbers to this day. Nintendo’s 1995 “Virtual boy” is believed to be the very first virtual reality console, but was a complete failure only selling 770,000 consoles, and was discontinued in December 1995, the same year. However, the 2006 “Nintendo Wii” another product made by Nintendo, was a great success, selling over 101.63 million units. One of the reasons why it was such a success is because it was the first console with motion controls. However, this isn’t the best-selling console; the best-selling console award goes to Sony’s “PlayStation 2” made in 2002 selling over 158 million units and the best-selling handheld console is the “Nintendo DS” selling over 154.02 million units world-wide. The best-selling video game is “Tetris” selling over 100 million copies.

Nowadays, video games are still developing and Fortnite is one of the newest games that broke records. Fortnite was released for free as a beta in July 2017 and is a third person shooter game where 100 players are deployed on to an island where they have to fight to the death and where there can only be one survivor. It is a similar concept to Hunger Games. Fortnite has been breaking records ever since its release, already bypassing Player Unknown’s Battle Ground or PUBG’s player count, one of their competitors. Fortnite has roughly 10 million players and 3.4 million players log in consistently every day. One the reasons why Fortnite is so popular, is because of the new daily cosmetics and challenges free of charge that keep players playing. A popular strategy used by other games so that players keep playing, such as Ubisoft’s “Rainbow Six Siege” where every season new operators, skins, elite skins and other cosmetic items are released free of charge, but they cost in game currency.

Now with the fast evolution of technology, and video games, video games might expand further with brand new genres, but who knows? Maybe technology is not going to rapidly advance like it did in the 90s, but for now, we’ll have to enjoy the games we have.

Lucki