Unit8-Part1-Reading

The History of Video Games.

Most people considered the first computer game to be tennis for two.

It was developed in 1958 by nuclear physicist William Higginbotham to instruct players about

the effects of gravity.

The first arcade computer game, computer space, appeared in 1971, but it didn't sell well.

The creators regrouped and founded Atari.

In 1972, they produced the Pong game, which was a huge commercial success.

In 1980, the highly popular game Pac -Man was created.

During this time, game consoles that could be connected to the TV set started to appear.

The first one was the Odyssey in 1972.

The big step, though, came in 1977 when Atari brought out their VCS system, a console

which allowed users to play different games by inserting cartridges.

Nintendo introduced the Game Boy in 1989 as the first handheld gaming system.

It included the game Tetris, which ended up being very popular.

Sony released the PlayStation in 1994, but during the 1990s,

PCs started gaining considerable advantage over the consoles.

Their graphics resolution was better.

They had more memory, hard disk to store game data, and much higher processor speed.

Many great games were produced for PCs, such as SimCity, Civilization,

Popolos, Tomb Raider, Quake, Half -Life, and Grand Theft Auto.

In 2000, Sony produced PlayStation 2.

It had excellent sound qualities, a network adapter, and a double -layer DVD drive

that could also play DVDs.

In 2001, Microsoft entered the market with the Xbox.

During this time, people also started playing games on their mobile phones.

Initially, screens of phones were small, and the devices were rather limited.

Things changed when smartphones started becoming popular.

When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, this had a huge effect on mobile gaming.