With an overall turn over of 27.5$ billion this industry even leads the music and movie industry combined.

But this modern video game industry had a humble start, but steady

In winters of the year 1966, a New Hampshire engineer earlier working for a defense contractor making electronic gears for military came up with a breakthrough idea that got video games out of the lab and into the living room. Looking at his TV he thought what else you can do with your TV besides watching “My three sons?”

Baer started development of the “Brown Box” console video game system and other prototypes in 1966 for the defense electronic company sanders associates in Nashua, New Hampshire. In late 1971 it was licensed to Magnavox. The console was launched in 1972 after being renamed as Magnavox odyssey. Many other looked down on game development, but it was sanders earning most of the profit.

By the mid of 70’s sanders and company rock the gaming market and made widespread development of video games as much as possible. But not far from it a new company came into existence. And it was soon seen all over the gaming map. It all started when an electrical engineer turned entrepre Nolan Bushnell hired a young Berkeley engineer Al Alcorn and gave him a base to get his feet wet in game design. “The idea was to build a video game that was the simplest thing you could think of” said Alcorn “so I just went to Walgreen’s drug store and bought a 75$ black and white TV.” They used black and white television and the computer system was 74 series TTL chips.

Bushnell and Alcorn named the game as pong and installed the first ping machine for a trial run at a bar in Sunnyvale, Calif., earlier known as Andy capps tavern. What happened next made Andy capp’s the  name scribbled in the history with golden letters. One day within the first week, “I got a call in the evening saying that the machine stopped playing, and could I come down and fix it cause they got customers that want to play the game,” said Alcorn.  “So I drove down to Sunnyvale and went to see the machine, opened the coin box up and there was this big fistful of quarters (that) just gushed out of the machine. … All of a sudden we had a real hit on our hands.”

Soon there was competition seen as companies like midway, which before that used to make equipment for amusement parks started getting into video game business. One of very famous and innovative company of that time which bought space invaders to America had invaded the market space of Atari- then the industry leader in a big way.

Rather involving into fighting Atari CEO Ray Kassar choose the better and beneficiate way and licensed the home rights. And guess what kassar won. Sales of the attari VCS console doubled in a single year. And then in summers of 1982 Japan invaded this time with a blockbuster: PACMAN. “When they were making the PacMan, the guy who was leading the project took his team to lunch,” said Steven L. Kent, Author of “Ultimate History of Video Games.” “They went for pizza in Tokyo.  And somebody had taken the first slice of pizza.  And then he looked down, and there was PacMan staring at him.” Japan was in the game and American’s were well aware what Japan had done to them in the past, nearly close down there world praise automobile industry. Japan had started a global epidemic.

Whole 80’s were dedicated to Japan’s NINTENDO had a whooping 90 % share of the video game market. And till 1989 company’s domination increase further and nigger as it launched its video game equivalent of Sony’s Walkman –game boy. And guess whom Nintendo was thankful to for its success none other than ex Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev. Well, sort of. At the end of the cold war, a soviet computer engineer named Alexy Pajitnov created a puzzle game called Tetris. When the iron curtain lifted, Nintendo got its first look at Tetris and start talking for rubles. Nintendo was well aware that it could be a killer game (launch title) on game boy. And it was, Tetris game boy became an instant hit. Selling over 32 million units in first three years. Nintendo seemed unbeatable until one more Japanese company earlier depending on other launched its own game platform, PLAYSTATION, in the mid -1990s. And still, this company is unbeatable.

Sony was planning for future as its products was loaded with such technologies that gamers was never heard of, like sound cards, video enhancers and the best perfume synthesizer.

After the mid blowing success of Playstation and its sequels Sony was saying “this is gonna replace PC, will replace DVD player. It’s going to be base of your home entertainment experience and can go beyond as well.” Replacing PC was not what MICROSOFT want to hear as they were the leading computer software makers in the world. And adding to that playstation was outselling the top 5 PC makers in the world. This sort of messaging catalyzed lot of competitive spirit among Microsoft people. And these lead to Microsoft’s X-BOX it soon ate a lot of Sony’s market but couldn’t able to over run Sony completely.

Today, the video game platform arms race is in full swing. In a matter of days, Sony’s new Play station 3 and Nintendo’s Wii will finally join Xbox on store shelves that Microsoft has enjoyed all to itself for an entire year. And another marketing shoot-out for gamer dollars will begin, let’s wait and watch what development we’ll see next. May be virtuality reality matrix.

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