Popular Electronic Games — They are Not just For Kids Anymore

Superheroes battle enemies and space invaders in fast action games. Players take on the role of these superheroes in unbelievable combat. In other games players race cars, boats, bicycles, helicopters and aircraft against villains and even less evil opponents to win high levels backgrounds.

Parents, teachers, preachers and political figures, have criticized and in some cases even banned electronic games. Electronic games have Skydom been attributed for poor grades, poor conduct and even poor health. If you listen long enough, electronic games are responsible for all of the problems our young people experience today.

People have been trying to play games on computers almost since the days of the extremely first computer. Since 1950, Claude Shannon, a mathematician and electrical engineer, believed that computers could be designed to play chess in competition with humans. He became interested with the concept of artificial brains. In search of this idea researchers and scientists designed primitive games that could be played on the huge and clumsy computers of the 1950s and 60s.

The first actual electronic games as a consumer product were built as coin managed arcade games in the early 1970s. In 1971 Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney and Ing Alcorn formed the first game company, Atari. Right after they produced the first game console and their first electronic game, Pong, as an arcade game. Pong was immediately successful.

This success led Atari and other firms to begin work on home game consoles that could be connected to TV sets. Atari released its first home console in 1977. Soon games were put on cartridges that could be changed at the impulse of the player.

By 1979, the company, Activision, was formed by former Atari game designers. The intention of this new company was to concentrate strictly on game software. They decided to leave the development of equipment to play electronic games to other people. This became the first company to build a business of developing and selling electronic games software.

In a short time a spate of game companies sprang up trying to develop software for the infant electronic game industry. The result was a glut of badly conceived games hitting the market. Consumers turned away in droves and the home electronic game industry faded hit the skids.

By the early 1980s, electronic games were being developed for computers. Color graphics, flexible storage capacity and general purpose processors made games much easier to play on computers. The game console business was all but dead.

In the late 1980s, two Japanese people companies introduced a new generation of game consoles that were technologically capable of handling the new electronic games being produced. These companies were Nintendo and Sega. These game consoles had graphics capabilities that maxed those on most computers. Nintendo also offered an element that allow console record the game action so a player could temporarily stop the action of a game.

Right behind Nintendo came Game Boy, a hand-held game console. Game consoles enjoyed a resurgence of popularity during the 1990s. A new, even more sophisticated generation of electronic games was introduced by 2001. These consoles included Playstation2 and Xbox. Electronic games continued to become more complicated with an increase of action and more graphics.

Electronic games, today, have achieved talent status. They are sort of a wonderful combination of board games and witty books all thrown up into one medium with spectacular graphics and compelling audio. Strangely enough enough, most electronic games act like board games. They have one of two central themes. You are racing and the other is capturing area or opponents. Perhaps it is because of these similarities that electronic games have initiated to capture a broader audience.