Video Games Have Come A Long Way
Have you ever walked into the room where your kids play video games and wondered what movie or TV show they were watching? It sometimes happens to me when my boys are playing their basketball or auto racing games. It looks like a real sporting event! The graphics in today’s video games are incredibly realistic, but I can remember when they were more like cave drawings.
In the 1980s, video game characters were still blocky, pixelated blobs of color drifting across the screen. And we loved it! It was the greatest thing we had ever seen. Before that revolutionary decade, most video games were just variations on tennis, consisting of two white lines for rackets and a little white square for a ball. Pong, anyone? Here’s what some of those earliest video games looked like:
Tennis for Two, 1958
Spacewar, 1962
“Brown Box” Ping-Pong, 1969
Atari (Syzygy) Pong, 1972
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiShX2pTz9A
Magnavox Odyssey, 1973
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2EIsnr_cv4
Atari 2600, 1977
