A September and November, We All Should Remember

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

While we write August 2022, 50 years will soon have passed since the commercial breakthrough of video gaming. Expirementation with playing electronic games on computer screens and television sets had been done beofre, but they weren't that successful.

In September 1972, the Magnavox Odyssey home console was released in North America and on 29 November the same year, the Atari Pong arcade game was released in North America.

Atari dominated the early years, and released the Atari VCS home console in North America in September 1977, and in Europe in 1978. Eventually, the video game market crashed in North America in 1983 as people could do more things with home computers, including playing computers games.

The late 1980's and early 90's were dominated by Nintendo and Sega, who fought a console war against each other.

On 3 December 1994, the Sony Playstation was released in Japan, marking the major breakthrough of 3D video games. From this time, video games were no longer considered just a children's (electronic) toy, but also something for teenagers and adults.

But not everyone was happy. People have complained over violent video games since the mid 1970's, and with Mortal Kombat launching in October 1992, it started the modern video game violence controversy. Later, the Grand Theft Auto series were often attacked by parents, media and politicians. By the late 1990's and early 21st century, almost every school massacre was blamed on violent video games.

Despite all this, the video gaming industry is still going strong and today, children have parents who also grew up playing video games. On the Youtube, video gamers become celebrities. While most of us weren't born in 1972, we should definately observe the anniversary.

As comparison, 1895 is considered the year the motion picture was born (not counting early expirementation druing the late 19th century). This means that by 2022, commercial video gaming has been around as long as movies had been by 1945.