(1940)
For the Westinghouse display at the World’s Fair, Edward U. Condon designs a computer
that plays the traditional game Nim in which players try to avoid picking up the last matchstick.
Tens of thousands of people play it, and the computer wins at least 90% of the games.”
I honestly never realized video games dated back that far. I did however I know that when going as far back as the 70s that gaming was more of coding, words, and not what you traditionally see nowadays. But 1940? That’s crazy. This basically is what started the pavement to what would become a billion-dollar industry.
(1977)
Atari releases the Video Computer System, more commonly known as Atari 2600.
Featuring a joystick, interchangeable cartridges, games in color, and switches for selecting games
and setting difficulty levels, it makes millions of Americans home video game players.“
This is what I remember as a very small little girl, my uncles playing with this ‘machine’ that I had no interest in. It just looked funny and by then not every single family that I knew had one. It wasn’t until my father bought me my first Nintendo in 1992 that I fell in love with something that would forever be a part of me.
(1996)
Lara Croft debuts as the star of Eidos’s adventure game Tomb Raider.
Players love her, but critics charge that she’s an example of sexism in video games.“
Personal Take: If you ever had a conversation with me about my all time favorite franchise in gaming you’d know it would be Tomb Raider. I had the first game back in 1996 on my Sega Saturn. Growing up my mother and I never got along but playing this game made her and I, for a moment, forget our tensions and just play the game. She loved seeing a female lead in gaming and I just loved that it made my mother nice to me. I would solve all the puzzles and mazes and she would do the scary boss fights for me. And it continued well into my teens with every Christmas my father bought me the new Tomb Raider installments because he hated watching us fight. We even went together to see the movie starring Angelina Jolie. We loved it.
Sexism in Gaming: I didn’t dismiss that part of the quote. I cannot tell you how many games there are where the men have reasonable armor and the women have their belly, chests, or thighs exposed with very little armor for protection. There’ even sexual suggestive games out there like “Catherine”. I guess it’s because the male species have dominated the gaming world for some time now but women, in recent years, have made a come up in numbers. And I have witness some games not over sexualizing the female characters like Destiny 2 and Call of Duty.
