Video games have been around for more years than most people know. Most people today can remember the Pac-Man, Pac-Woman era. In reality video games have been in our daily lives for far longer than that. In fact one of the first video games on record goes back to 1947, where the first ever patent was filed in January of that year and that patent was issued in December 1948. Little did we know that this would come to be one of the hottest commodities to hit the American and International markets. One of the earliest video games was created by the same man who developed the atomic bomb.



In the 50's and 60's a video was being patented to run on computers. This became a reality, the problem was that little was known about computers and they were so expensive that few people had them, and this program was run on a platform called oscilloscopes, which was a piece of electronic equipment that could show two dimensional graphs. These were located at colleges and universities.

The 70's brought about new developments in the video industry. In 1972 a patent was granted for the release of a home video console. In was large and bulky, but it satisfied the video game demands of the gaming public. Later, in the 70's and early 80's, along came the development and release of Atari. This lasted for only a few short years, when the video market took a big dive. The reason for this was that there were so many entities producing these video games (most of which were the same game) that the market became flooded. The industry had really gone stale, because how many versions of the same video game can there be. One just seemed to be an updated version of the other. The public became bored with this and needed something fresh and new.

In 1989 the market once again had a new video game gadget, Nintendo Game Boy. This was new and exciting and the games were different, challenging and, best of all, you could take it with you wherever you went. There were several competitors who put their video games on the market by this time, but even today Game Boy seems to be the best selling hand held video game and console.

The 1990's came alive with new and improved versions of consoles for video games. Nintendo was overtaken by the newcomer, Sony's Play Station. The public went wild and now anyone who had the Nintendo switched and had to have a Play Station, with more bells and whistles than had been seen before.

Up until now all video games had been developed for computer type consoles, hand held consoles and computers. 2003 saw a new direction come to life with the development of video games on cellular phones, this came from none other that Nokia.

The video game industry has evolved into a multi-million dollar industry today. Almost every person in the world has at one time or another in their life either played a video game, whether it be on the old oscilloscopes, coin operated consoles, hand held consoles, home computers or the cell phone. It is an industry that is growing by leaps and bounds on a daily bases.