Timeline for the history of video games from the book "The Ultimate History of Video Games" by Steven L. Kent.
Created by LizC on Sep 10, 2009
Last updated: 03/31/10 at 04:25 PM
Tags: video games steven kent
Ray Kassar becomes the CEO of Atari.
Bushnell is forced out of Atari and buys the rights to Pizza Time Theatre.
Atari opens the first Pizza Time Theatre.
Atari releases the Video Computer System, also known as the 2600.
Mattel introduces a line of LED-based handheld video games.
Nintendo releases its first home video game in Japan.
Bally releases the Bally Professional Arcade home console.
Bushnell sells Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million.
Exidy Games releases Death Race, a game in which players drive over stick figures. Protests about the game are featured on 60 Minutes.
Fairchild Camera & Instrument releases Channel F, the first programmable home game to use cartridges.
The Connecticut Leather Company, now known as Coleco, releases Telstar, a television tennis game.
Midway Games imports a Taito game called Gunfight, the first game to use a microprocessor.
Nolan Bushnell approaches venture capitalist Don Valentine for funding.
Atari creates prototypical Home Pong unit and sells the idea to Sears and Roebuck.
Taito, Williams and Midway enter the video game business.
Bushnell leaves Nutting and starts Syzygy with partner Ted Dabney. Finding that the name Syzygy is already taken, they rename their company Atari.
Atari engineer Al Alcorn creates Pong.
Magnavox sues Atari on grounds that Pong infringes on Ralph Baer's patents. Nolan Bushnell decides to settle out of court.
Magnavox begins demonstrating Odyssey in private showings. Bushnell attends a demonstration of the console on May 24th in Burlingame, CA.
Nutting Associates purchases Computer space from Nolan Bushnell and hires him to help manufacture it. Nutting begins shipping Computer Space, the first arcade video game machine.
Magnavox licenses Ralph Baer's television game from Sanders Associates.
Bushnell begins work on an arcade version of Spacewar called Computer Space.
Nolan Bushnell graduates from the University of Utah and accepts a job in California.
Ralph Baer patents his interactive television game.
Sega releases Periscope, a game that beomes such a hit in Japan that U.S. and European companies begin importing it. This is Japan's first amusement game export. Because of the high cost of shipping, U.S. arcade owners charge players $0.25 per play, setting what will eventually become the standard price for playing arcade games.
Ralph Baer begins researching interactive television games at Sanders Associates.
Nolan Bushnell gets a summer job at a Salt Lake City carnival where he is in charge of the games midway.
Rosen Enterprises, Japan's largest amusement company, merges with Service Games, which now has jukeboxes in over 6,000 locations, to form Sega Enterprises.
Nolan Bushnell enters engineering school at the University of Utah.
MIT student Steve Russell creates Spacewar, the first interactive computer game.
Physicist Willy Higinbotham of the Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York invents and interactive table-tennis-like game that is displayed on an oscilloscope.
Rosen imports $200,000 worth of coin-operated electromechanical games to Japan and starts the county's coin-op business.
David Rosen starts Rosen Enterprises and begins shipping photo booths to Japan.
Yamauchi changes the name of Marafuku Co. Ltd. to Nintendo, a term meaning "leave luck to heaven."
United States passes new laws regulating slot machines. Marty Bromley, who manages game rooms at military bases in Hawaii, buys machines and opens Service Games (SEGA).
David Rosen, returning from service in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War, opens a portrait painting business in Japan.
The Connecticut Leather Company is established by a Russian immigrant named Maurice Greenberg to distribute leather products to shoemakers.
Fusajiro Yamauchi establishes the Marafuku Company to manufacture and distribute Hanafuda, Japanese playing cards.
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