Game Collection

A computer game is a computer program that serves to organize the game process (gameplay), communicate with game partners, or act as a partner itself.

Currently, in some cases, instead of the term computer game, a video game can be used, that is, these terms can be used as synonyms and be interchangeable. In computer games, as a rule, a game situation is reproduced on a display screen or a conventional TV (in this case, computer games are also video games at the same time), but at the same time, a computer game can be sound, teletype and other.

Computer games can be based on films and books; there are also reverse cases. Since 2011, computer games have been officially recognized in the United States as a separate art form.

Computer games have had such a significant impact on society that there is a steady trend in information technology towards gamification for non-gaming application software.

The first interactive electronic devices designed specifically for games and the first game programs for computers were developed in the United States after World War II. In 1948, American physicists Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann patented a "cathode ray tube entertainment device", which was an electronic shooting range; a more advanced device was Tennis for Two (1958), an oscilloscope-based tennis simulator created by William Higinbotham of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Game programs were written for the first computers originally designed for other purposes: for example, the tic-tac-toe program OXO (1952) was compiled for the EDSAC computer by the British scientist Alexander Douglas as part of his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University; claiming to be the first computer game program Spacewar! (1962) was written by Steve Russell. and two other MIT students for the PDP-1 minicomputer.

Arcade arcade machines like Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space (1971) and Ralph Behr's Pong (1972), later called the "Father of Video Games," turned computer games from programmers' fun into a commercial product. Ralph Behr also holds the title of developer of the first game console using a TV as an output device, the Magnavox Odyssey, released to the American market in 1972. Magnavox Odyssey and Pong were a huge success, spawning many hardware and software clones from other manufacturers - this boom began the computer games industry. The Space Invaders arcade machine, created in 1978 by the Japanese company Taito, ushered in the golden age of arcade machines in both Japan and the United States - in turn, this gave a powerful impetus to the production of home consoles like the Atari 2600 (1977) and games for them , often ports of arcade games. Parallel to this, mainframe computer games like Star Trek (1971), Colossal Cave Adventure (1975) or Empire (1977) continued to be created in the university and academia, aided by the advent and spread of standard computers such as the PDP-10, and operating systems of the UNIX family.

The flooding of the home game console market with monotonous low-quality games led to the crisis of the computer game industry in 1983, when most of the American companies involved in the production of commercial computer games went bankrupt. As a result, the global PC game market was dominated by companies from Japan for many years, most notably Nintendo; the crisis also boosted the home PC market, like the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in the West and the NEC PC-98 in Japan. Many of the game series that still exist today, such as Mario, Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda, originated in this era. The Game Boy handheld console (1989) created a vast market for handheld consoles and games for them; not the last role in its popularity was played by the Tetris puzzle by Alexei Pajitnov.

The 1990s saw the transition from 2D graphics in games to 3D; As new genres emerged and flourished, such as first-person shooters like Doom (1993) and real-time strategy games like Dune II (1992), the proliferation of networks and interest in multiplayer games spawned deathmatch and massively multiplayer online games. The arcade industry was revived for a while by the proliferation of fighting games like Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat. The use of CD-ROMs as storage media - instead of removable cartridges and floppy disks - made it possible to significantly increase the amount of data used by games, up to the inclusion of video screensavers (FMV) in games and the use of motion capture technology; The success of Sony's Playstation predetermined the future of the home console market.

In the 2000s, the improvement of the three-dimensional graphics of games continued, bringing individual games closer to movies, and the spread of network games. There was a boom in casual games aimed at the widest audience - this was facilitated by the spread of access to the Internet and the rise of social networks; digital game distribution systems such as Steam have gained popularity. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games flourished, with World of Warcraft (2004) dominating the game. The second half of the 2000s was also a time of high, but quickly ended popularity of music games, like the arcade machines Dance Dance Revolution (1998) and Guitar Hero (2005) intended for home consoles. The proliferation of mobile phones and later smartphones led to the flourishing of the gaming industry for these devices.