PC games

A computer game is a computer program that serves to organize the game process (gameplay), communicate with partners in this game, or itself acts as a partner. In real time, in some cases, a video game can be used instead of a computer game, that is, these definitions have every chance of being used as synonyms and being interchangeable. In computer games, as a rule, the game environment is reproduced on the screen of a monitor or a simple TV (in this case, computer games are considered video games at the same time), but at the same time, a computer game can be sound, teletype, etc. games have every chance to be created on the basis of films and books; There are also reverse cases. Since 2011, computer games have been officially recognized in the USA as a separate form of art.

The first interactive electrical devices designed specifically for games and the first game programs for computers were developed in the USA after World War II. In 1948, South American physicists Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann patented a "cathode ray tube entertainment device" that was an electric shooting range; a more ideal device was Tennis for Two (1958), an oscilloscope-based tennis simulator developed by William Higinbotham of the Brookhaven State Laboratory. Game programs were formed for the first computers, at the beginning specialized for other purposes: for example, the OXO (1952) program, depicting the game "tic-tac-toe", was compiled for the EDSAC computer by the British scientist Alexander Douglas as part of his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University; Spacewar, counting on the title of 1st computer game! (1962) was written by Steve Russell. and 2 other MIT students for the PDP-1 minicomputer.

Arcade arcade machines like Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space (1971) and Ralph Baer's Pong (1972), later called "the father of video games," took computer games from a fun for software developers to a paid product. Ralph Baer also holds the title of creator of the first game console using a TV as an output device - Magnavox Odyssey, released to the South American market in 1972. Magnavox Odyssey and Pong used it to unimaginable triumph, spawning a large number of hardware and software clones from other manufacturers - this boom marked the beginning of the computer games industry. The Space Invaders arcade machine, developed in 1978 by the Japanese company Taito, opened the golden eternity of arcade machines both in the Land of the Rising Sun, for example, and in the USA - in its own turn, this gave a huge boost to the production of family consoles like the Atari 2600 (1977) and games for them, often ported from arcade games. Parallel to this, games for mainframe computers like Star Trek (1971), Colossal Cave Adventure (1975) or Empire (1977) continued to be created in the institute and scientific environment - their distribution was facilitated by the emergence and spread of normal computers, such as the PDP-10, and operating systems of the UNIX family.

The flooding of the family game console market with the same games of low quality led to the crisis of the computer game industry in 1983, when the bulk of American companies involved in the creation of paid computer games went bankrupt. As a result, the large market for computer games was dominated for endless years by firms from the Land of the Rising Sun, primarily Nintendo; the decline also contributed to the flourishing of the home personal computer market, like the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in the West and the NEC PC-98 in the Land of the Rising Sun. In this era, almost all the series of games that take place to this day appeared, such as Mario, Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda. The Game Boy Miniature Console (1989) made a wide market for miniature consoles and games for them; not the last role in her fame was played by the puzzle "Tetris" by Alexei Pajitnov.

The 1990s saw the transition from 2D graphics in games to 3D; the rise and rise of fresh genres such as first-person shooters like Doom (1993) and real-time strategy games like Dune II (1992), the proliferation of grids and the focus on multiplayer games spawned deathmatch and massively multiplayer online games. The arcade industry was revived for a while thanks to 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 connecting video screensavers (FMV) to games and using motion capture technology; The success of Sony's Playstation predetermined the future of the family console market.

In the 2000s, the improvement of the three-dimensional graphics of games, bringing individual games closer to movies, and the spread of network games continued. There has been a boom in casual games aimed at the widest possible audience - this was facilitated by the spread of access to the Internet and the rise of social networks; fame was bought by digital game distribution systems like Steam. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games flourished, among which World of Warcraft (2004) took the dominant position. The 2nd mid-2000s was also the period of the highest but quickly ended popularity of music games, like the arcade machines Dance Dance Revolution (1998) and Guitar Hero (2005) intended for family consoles. The proliferation of mobile phones and later smartphones led to the prosperity of the gaming industry for these devices. In the criteria