Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Greetings Infomaniacs,

Today I have some fun facts for you about the history of video games. I grew up in the 1980s and remember such Atari classics as Asteroids and Frogger, and then progressing to Nintendo in the 1990s.

It's amazing how far video games have come since blowing the dust out of a Nintendo game cartridge to get it to work. Reminisce with these interesting trivia bits...

Enjoy!

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WHO SAID IT?
QUOTE: "Life is more fun if you play games."

HINT: (1916-1990), was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and fighter pilot.

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RANDOM TIDBITS
At MIT in 1962, Steve Russell programmed the world's first video game on a bulky computer known as the DEC PDP-1. Spacewar featured spaceships fighting amid an astronomically correct screen full of stars. By the end of the decade, nearly every research computer in the United States had a copy of Spacewar on it.

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Nolan Bushnell founded Atari in 1972, taking the company's name from the Japanese word for the chess term "check." Atari released the coin-operated Pong later that year, and it became an instant arcade hit.

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In 1985, Tetris found success in the Soviet Union (even in spite of the Cold War), and the following year it took over the U.S. market. The game was invented by Soviet mathematician Alexi Pajitnov.

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Released in 1978, Midway's Space Invaders was the arcade equivalent of Star Wars. A year later, Atari released Asteroids and outdid Space Invaders by enabling the high scorer to enter his or her initials for posterity.

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The 1980 Midway classic Pac-Man is the world's most successful arcade game, selling some 99,000 units. The game inspired rap songs, Saturday morning cartoons, and a slew of sequels.

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In 1980, Nintendo's first game, Donkey Kong, marked the debut of Mario. Originally dubbed Jumpman, Mario was named for Mario Segali, the onetime owner of Nintendo's warehouse in Seattle.




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WHO SAID IT?
QUOTE: "Life is more fun if you play games."

ANSWER: Roald Dahl.