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Effects video games have on society
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How have video games affected society
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THE RISE AND FALL OF ATARI
Kiara Morgan
University of Texas at Tyler College of Engineering and Computer Science
Introduction
The year was 1972. This was the year Atari was created. When it was first released, Atari was one of the most popular gaming systems of the pop culture. Computer Space and Pong being among their first two games, got them their break. In a world where arcade games were not mass produced, Atari made them exist. Atari are not only considered the founders of arcade games but they made household gaming systems possible. Atari rose to be a great video gaming system but through the years, trials and tribulations eventually led to the downfall of this evolutionary gaming company.
The Creator
Nolan Bushnell was born on February 4, 1943 in Clearfield Utah. Nolan was participating in the engineering program at the University of Utah. He worked as in an amusement park along side his computer science studies. A big hobby of his was a game called Space War in which he and his peers had to play on a super computer at the university. Nolan Bushnell graduated from college in 1968 and moved to California where he tried to work for Disney but they turned him down so he worked for an engineering company called Ampex. He spent his day time working for Ampex and his nights were spent building his arcade video game in is daughters bed room. He used free parts he got from Ampex and some parts he got from friends at other electronics companies. Nolan used a TV as his monitor, and an old paint thinner can as the prototype coin box. The monitor was black and white. In 1971 Bushnell invented his first video game. It was called Computer Space. The game was said to be too complicated for mass production. Nolan decided to ...
... middle of paper ...
...ould even be interested in the game at all.
Figure 8
Atari’s The Extra Terrestrial game
The extra Terrestrial ended up being the worst game Atari ever made people said it was worse than Pac Man, Atari ended up trashing millions of both the games in a New Mexico Land fill.
Conclusion
In 1983 Atari had a chance to revive itself and a little of its fortune but it messed up its opportunity. Nintendo the creator of the video game Donkey Kong decided it was going to bring its Famicon to the United States and join the gaming market but it didn’t want to do it alone so they started to negotiate and talk for about three days and Nintendo decided to go in the market alone and in the end it was a good choice for Nintendo becoming one of the biggest gaming companies in the industry asfor Atari they don’t really do much anymore and that was the last big chance they had.
An examination of videogames in popular culture is a complicated one. There is a large debate as to what is the very first video game. The supposed earliest known video game was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube in 1947. The game was a missile simulator similar to radar displays from World War II, and overlaid sheets of paper were used for targets since graphics were unknown at this time. On May 5, 1951, the NIMROD computer was presented in Britain. It used a panel of lights for its display and was used to play a game called “NIM”. Later, in 1952, Alexander S. Douglas made the first compu...
Atari, a name synonymous with video games. The makers of such hits as Pitfall!, Adventure, Centipede, and Asteroids. Atari’s name and moniker will forever be written down as one of the first, successful video games companies in America. But, how successful? It’s regarded among the gaming community as one the most scandalous and ludicrous actions in gaming history and, in recent years, has taken on a title of urban legend.
The video game industry has grown very powerful over the last five decades due to gamming consoles. A new generation of gamming was created, taking games from arcades and putting them in one’s household. Although arcade games were a great hit, there were modifications that needed to be done to them to make them smaller and more compact. In 1967, German born Ralph Baer and some of his coworkers were the first to get an actual prototype to work on a regular home television. After the console, Magnavox Odyssey (1972), was released and made a big impact on the market, more and different companies and corporations released more systems with such specifications. Although the consoles had been a great hit, there was only one playable game in each console. The purpose of creating gaming consoles was mainly to provide families with their own videogame console at their own home. However, the modifications made to these consoles were very small but at that time it took a long time to be able to develop adaptors.
Apple Inc. went from rags to riches in becoming the largest company in the world by market cap and making $108 billion in 2011 (Heather). Apple Inc. was an underdog and Microsoft was ruling the technology world. Then Apple made the iPod and the iPhone and with that they took over the technology world. Apple sold one million iPhones in the first three months of releasing of the first iPhone in 2007 (Heather). Since the beginning of Apple, Apple’s
While it is as far from the eventual commercial videogame systems that come later as a walk in the park is to a walk on the moon, a physicist trying to make the public tour of his lab a little more exciting to bored visitors designs what some consider as a precursor videogame system in 1958. Working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a US nuclear research lab in Upton, New York, William A. Higinbotham notices that people attending the annual autumn open houses, which are held to show the public how safe the work going on there is, are bored with the displays of simple photographs and static equipment. Educated at Cornell University as a physics graduate, Higinbotham had come to BNL from Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, and had actually been witness to the first detonation of the atomic bomb. A chain-smoking, fun-loving character and self-confessed pinball player, he wants to develop an open house exhibit at BNL that will entertain people as they learn.
In 1939 the very first computer was created by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and Cliff Berry. It was not the type of computer we are used to though, that type of computer didn’t make an appearance until 1982(Timeline of computer history, 2001). After the first computer was created communication took off like a rocket.
Video games started as arcade machines with simple graphics and even simpler stories, soon evolving into home gaming with The Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first home-gaming console. It invaded living rooms in 1972, selling 300,000 units. Since then there has been many consoles and games released, some have been huge commercial successes which
This was the same year when Bill Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft. In 1981, Bill Gates’ company was hired to develop an operating system but rather than creating a new operating system they decided to buy a preexisting operation system called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for the amount of 50,000 dollars. After modifying the operating system they bought, they renamed the operating system to MS-DOS. After MS-DOS began selling it brought in a steady income for Gates due to the fact that the PC market was growing and there weren’t many competitors in the market for them to compete with. In 1986, when Microsoft Corporation went public, it made Gates into a millionaire overnight. The following year, Microsoft released their first ever version of
Co-founder Nolan Bushnell abandoned the Company after this business arrangement. He claims that Warner caused the downfall of the gaming company. In fact, Warner released the infamous E.T. the Extraterrestrial videogame, which is, to date, one of the biggest commercial failures in the videogame history.
Video games, specifically home consoles, came to the US on October 18th 1985. The NES. Most games around that time were all bright and cheerful looking games such as Mario, Kirby, Legend Of Zelda, and Pokemon a few years later on the Gameboy. But as other game developers appeared, new types of games were made. The shooter genre and fighting genre of games came mostly on the Xbox and PS systems with a couple exceptions being on a Nintendo console(Doom, Goldeneye, Smash bros). Now shooter games
Steve Jobs went off to find investors, one of the major investors was Mike Markkula and finally with enough money they became big enough to mass produce the VisiCalc for Apple II which was the largest computer company in the early 80s. It was a roaring success in the homes and in the offices at that time. Right around the same time, the IBM PC was born and the journey turned into a race frantically. Apple then tried to innovate, but failed horribly with the Apple III simply due to design flaws and the pressure of the new competition.
Apple Inc. was established by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne on April 1st, 1976. Apple Inc. humble beginning took place in Steve Jobs’ garage where Jobs, Wozniak and Wayne produced the company’s first computer, the Apple I. It has a typewriter-like keyboard and was able to connect to a regular television. It was the archetype of modern computer which was developed under Jobs and Wozniak’s vision of making computer user friendly and small enough for people to have in their homes or offices. However, the Apple I was not taken seriously. It was not until the launching of the Apple II on April 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire where Apple Computer revolutionized the computer industry. The Apple II was the first
In 500 B.C. the abacus was first used by the Babylonians as an aid to simple arithmetic. In 1623 Wihelm Schickard (1592 - 1635) invented a "Calculating Clock". This mechanical machine could add and subtract up to 6 digit numbers, and warned of an overflow by ringing a bell. J. H. Mueller comes up with the idea of the "difference engine", in 1786. This calculator could tabulate values of a polynomial. Muellers attempt to raise funds fails and the project was forgotten. Scheutz and his son Edward produced a 3rd order difference engine with a printer in 1843 and their government agreed to fund their next project.
Thousands of years ago calculations were done using people’s fingers and pebbles that were found just lying around. Technology has transformed so much that today the most complicated computations are done within seconds. Human dependency on computers is increasing everyday. Just think how hard it would be to live a week without a computer. We owe the advancements of computers and other such electronic devices to the intelligence of men of the past.
The computer evolution has been an amazing one. There have been astonishing achievements in the computer industry, which dates back almost 2000 years. The earliest existence of the computer dates back to the first century, but the electronic computer has only been around for over a half-century. Throughout the last 40 years computers have changed drastically. They have greatly impacted the American lifestyle. A computer can be found in nearly every business and one out of every two households (Hall, 156). Our Society relies critically on computers for almost all of their daily operations and processes. Only once in a lifetime will a new invention like the computer come about.