Video Games: The Movie

Mediajuice Studios, Ltd. Once upon a time there was a world without

video

games

. Like so many other things created by man, electronic

games

were born from a combination of innovation, necessity and curiosity. The first puzzles were electronic delights, cheap and simple entertainment that would eventually transform into something powerful and alive. This happened not only thanks to electronic magic, but also to the efforts of artists, designers and entrepreneurs whose initial goal to entertain also ended up challenging, captivating and enlightening millions of people around the world. The men and women who created this industry allowed their own experiences and the world around them to inspire their creations.

This is the history of

video

games. This is Video Games: The Movie. I love video games because I have the same experience as when I watch a

movie

that I love or read a book that ignites my imagination. But I'm an active participant rather than a passive observer. Video games have a really interesting role to play in the future of our species, and we're just beginning to find out. I feel like at this point, video games are inextricably linked to our culture in an irrevocable way. I think it will get deeper from here. I think the roots of video games grow deeper and deeper into everything we do until they are just a part of our lives in a way we don't even realize.

All media is relevant to its time. For example, records and cassettes ceased to exist, but music did not disappear, it was digitized. The same goes for

movie

s and books. They evolve from one form to another. For video games, the development is the same. They will change and evolve. They will be part of our global culture forever. In one or two hundred years, video games will still be around. According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average gamer has been playing video games for 12 years. Adult players have played for an average of 14 years. Men have played an average of 16 years, while women have played an average of 12 years.

By In 2013, 49 percent of all American households owned a dedicated game console, and those who did owned an average of two. By In 2013 the average age of a player is 30 years old. And no, they are not all men. 47 percent of players are women. 42 per cent of gamers believe that computer and video games offer them the best value for money compared to DVDs, music or going to the cinema. Who buys video games? The average age of the most frequent game buyer is 35 years old. Point? Video games have come of age and are now not just in the game rooms or our living rooms.

They are in our pockets. The top 15 percent of gamers pay to play online games, while 33 percent play on their smartphones and 25 percent play on a handheld device. Most gamers who own dedicated gaming consoles also use them for other forms of entertainment, such as watching movies, TV shows, and listening to music. Are players sociable? 62 percent of all gamers play with others, either physically or online. What about the rating of game content? More than 85 percent of parents are familiar with the ESRB rating system, which rates the content of a game and matches it to the appropriate age for playing.

E for all, T for teenager, M for adult. But what everyone wants to know is: do parents really control what their children play? More than 73 percent of parents believe the parental controls available on all new video game consoles are helpful. Additionally, parents set more time limits for video game use than any other form of entertainment. More than 90 percent of the time, parents are present when games are purchased or rented, and 82 percent of the time children get their parents' permission before buying or renting a game. Like movies, games have specific genres and subgenres, such as action, adventure, role-playing games, casual games, shooting games, strategy games, open-world games versus linear games, sports games, racing games.

The list goes on and on, with each genre offering its own distinctive blend of interactive entertainment. And yes, each one is very successful in their own way. In the last decade, video games have grown from a $6 billion industry to more than $24 billion a year, far surpassing movies and music. Point? Video games are here and they are here to stay. "A small group of determined souls driven by an insatiable belief in their mission can change the course of history." -Mahatma Gandhi History But where did it all begin? The answer is... well, a little complicated. It is the debate of the century, who is the father of video games?

And, you know, you can always say Nolan Bushnell because he founded Atari. The godfather of video games has to be Nolan Bushnell. It must be Nolan Bushnell. -I would say Bushnell. -Nolan Bushnell. I'd probably give it to Nolan Bushnell. Nolan Bushnell. I'd probably vote for Nolan Bushnell. The man who invented the entire Atari series. He would probably say the creator of Atari. -Who created Pong. -Ralph Baer. In the late '60s and early '70s, when he made the brown box. Ralph Baer because he created the first console. I think we both agree it was Ralph Baer.

Oh, Ralph Baer. I can offer two different points of view here. I can say that you know that the one who started it all was the one who created Pong. The one who started gaming as we know it today, I would have to say Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. -Miyamoto. -Shigeru Miyamoto. I think... I think you know who Shigeru Miyamoto is. But I would go back to MIT, the guys who made Spacewar, John Carmack. Hideo Kojima, I'm telling you right now, excellent. You can't just pick one because it would be unfair to all the other people who helped develop the games.

I don't think I ever thought about who he started playing with. I'm just grateful they did it. Some say it all started here, in a small back room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, on the PDP-1, the first computer to use a visual display. Steve Russell, who I consider the person on whose shoulders I stood, created a game called Spacewar for the PDP-1. And I played it in college while I was working at an amusement park, and I thought if I could bring Spacewar to the arcade, I'd make a lot of money. It was a game developed as a demonstration of the capabilities of a digital equipment company, the PDP-1 computer back in 1962.

A group of MIT students and staff wanted to create a game that could really show off the capabilities of this new machine. which had a specific feature that they were very interested in and that was a display screen. Before that, most computers perhaps had paper output or something similar. But this one actually had a screen. I would go back to Steve Russell because he is the one who actually created the first playable game. Russell's product was so fun to play that he infected every PDP-1 in the world and they tried to get people to remove it from the machine because it wasted a lot of computer time.

Others believe that electronic gaming began much earlier or that video games were a byproduct of Cold War technology. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. While many industries and innovators came together to pave the way toward the very possibility of the first video game, there is almost no debate about the visionaries and the company that finally brought video games to the public... on a large scale. What Nolan brought to Atari was an understanding of what constitutes a good game. He played a lot of games and understood them. When we started this, we discovered that the most successful games were those that were easy to learn but impossible to master.

Pong was something of an exception. It was what we considered too simple, but when he put it together and Al Alcorn did it, he put some surprises into it that were absolutely incredible and made it a tremendously fun game. One of the design flaws of the original Pong game was that the paddle didn't reach the top of the screen, and I was supposed to fix that, but I never got around to it and realized that feature was holding the game back... two good people so they don't play it forever. It would never end. The term "video game" refers to an RGB, or red, green, and blue raster, "video display" device.

Take Pac-Man, the original, for example. This is a bitmap image of Pac-Man. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Taking a closer look, they can be analyzed with their colors constructed by adding the values ​​of red, green and blue. A bitmap corresponds "bit for bit" to an image displayed on a screen. A bitmap is technically characterized by the width and height of the image in pixels and by the number of bits per bit. pixels, or a "color depth", which determines the number of colors that the pixels and ultimately the image can represent. The more bits, the better the games looked.

However, more bits meant more memory was needed, which was not plentiful in the early days of gaming. This resulted in games that seemed clunky and simple. But that didn't stop designers and players from jumping straight into this amazing new medium. Barnstorming Game Cassette Over time and as technology became more advanced, 8 bits became 16, then 32, 64, 128 and so on. With each generational leap in graphics and so-called "image fidelity", the depth of story and immersion in the games also seemed to progress. Technological limitations drove the art form and vice versa. Games constantly evolved and the people in the inner circle grew with the art form they created.

It was the Magnavox machine, I think it was called Odyssey, and to show you how different things were... I mean, basically, it let you play Pong. That console didn't really have graphics. There were only squares of light on the television screen. So, there were Mylar overlays that you placed on the screen. And then you would set up a haunted house. And then all of a sudden the white Pong ball was like a ghost, you know, moving around the house. So you had to use your imagination and the Mylar overlays to understand the story they were trying to tell.

Magnavox presents Odyssey, the electronic game of the future. Odyssey can be easily connected to any television, black and white or color, creating a closed circuit that was an electronic playground. Odyssey brings you all the exciting action of ice hockey and 11 other challenging and learning games for the whole family. 1972 Magnavox Odyssey Pong Arcade Machine 1977 Atari 2600 Adventure I had a good friend who was the head of ATCO Records. He had an Atari 2600 console in his office. And she pointed to it and asked me, "Do you know what that is?" And I said: "Well, so, but what is it?" And she told me: "It's a license to print money." Dear buyers.

The new Atari cassette is now available for purchase. Only Atari creates the most popular home video game in the world. The only space invaders. The only asteroids. The only Pac-Man. And the only way to play them is on a home video system made by Atari. ? Come play Atari today? The first game I remember playing was Space Invaders on the Atari 2600. I was six years old at a friend's house and was completely amazed by the fact that you could manipulate an image on your TV. The first console I remember playing on was the Atari 2600. We played everything.

Of course we had Donkey Kong. Baseball. I loved BurgerTime. I remember my brother saying, "Wait, look at the graphs." Trap! It was like a wonderland because there were so many colors, you know, you could really just drive around... you know, it was a side-scrolling game, but it was amazing. You just see the same screen over and over again. You think, “Oh, they added a crocodile head in there,” or “Oh, there are some grapes.” The fact that you could go underground in Pitfall! It was absolutely fantastic...like, can you really go there? I knew enough about computers to know that it was a computer game, and this was... but it simulated, you know, this alien invasion with a ship on Earth defending the planet against this alien invasion, and to me, it was almost like to be there.

Even with those rudimentary graphics, it was the first time I had control over something on television or a screen. 1977 Atari 2600 Adventure 1980 Intellivision Burger Time/Dig Dug 1982 Atari 5200 Super System 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System Probably the most memorable console of my life and one that I miss, that I wish I still had, was my original Nintendo Entertainment System. The Nintendo Entertainment System. Your parents help you plug it in. What's it like to play on the Nintendo Entertainment System? When you play the most arcade-hit system, you play with power. The Nintendo entertainment system, now you play with power. I think one of the reasons we get nostalgic about things is that it's not necessarily what we did.

It's not that song, it's not that game, it's notthat movie, nor that book, is what was happening in your life at that moment. It came at exactly the right time in my life. And the NES was a fantastic gaming system. Apparently the games improved quickly. Before I was a teenager, everything was like... it didn't look as good as arcade games. But when Nintendo came along, things started to get a lot better. 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System 1989 Game Boy Turbo GFX 16 1991 Super Nintendo Super Mario World I was lucky enough to experience Nintendo for the first time as a consumer.

And for me, the first system I was exposed to was the Super NES. And I have a lot of good memories and a lot of good stories about my interaction with that system. I played for many, many hours. I played games like The Legend of Zelda, Link to the Past, games like Chrono Trigger, all these amazing experiences that for me were my first gaming experiences. And then I bought a Super Nintendo, and then it was all about Star Fox. And I was very interested in Star Fox, the story and what would happen next. In most games, when we started playing Super NES, suddenly you had a reason to do it because you were trying to save someone.

So that little thing there brought story elements into the game. And what I think was really cool about Nintendo in that period was that they really wanted to make sure that all the games on the system were very high quality. But Sega Genesis was something completely different. Sega Genesis was to me in college what Nintendo was to me in high school. At that time it was a very advanced console. 1991 Super Nintendo Super Mario World 1992 Mortal KOmbat Street Fighting II/MK 1993 Atari Jaguar 1994 ESRB founded Rate game content 1995 Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn I think the next console I bought was the PS1.

And I thought, "Okay. These games are getting too sick." So I bought a PlayStation 1. Hello, mustachioed plumber. Your worst nightmare has arrived. Pack your things. I have a little surprise for you. Look here. What do you think? Sony PlayStation has over 150 games, NHL Faceoff '97, Jet Moto, Tobal No. 1, Destruction Derby 2, Crash Bandicoot, I could go on. Let me give you a personal demonstration. You can't stop, grandma. You can not. Come on, my girl! Games station. - I have to ask you to leave. - My elbow hurts. Suddenly you had an incredible amount of data on a drive that could also play music and everything else.

For me, it was a portal into today's modern games. When Tomb Raider came out in 1996, it took people into a world they had never participated in before: the 3D world. It was an immersive world at a time when there weren't many games like that. And I think over the years it's grown, people embraced that game. When I talk to developers and fans around the world, they always remember their first experiences playing Tomb Raider. And it moved them and it was something special. 1995 Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn 1996 Nintendo 64 Super Mario/Zelda Ocarina And I begged my mom for a console.

I begged him. And it wasn't until the N64 came out that it finally relented. If we take the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64, that's when you first started seeing 3D. What allowed Mr. Miyamoto's vision was to say, now that I have the ability to manipulate polygons in real time at a fast enough frame rate, so instead of walking back and forth, I can now run in circles or move on or off the screen. . So he gave the game a whole new dimension. And the controller was actually designed with an analog joystick to be able to control that movement.

He began to add a whole new dimension to what players were used to. So for a long time they had been these 2D planes, a kind of 2D parallax. But as you moved into the 3D era, you started to see people playing, you know, what kind of mechanics can we do now? What can we really play with? What is this new world in this other dimension? And you know, at first it was painful. There were certainly good examples of it, but it was difficult. It's difficult to give players this level of freedom that they weren't used to.

And then we started getting consoles that were bigger and better, and you could incorporate a more 3D environment, better frame rates, and better sound. And then you could put more polygons on the screens to make the kids look more realistic. 1996 Nintendo 64 Super Mario/Zelda Ocarina 1998 Dreamcast Starcraft/Half-Life 2000 PlayStation 2 God of War/Grand Theft Auto With the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, you finally started to see some really cool things happening. You started having avatars on the screen that represented people better. They are easier to understand what they were trying to put you through. Especially on PlayStation 2, we started to feel like we had enough graphics to make people really interesting.

You know they weren't real, but they were real enough. So you can start believing in them a little more. I had grown the PC business pretty well and I started looking at the console business and thought, "Wait, that would be a good business for us." But we didn't really know anything about it. And then one day, some guys came to my office. They were from the DirectX team and said they had an idea to put DirectX in a box. It should be a DirectX box. And DirectX is the name of the Windows API for gaming. So this DirectX box was basically going to act as a gaming console on the outside, but on the inside it was actually a Windows PC with DirectX.

That was the original plan. But what I think we didn't really understand at the time was that we were actually building a bridge between these two worlds, that the Xbox was going to be that bridge between what was happening in PC gaming culture and what was happening in console games. culture. 2001 Xbox and Gamecube Splinter Cell/Halo 2005 Xbox 360 Sony PSP/Call of Duty 2006 Wii and PS2 Fallout 3/Wii Sports And then when we got to the PlayStation 3, we just said, "Okay, this will give us enough power." "Really go back and look at the idea of ​​telling an interesting character-driven story in a way that no one had done before." The first time I held a Wii Remote it was a piece of wood with some electronics taped on it and they had a demo of a tennis game.

And when I first picked it up and started playing it, I thought, "This is going to be a hit." It was a lot of fun. just fantastic. I love it. And I also like the PS3. I'm not really interested in, you know, the holy war of which one is better. You can probably call them fanboy arguments. ""I like Sony," you know, it's... I think this is what's really happening, because if I was a kid, I would have had a Genesis and a Super Nintendo. I would have had a Nintendo and a Sega Master System if I had I couldn't afford it, but, you know, you're a kid.

You can't afford all that. Then you start defending the one you have, and I think that's where it comes from. "Xbox", "No, PlayStation." To this day I still stay up until four in the morning playing the latest Xbox 360 that came out yesterday or whatever, you know, I'm still constantly immersed in it. With continued waves of technical and artistic change sweeping the industry, and games getting bigger and better, the video game industry began to gain a foothold in the public consciousness, with many arguing that games are both an art form and ... anything else. . The problem with art is that it is a subjective concept.

What is art for one person is rubbish for another. And this is where we return to the wordplay with the order "art", which is problematic. Whether it is a movie, a book, a painting or a computer game, it provokes a reaction. It makes you think about the world or look at it in a slightly different way. I've always felt that games are an art form. You know, as Phil Fish said, it's the culmination of every art form and artistic expression that man has ever had that goes into a game. If you look at the team that builds a video game.

You have a composer. You have a writer. You have an artist who draws. You have a technical artist. You have level designers who create spaces, like architects. It's really like a group of superheroes with different characteristics if you really think about it. Nowhere is this more obvious than in video games. You have these artists creating these beautiful three-dimensional worlds. And the technology that allows players to enter those worlds and make them as real as possible is the best example of how art and science work together. The best description I heard from one of my professors when I was doing my master's degree was that art is someone who has made something that deliberately evokes a response from an audience.

The consumer is actually a participant in the art. It's almost like being part of a great artistic experiment, a living artistic experiment. Yes, there are a lot of basic logistics. For example, you press "X" and this happens, or you press "up" and this happens. But if there were no more games, we wouldn't play them anymore. We would have lost interest a long, long time ago. Surprisingly, modern gaming technology is still based on the same fundamental concept of early gaming technology, combining new layers of science and art to achieve higher levels of innovation and artistic expression. Modern gaming systems represent not only quantum leaps in hardware and graphics, but also in the use of parallel computing and memory within the cloud.

What does this all mean? Basically, from now on, anyone will be able to play any game, anywhere, anytime, with incredible speed and quality. The cloud is something we hear a lot about these days, and there are actually two very different concepts. The first is the one that we all associate with the term Cloud. You know, I have a photo, I want to upload it, I want to tweet it. All of this is transferred to the cloud and stored on hard drives. So, think of the regular version of the Cloud as having a lot of storage space.

There is another very, very important idea: why not use computers and the cloud to get much more computing power than you would usually buy yourself? And what that means is that the software that you would love to experience will run right there and then the video or actual game output will be delivered directly to you wherever you are and on whatever device you are on. There is more computing power in the cloud behind Xbox One than all the computing power on the planet in 1999. Now we can put scenes on the screen that are, in some ways, more real than reality itself.

But then there's the power of the cloud behind the box, allowing us to tap into thousands of servers to help make the box in your home significantly more powerful than it could on its own. But there was a time when the future of this now-massive industry was in grave danger. After the explosive financial and cultural success of the first generation of video games, the industry began to believe that it was invincible. You know, when all these companies saw that there was a market for video games, they flooded it with so many games. There were some companies that really wanted to show that they had a great game, but then there were, you know, for every really good game, there were 100 really bad games.

What happened was that there was a lot of hope that the next Christmas would be better than the last. And people were already fed up. People got tired of being sold the same thing over and over again with a pretty bad entertainment experience. People started producing games at a very fast pace. And the quality of the game dropped significantly, to the point that some of the games were so bad that they ended up throwing many of them into landfills. With tons of new game developers popping up overnight and venture capitalists pouring money into what seemed like a guaranteed-to-hit product, it was easy to see the writing on the wall.

The market had become saturated and in 1983 the final nail was put in the coffin. Atari has reached a deal with Universal Studios to make a video game adaptation of the hit movie E.T. Only from Atari, made especially for Atari systems, the video game that allows you to help E.T. home. Just in time for Christmas. Merry christmas. With only five weeks to create the game, Atari rushed to release a product that fell short of expectations. Confident in its past success, in the fall of 1992, Atari shipped millions of E.T. cartridges. The reaction was legendary. It caused a domino effect throughout the gaming industry and by the summer of 1983, consumer confidence in video games had reached an all-time low and Atari, along with a number of other new gaming companies, collapsed and went bankrupt. home.

Lossepads here used City for Atari: 'E.T.' Garbage The Fight for Survival at the Warner Store for Rent 20% Off All Intellivision Cassettes So there was a lot of conflict and the whole management style blew up and Warner basically took control. They brought in his man, Ray Kassar, who was from the East Coast, with no experience in entertainment, gaming, technology or Silicon Valley. And he didn't really understand or play. So when you're like this, it's very difficult, as president, to really assess the quality of what's happening. It was that kind of attitude andcreation of a terrible product which was driven by advertising and marketing and not any content, and guess what happened?

It was not sold. The only story about the E.T. tapes buried in the desert is really true. The fact that Atari rushed to make this game just so they could release it with the movie to use the E.T. was huge in the '80s. Both E.T. and the Pac-Man games, they were two of the games that didn't do well, they tried to put something into the Atari 2600 that it didn't want. The great crisis occurred in 1983 and toy stores sold consoles for almost nothing. Everyone thought they could put any type of game into the system and that was the first lesson the industry learned: the fact that consumers are smart, especially gamers, and you can't just throw in random games and fool them.

They don't buy it. But after the accident they realized that there were too many people, it had been a fly 24/7, but for a core group of people, they still wanted to play. 1977 Atari 2600 Adventure 1980 Intellivision Burger Time/Dig Dug 1982 Atari 5200 Super System 1985 Nintendo's Entertainment System For a few years after the crash, many people believed that American video games would be relegated to the "popular buzzword" section of the world's lexicons. XXI century. century and be forgotten. Then came Nintendo, a Japanese toy company that understood that the popularity of classic games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Pitfall showed that people liked to play as a character, not just a spaceship or a block of pixels. name.

Even with the early primitive 8-bit graphics, the concept of "immersion" and "being" a character was very appealing to audiences. And no one knew that their favorite video game character was just around the corner. Nintendo Now you play with power This is Nintendo, a smart little computer that lets you play video games on your TV screen. This is called the Game Boy and industry analysts say many of this product are being purchased because holiday demand outstrips supply. This is Super Mario 3, a highly anticipated game. Obviously Super Mario was very, very popular, Super Mario 2 was extremely popular, now comes Super Mario 3.

It's been the best-selling toy in this country for three years in a row. Twenty million of these things now live in American living rooms. "Live" is a very good word. Because of the accident, no retailer would touch a "video game system." So a lot of what we did was come up with something that was completely different, it wasn't just a game system, it had other features. So we finally came up with R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy and the Zapper gun and two cassettes and sold them as an entertainment system. Still, it was a tough sell to retailers, but it was reasonably successful.

And during the first initial phase, Super Mario was released and sold like hot cakes. It was an extremely successful game. The Nintento entertainment system was, I mean, you know, a big milestone for gaming systems because before that there were a lot of doubts about whether video games could still be popular or not. There was a huge decline in video games and then Nintendo showed us how to bring them back and make them really popular again. I remember watching Super Mario Brothers for the first time and being totally blown away, it was like, "Wait, there's an arcade in my house!

It's the coolest thing ever!" And Mario Brothers was great and Zelda was great, so I spent a lot of hours playing early Nintendo games, I love early Nintendo games. I saw the Nintendo Entertainment System and said, "Wait, this is new, unique, different and offers the consumer new experiences. I saw the original Mario Brothers and said, 'Wait, this is new, this is different.'" Same with the original Legend of Zelda Then after the video game crashed, there was a time where I didn't like the games that much and I just ignored them and then one day, a guy next door, I went to his house and he has a. gray box with this R.O.B., the robot, and he has the Zapper gun and we were playing the Duck Hunt game and then he turns on the Super Mario game and I was like, “Okay, this is on a whole new level.” The first time I jumped and hit a block that was there that I didn't know was there, one of those secret blocks with an extra life, my brain just... exploded because now there are secrets in the game.

American gaming industry, a new generation of gamers arrived. The appetite for simple maze-based games quickly disappeared. The players were ready for more. Becoming a character, living a virtual story, and immersing yourself in something otherworldly was not only technically possible now, but expectations for deeper, more immersive experiences were constantly growing. As the gaming industry evolved, people created larger, more complicated games that required 30-page manuals and 80 hours of gameplay to understand. You didn't really care about the Gauntlet characters, did you? It was just that Gauntlet was an addictive game. But now we not only spend more money on games, but we see them as entertainment media that we want to invest in the story, we want to invest in the world.

I think the big difference is that the older games were much more difficult. If you didn't time your jump exactly to land on a platform, you didn't make it past that level. Timing was everything, now you have much more freedom. You can... You can kill a boss in many different ways. It used to be that the point of the game, literally, was to shoot pixelated aliens falling from the sky, but we didn't know why those aliens were falling from the sky, we didn't care why those aliens were falling from the sky. Honey, we just wanted to shoot them.

But today, not only do we know why those aliens fall from the sky, we know the names of their mothers and we know the names of their future children and we know that we must destroy them all. I feel like as games have evolved over time they've kept a lot of the same features, they've just manipulated the way they work in the game world because people have different desires when it comes to games. They want to be more involved, they don't want to just sit in a bar for a while and play Pong, they want to really invest in that gaming world for a little bit longer.

At first, it was just the industry that needed to understand: "What are these mechanisms? How do players interact with an interactive medium?" As we begin to understand those rules a little better, little by little other aspects of creating something truly advanced or beautiful are incorporated. So advanced graphics are starting to become more relevant because, you know, we're learning how visual elements interact with storytelling and gameplay. In those days, the game designer's main job was to create the rules of a game, nothing more. It was very similar to chess or card games. In the 90s with the PlayStation and the arrival of more powerful technology, we gained expression.

Games became 3D, characters could talk, music was created, characters could show emotions through detailed facial expressions. In the late '80s and early '90s, the industry received a shot in the arm with new technology, new customers, and new talent. A renaissance in game design emerged that not only produced some of the greatest video games of all time, but also a new industry that would generate billions of dollars and a new generation of game designers. Condemn. Command & Conquer System Shock 2 Ultima Online Diablo Myst World of Warcraft II EverQuest "If your culture doesn't like nerds, you're really in trouble." -Bill Gates Culture In the fall of 1972, a small group of computer science students at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory came up with the idea of ​​holding the first "Intergalactic Space Warfare Olympiad" using the PDP itself- 10 of the computer laboratory.

Contestants battled each other on the machine's then-impressive 10-inch raster screen. Two competitions were held: a five-man free competition and a team competition. In Spacewar, five ships with different designs, nicknamed "Pointy Fins", "Roundback", "Birdie", "Funny Fins and "Flatback", fought to the death in the exhibition's round arena, which was dominated by a star whose gravity It drew them towards the center. This was the first video game tournament and the beginning of a community that would quickly become a culture Players wanted for the National Video Team In my dorm room, we threw cables at other people's computers and started up. these home LAN competitions, where we played all kinds of games, from shooters to RTS and anything we could play together.

I used to play Dungeons and Dragons and we bought Doom and we built a LAN in our house and we had network cables in every room and, dear God, that's all we did for the next year, I swear, we only played Doom and Doom 2, four players. And there's something about shooting your friend in the middle and then hearing it in the next room, like, fuck you, there's nothing more satisfying. Growing up in America you always go to the mall, that's how I was when I was a kid and I remember there was an arcade in the mall near where we lived called The Dream Machine and it was this loud devilish cave and all these portals to all.

These other worlds that you could go in and out of, Mr. Do It!, Dragon's Lair, Joust, Centipede, Frogger, all of them. And every time a new game came out, I played it and there were a lot of people watching. And eventually, there came a point where fighting games became a big thing later on. You literally went up and put your two crowns in a row and tried to beat him, the guy who destroyed everyone like Chun-Li. There was a time when kids in the arcades that were really good, like at Chuck E. Cheese or the arcade at the mall or, in my case, the bowling alley, people would line up behind you and I was seeing if you were good at a game.

A global community was born. A community that now not only plays and connects online, but has also produced lifelong friendships, thriving communities, and even marriages. And this community doesn't exist just for entertainment. Not only are gamers one of the most connected and vocal groups, they are also some of the most loyal. For some reason, the friendships that are formed through a gaming experience are so strong that they are not easily broken. One of the really cool things about gaming in general is that it's evolved far beyond the local community aspect - you know, playing or enjoying the game with some of your local friends - to truly global experiences where you can share. your passion with people from all over the world.

I love connection, I have lifelong friends that I met online and we started out just playing together and ended up, you know, meeting up for competitions or just meeting up to hang out and actually meet up in real life, and it sounds silly, but a lot Some of these friendships are really built around the shared experience you have while playing, and I think that's something special, something magical. It's something I saw working in the internet industry during the '90s and early 21st century, where people would meet other people online and really fall in love with them and sometimes move to another city to try to live with them. person, or, You know, people got married or met like that and it's a whole new type of human relationship that didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago.

It's something new, people can meet and fall in love without ever having met in real life. I can't count how many stories we've had of people who got together because of... people who end up getting married because of gaming, people who have gone through, you know, some kind of terrible illness that they've had to fight and gaming allows them to get over it. . I see that when one of the main characters dies it really affects people and makes them cry in the game, or they get tattoos or the game logo on their body, or a man and his wife meet on Xbox Live while playing and Now they play together every night.

There are kids who exist now because their parents met in World of Warcraft, you know? So video games have changed human development to some extent and created completely new mating rituals and forms of social interaction that didn't exist and that's as a result of the internet and video games, so it'll be interesting to see everything that develops. . Video games will become more and more real and will connect more and more people around the world. I used to play EverQuest quite a bit, as do a lot of EverQuest players. A guy I met at South Karana DVPing, we became friends, I ended up going to his wedding, ten years later, now we are family friends and it's great because we share this passion for gaming, we had a lot of values ​​in common. and ideas, and we had a lot of great shared experiences online where we really encourageda deep and genuine friendship that has turned into a great and lasting friendship in the real world.

I saw someone talk recently about him, a kid whose parents died in a car accident, so he was completely alone in the world and... and with no video games to turn to, he would just sit in his room and be completely depressed and his gaming world, and all his friends in his gaming world really supported him during that very painful time and the guy who watched this basically said, "You really don't understand, because I know you hear all of this." time, that violent video games are the problem in the world and so on, but games mean a lot to the people and friends they build around them and the creativity, immersion and everything else that comes with it is actually very valuable and It is something from which you learn a lot.

I went to the landing here and I, this chase... I can't really describe it, but I fell down the stairs because I had a heart attack, which they told me later. I ended up in the hospital for nine or ten days and you're really scared and you don't really know where to... I mean, you're sad and you have a lot of anger and you don't know who to turn to. Take it out and my friends started bringing me stuff, and at first it was food and then they started bringing us ways to play games, I bought a little Nintendo DS and I played Zelda on it and I had a laptop and I played, I mean I had Steam and I had TF2 and Left 4 Dead and Borderlands and that was really the turning point in the hospital. , where I...

I wasn't so scared anymore. I wasn't that angry, I had something to do. Because the terrible thing about the heart attack was that I went blind in my right eye, and it's crazy how not only the games in the hospital helped me get through it, but everyone around me in the industry. At many different companies in different states. So, yes, in a very literal way, I think video games really saved my life. The world is now surrounded by an artistic, social and technological revolution like it has never seen before. Interactive entertainment is the ultimate form of expression and delivery format, but who will decide what stories will be told and how we will experience them in the future?

The answer is simple. Children have an unlimited capacity for imagination and creativity and are not afraid of failure. When I was learning history in school, it was so boring... old books with black and white photographs and I saw a girl in a recent Carnegie Mellon video talking about the spear, which is an ancient weapon from the Middle Ages. . But she had actually experienced using one because she, of course, had done it in a virtual world. And to have, I think I was six, a six-year-old girl tell you her opinion on medieval weapons, compared to my version, which was incredibly boring, is a fundamental change in education through entertainment. , that can make the story and the like much more immersive.

My son is 12 years old and he is faster at things that I am not as fast. He's better at some things and that's because while his brain was developing, he had access to interactive media that was much more advanced than the interactive media I had, and the interactive media I had was the first time . My parents didn't have any interactive media while their brains were developing. I believe that video games provide a space where one can learn to fail safely and successfully. I think as a culture we are obsessed with always doing things correctly. We are afraid of failing.

Video games give us a very safe space to learn how to solve problems, to think about a problem that we really can't solve, to help us realize that it's okay to fall from time to time if we learn from it and then we can finally achieve success . Because it is simulation, we can do things, experience things, practice things, and try things that are not possible or safe in reality, in the real world. Despite the widespread acceptance of video games in the '80s and early '90s, in the late '90s it was still as if the term "gamer" was a close relative of "geek." If you were a serious, dedicated gamer, you were perceived as part of a strange subculture.

But the winds of change were blowing and this perception would soon change. Being a gamer would soon be fashionable. It's almost a religious experience to be in the middle of an esports stadium, filled with tens of thousands of players cheering on their favorite team. It's so surprising to see because it's easy to doubt that that kind of passion can really manifest itself in a physical setting and that people would pay hundreds of dollars or travel thousands of miles to attend these events and see people playing video games and they do and they love. I've always been frustrated by the geek perception of video games and stuff.

For my career, making games that look like summer blockbusters and not like, you know, basement D&D games, having the courage to stand up in front of the camera and put on a clean shirt and also change that perception a little bit, just evangelize . games in general and also to evangelize the race. So, over the course of my 20-plus year career in this business, I've always hoped that there are some kids who look at a football player or, you know, an astronaut and think, "Yeah, that's cool, but "You know what, maybe video games? Maybe that's what I want to do?" And there are a lot of people who message me or email me and they... they're just miserable because they feel so alone, they haven't found their group of friends, you know?

And I think that's my mission, which is to connect people, make them happy and give them friends, because I never had that when I was a kid, I never had my geek group. I think that's how communities have emerged, simply by being able to find people with similar interests. You know when you're a kid it only happens if your neighbor is playing, but now we're all adults and have the ability to connect with others. It is definitely a culture where everyone has fun, where everyone smiles and is happy. They live their lives in a very, very powerful way.

The old way of, you know, "Oh, computers are for geeks and stuff, and video games are for geeks," is dead. Everyone has Facebook. Angry Birds, people don't consider it a video game. People don't think about... The lines between what is a video game and what is not are no longer so clear. Is Facebook a video game? I think it is. I mean it's interactive like a video game and you can do things in it. The world is really different now and I think it's because those of us who grew up and were excluded and despised and treated like we had a contagious disease by the dominant culture, created our own culture and took the things we love.

We took video games and we took technology and we took engineering and we built our own world out of those things and that world is so amazing that the dominant culture that made fun of us when we were kids because we loved this culture that is so amazing that we couldn't deny it and I couldn't help but let myself be seduced by it. Celebrating Video Game Week starting today From Studio 6B at Rockefeller Center, the National Broadcasting Company presents Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Look, he seems smart, wait. Well, it is the most powerful video game console ever created.

Our goal was to multiply performance tenfold... -Ten times, really? - Yes, ten times more. I didn't think it could be better than the PS3, but apparently it can, ten times better. We play it together. So, this is Super Mario 3-D World. Yes, yes, like that! I love Mario. That video game made me sweat. Ladies and gentlemen, here is a professional actor reading the phrase "It's me, Mario" in a very dramatic way. It's me Mario. Hello, Conan O'Brien here. Just so you know, I know absolutely nothing about video games, which is why I decided to review them. - Take me for a ride. -Oh my God.

I had never licked a remote control before. I look like John Tesh after being dead for a year. -What did she just say? -"I hate digging." Well, you know what? Stop looting tombs! Oh, I'm sorry, I wanted to congratulate her and I almost kicked her! In the late '90s, as realism in gaming reached new levels and more visceral, action-packed action hit shelves, a new discussion began. Violence. ...home video games are not limited to violence. Mortal Kombat, two of the bloodiest games to date came out yesterday. This game encourages players to shoot this weapon called the Justifier.

Children who play video games too often are more likely to become violent. This is the conclusion of a new study from Tohuku University in Japan. There was no rating for this game when it was released. ...has a lot of racist, sexist, and violence-promoting information. ...recommendations on weapons after that series of meetings and, as you mentioned, the last one with video game makers saying, "Don't blame us." There is always a lot of media that talks about violence in video games, and of course there are violent video games, but that's not how the gaming medium is described. If I went to the movies and saw Saw movies and walked away and you asked me what I thought of the movies, I would say, "It was the most disgusting, violent, senseless thing." And that is what the media has done, focusing on a few games and which has ended up in the minds of consumers, defining what the industry is.

It's weird how when you see people, you know, they go to Congress and they're angry, you know? "Our children are being corrupted," I think, "Yes, exactly, your children. You shouldn't corrupt them." "I leave them alone for ten hours a day." I mean, it's like finding your dad's Playboy magazines under the bed and then blaming Playboy. We're like any other industry in the sense that... we have these rating systems and there will be something for everyone. We have measures in place, the ESRB are our guidelines. We make sure to build our games according to the rating. It is monitored periodically.

The interesting thing about games is that we actually have an even better rating system than movies, but there's still a widespread misconception among the older generation that somehow all games are like Grand Theft Auto. People can just make a causal connection and say that video games cause violence and say, "So, let's see, there's more crime in the summer and more ice cream is sold in the summer, therefore ice cream causes crime." This is not how legitimate scientific research works. Unfortunately, violence is part of human nature and last I checked, Kain didn't destroy Abel with a Game Boy, Genghis Khan didn't have an Xbox Live account, and Hitler didn't play Crash Bandicoot.

Unfortunately, we've had a lot of gun crime in the US recently and I remember someone tweeting after one of the recent incidents that when people started blaming video games for having an influence on this, they thought, "Enough." "God knows how to do everything." "Other countries with exactly the same video games as us don't have as much gun crime." You know, it would be like saying, "We don't want anyone to watch movies because all movies are violent." But people don't say that because everyone really understands film as a medium. I don't think video games are murder simulators.

In any case, what the statistics show is that it is exactly the opposite. We've survived a lot as players for a long time. We have survived Congress, we have survived angry parents, we have survived religious hysteria. You realize that it's about imagination and invention and a connection to a world and it doesn't have all that gibberish that people impose on it. So I think it's a problem that will slowly go away and we just have to defend the industry until that development happens. "There is no joy like that felt by the inventor when he sees his creation developing toward success.

These feelings make man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything." -Nikola Tesla Creation The campfire. We've all been there, whether at a real campfire or just listening to someone tell a good story. As human beings, we have always had the ability and desire to suspend our disbelief. Even if it's just for a few minutes a day, we will escape the tedium of life and "forget" it to immerse ourselves in something outside of ourselves. We have this opportunity to become storytellers, to be able to give the consumer the opportunity to immerse themselves in a world for as long as they want.

We have everyday realities every day, whether it's the economy or how to get ahead or whether it's a job or making money, but we have a medium that we can immerse ourselves in. Everyday life isn't always so exciting, and if at the end of The Day you can turn on a tablet, a PC, a console and just escape to another world, I think that will be a wonderful thing that will basically allow you to live the dream. Storytelling in games is as good as movies. It's as good as reading a book. With the resurgence and rebirth of the industry in the '90s and the turn of the century, gaming took another evolutionary step forward.

History. This fundamentally changed audience expectations of what a "good game" actually was and raised the expectations of game designers.games from all over the world. Telling stories in games is a very, very difficult thing to tackle. As game creators, we have to establish rules, we have to establish universes that make sense and have their own kind of logic, and once we've established what that logic is, we let the player's mind and imagination problem-solve and work. his way through those worlds. I think one of the things we've really learned in the last decade is how to tell stories without editing the scene, without stopping the interactivity, making the story become something that emerges from the game itself.

Video games are an experience you participate in, while movies and television are an experience you watch. You are the driving force behind every moment of the game. A friend of mine compared games to novels in that if you stop reading, the novel doesn't continue. Exactly the same thing happens with video games. Telling a story in video games can be much more difficult because then you have to anticipate the player's actions, whereas in a movie you decide what both characters are going to say and then you write it down and that's what they say. Storytelling in games is an interesting problem right now because we don't fully understand it.

The film industry has been around for about a hundred years and they have a good idea of ​​what it means to tell a story in that type of visual medium, and the gaming industry doesn't have all those rules yet. Whether it is reading a book or watching a movie, it is completely passive. You let the narrator give you his/hers on a couch and press some buttons for a while. Is it possible that the pioneers whose ideas gradually gave rise to an industry guessed what it would one day become? Would you find it strange? Or did they have a hunch from the beginning that the ideas and creativity of each generation of new designers and artists would reinvent the medium forever?

When we were working on games for the Atari 800, I think people would have laughed at you if you said, "This will be a significant art form and one day it will be displayed at The Smithsonian." I never thought it would come to fruition. Nolan was going around saying, "Oh, it's going to be a big deal! We're going to sell millions of games and it's going to take over everything!" And I expected Atari to fail until the day Nolan and Joe returned from visiting Warner. He tells us that they will pay for us, you know, 20 or 30 million dollars.

Did I say?" The amazing thing for us, you know, in the early days, is that we imagined that would happen. We really looked forward to the day when video games were interactive movies, looked like interactive movies. And I mean, we're There, the spirit of curiosity and invention that existed when the industry was born remains its driving force. Today's game designers continue to bring audiences new and fresh interpretations of classic stories. What began as a single pixel has now redefined what it is. storytelling in the 21st century and beyond. The future of games is in many ways tied to the future of technology and it's really hard to know, a few years into the future, where technology is going. faster than any previous medium.

I think that within the next 30 to 40 years, it will be impossible to imagine video games where you can't distinguish between fantasy and reality and you can live the dream you always wanted to live. They have a lot of really smart people who become smart by using this. I feel like video games are slowly moving towards the holodeck because their goal is to be as close to real life as possible. Couldn't you just digitize the entire world and that would make it an easier, safer, better place? I can see us getting there and getting there fast. What are the indescribable qualities that make real life important?

I think this is what video games will begin to challenge in the next 20 years. The size and scope of the modern video game industry may well be far greater than the wildest expectations of those who started it. But games will continue to be created as they have always been made, drawing on history and culture, imagination and technology, to deliver stories and experiences that delight and challenge generations to come, no matter what form the games take. I think that's why a lot of "nerds" play video games because it's pretty hard for us, we don't really fit in.

But in a game we always fit. Always. Even though I make them every day, even though I play broken games for years before they're perfect and we put them on a shelf and, you know, there's so much trouble involved, I still have the ability to be transported back to A Boy Wrapped in a Blanket , who stays up late, sitting in front of a small television, obsessed. And I really, really want to give it to another eight-year-old and make him feel the same way thirty years from now. It's the same reason kids play cowboys and Indians when they're little, or watch Star Wars, you wanted to be one.

It's satisfying your imagination and being able to realize it on a level with fully interactive worlds that you can explore and immerse yourself in. That was the way to make my game appeal to as many people as possible. And going back to basics, what we do in the gaming business is please people, entertain them. I used to tell people, "Someday everyone will be a gamer." And, you know, it was something to fight for. Now I can't even say it anymore because everyone... because it's like, well, of course everyone is. There's something we never expected, which is the assumption in the film industry to some extent that you would make a movie and people would be able to archive it and watch it decades or centuries later.

In the gaming industry, I never thought that would be the case. And seeing that people still love these old games means that they will probably survive in some form for many decades. There are many people who have dreams. I like to say that anyone who has taken a shower has gotten a good idea. It's the people who step up and do something about it that make the difference. I think the world is too interesting to think about the past. And I'm proud of my involvement in this industry, but I think what's even more remarkable is how we can take everything we've learned and take it one step further.

End I still remember some of the music. I think my favorite gaming memory was when I first played Bonk's Adventures. The one with the Thai fighter and the one with the motorcycle. Burger time. I loved BurgerTime. Oh, Crystal Castles! Ghosts and goblins. I used to close my eyes and watch the Tetris pieces fall and that's when I knew Tetris would be my favorite game forever. And the elevators. It's something my family and I have always shared together. It is a common topic of table discussion and has shaped my life to what it is today. My wife is a bit like my mother when it comes to video games.

She tries to regulate how much I play. The first game I remember playing was Pitfall! on the Atari 2600. From that moment on, it had a special place in my heart as a gamer. And at the same time, Atari had a lot of problems. If it got dust on it, your games wouldn't work, so you had to blow on the games and turn them on. - It's pretty cool. -Excuse me. As an engineer, I think this place needs more reinforcements. One of my all-time favorite gaming memories is the first year I signed up for Extra Life and that first year I raised over $1000 for a children's hospital of my choice and it made me so proud to be a gamer.

Thank you. And I played Return to Castle Wolfenstein and met a lot of cool kids during that time, some of whom are still good friends of mine even though I've never met them. Wherever the industry takes us, I will definitely be there. Player forever. People are killing themselves in a toy store to get that Nintendo 64 game. I'm one of those people. A Mediajuice Studios production. A special thank you to all of our Kickstarter backers. We couldn't have made this movie without you! To mom and dad To buy me my first video game I'm in space. Finish.