Pong is a 1972 sports video game developed and published by Atari for arcades. It is one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, but Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney were surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work and decided to manufacture the game. Bushnell based the game's concept on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. In response, Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement.
ZZT is a 1991 action-adventure puzzle video game and game creation system developed and published by Potomac Computer Systems for MS-DOS. It was later released as freeware in 1997. It is an early game allowing user-generated content using object-oriented programming. Players control a smiley face to battle various creatures and solve puzzles in different grid-based boards in a chosen world. It has four worlds where players explore different boards and interact with objects such as ammo, bombs, and scrolls to reach the end of the game. It includes an in-game editor, allowing players to develop worlds using the game's scripting language, ZZT-OOP.
The golden age of arcade video games was the period of rapid growth, technological development, and cultural influence of arcade video games from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The release of Space Invaders in 1978 led to a wave of shoot-'em-up games such as Galaxian and the vector graphics-based Asteroids in 1979, made possible by new computing technology that had greater power and lower costs. Arcade video games switched from black-and-white to color, with titles such as Frogger and Centipede taking advantage of the visual opportunities of bright palettes.
The Cassette Vision is a second generation home video game console made by Epoch Co. and released in Japan on July 30, 1981. A redesigned model called the Cassette Vision Jr. was released afterwards.
A video game clone is either a video game or a video game console very similar to, or heavily inspired by, a previous popular game or console. Clones are typically made to take financial advantage of the popularity of the cloned game or system, but clones may also result from earnest attempts to create homages or expand on game mechanics from the original game. An additional motivation unique to the medium of games as software with limited compatibility, is the desire to port a simulacrum of a game to platforms that the original is unavailable for or unsatisfactorily implemented on.
In the history of video games, the first generation era refers to the video games, video game consoles, and handheld video game consoles available from 1972 to 1983. Notable consoles of the first generation include the Odyssey series, the Atari Home Pong, the Coleco Telstar series and the Color TV-Game series. The generation ended with the Computer TV-Game in 1980 and its following discontinuation in 1983, but many manufacturers had left the market prior due to the market decline in the year of 1978 and the start of the second generation of video game consoles.
Gotcha is an arcade video game developed by Atari and released in October 1973. It was the fourth game by the company, after the 1972 Pong, which marked the beginning of the commercial video game industry along with the Magnavox Odyssey, and the 1973 Space Race and Pong Doubles. In the game, two players move through a maze, which continually changes over time. One player, the Pursuer, attempts to catch the other, the Pursued; if they do, a point is scored, and the players reset positions. The game emits an electronic beeping sound, which increases in pace as the Pursuer gets closer to the Pursued, and each game lasts a set amount of time.
Space Race is an arcade game developed by Atari, Inc. and released on July 16, 1973. It was the second game by the company, after Pong (1972), which marked the beginning of the commercial video game industry along with the Magnavox Odyssey. In the game, two players each control a rocket ship, with the goal of being the first to move their ship from the bottom of the screen to the top. Along the way are asteroids, which the players must avoid. Space Race was the first racing arcade video game and the first game with a goal of crossing the screen while avoiding obstacles.
The concept of video games as a form of art is a commonly debated topic within the entertainment industry. Though video games have been afforded legal protection as creative works by the Supreme Court of the United States, the philosophical proposition that video games are works of art remains in question, even when considering the contribution of expressive elements such as acting, visuals, design, stories, interaction, and music. Even art games, games purposely designed to be a work of creative expression, have been challenged as works of art by some critics.
Mighty Jill Off is a 2008 independently developed freeware platform video game designed by Anna Anthropy, with art by James Harvey and music by Andrew Toups. It stars a submissive named Jill, who has a boot fetish and is forced to climb up a tower after her Queen kicks her down it as punishment. Jill does this by jumping and slowly descending over obstacles. Jill can be defeated in one hit by these obstacles, but will return to the last check point. The game serves as an homage to the 1984 arcade game Bomb Jack and its console and computer sequel, Mighty Bomb Jack. It had follow-ups, such as Mighty Jill Off - Jill Off Harder Edition and Jill Off With One Hand. Jill made a cameo appearance in the 2010 video game Super Meat Boy as a playable character.
Dys4ia is an abstract, autobiographical Adobe Flash video game that Anna Anthropy, then known as Auntie Pixelante, developed to recount her experiences of gender dysphoria and hormone replacement therapy. The game was originally published on Newgrounds but was later removed by Anthropy. In 2023, she republished it on itch.io.
Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a video game designer, new media artist, writer and curator based in Oakland, California. They are primarily a developer of hypertext games and interactive fiction mainly built using Twine. They have been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a Rhizome.org commission, the Prix Net Art, and a Sundance Institute's New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship. Their work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. They were an editor for freeindiegam.es, a curated collection of free, independently produced games. They were a columnist for online PC gaming magazine Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Mattie Brice is an independent video game designer, critic, educator, and industry activist. Her games and writing focus on diversity initiatives in the games industry, discussing the perspective of marginalized minority voices to publications like Paste, Kotaku, and The Border House. Her games are freeware and do not require programming to create.
Boss Fight Books is a Los Angeles-based book publisher and its eponymous series of books about video games. Similar to the style of 33⅓, a series of books about individual record albums, each book focuses solely on one video game. The company was founded by Gabe Durham in June 2013, and following a successful Kickstarter campaign in July, they released their first book, EarthBound by Ken Baumann in January 2014.
merritt k, formerly Merritt Kopas, is a Canadian writer, editor, and video game designer.
The 1970s was the first decade in the history of the video game industry. The 1970s saw the development of some of the earliest video games, chiefly in the arcade game industry, but also several for the earliest video game consoles and personal computers.
Queers in love at the End of the World, also stylized as queers in love at the end of the world, is a hypertext game created with Twine. Developed by Anna Anthropy in 2013 for the Ludum Dare Game Jam, the short, ten-second narrative faces players with how to interact with their partner before "(e)verything is wiped away".
Masocore is a video game subgenre with a focus on intense difficulty, often featuring complex or unfair mechanics. The name is a portmanteau of "masochism" and "hardcore", suggesting that players of the genre are hardcore gamers who find pleasure in the aggravation required to beat the games and the feeling of reward afterwards for having surpassed a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Masocore games are mostly 2D sidescrollers, harkening back to retro Nintendo hard platformers, although the definition can also be taken to encompass fully 3D games of high difficulty such as soulslikes.
Naomi Clark is a Japanese American game designer, writer, and professor who currently serves as the departmental chair of NYU Game Center at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. During Clark's term as chair of the department, NYU Game Center has been ranked by The Princeton Review as the top school for game design. Her games often address LGBTQ themes. She designed Consentacle, a science fiction cooperative board game, which raised $154,609 on Kickstarter and won the IndieCade Impact Award. Clark co-wrote the book A Game Design Vocabulary with Anna Anthropy. Clark is a member of New York City's Game Development Industry Council.
