Pong is a table tennis–themed twitch arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released on 29 November 1972. It was 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.
A sports video game is a video game that simulates the practice of sports. Most sports have been recreated with video games, including team sports, track and field, extreme sports, and combat sports. Some games emphasize playing the sport, whilst others emphasize strategy and sport management. Some, such as Need for Speed, Arch Rivals and Punch-Out!!, satirize the sport for comic effect. This genre has been popular throughout the history of video games and is competitive, just like real-world sports. A number of game series feature the names and characteristics of real teams and players, and are updated annually to reflect real-world changes. The sports genre is one of the oldest genres in gaming history.
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.
1976 had new titles such as Road Race, Night Driver, Heavyweight Champ, Sea Wolf and Breakout. The year's highest-grossing arcade games were Namco's F-1 in Japan and Midway's Sea Wolf in the United States.
1975 had new titles such as Western Gun, Dungeon and dnd. The year's best-selling arcade game was Taito's Speed Race, released as Wheels and Wheels II in North America.
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.
Rebound is a two-player sports arcade video game developed by Atari and released in February 1974. In the game, two players each control paddles on either side of a volleyball net, with a ball dropped from the top of the screen. The players bounce the ball back and forth across the net with the goal of scoring points by having the ball reach the bottom or side of the other player's half of the screen, with the trajectory of the ball dependent on where it strikes the paddle. The winner is the first player to reach eleven or fifteen points, depending on the game settings.
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.
Encyclopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree, later retitled Fuck Eat Kill, is an independently developed freeware dating sim developed and written by Anna Anthropy. The game stars a submissive who eagerly goes to Anni, her dominant partner, only to find that Anni plans on eating her for dinner in her house. The player is forced to make branching choices which affect the game's outcome.
Dys4ia is an abstract, autobiographical Adobe Flash video game that Anna Anthropy, also known as Auntie Pixelante, developed to recount her experiences of gender dysphoria and hormone replacement therapy. The game was originally published in Newgrounds but was later removed by Anthropy.
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.
merritt k, formerly Merritt Kopas, is a Canadian video game designer and developer, as well as an author and a zine creator.
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.
