Video games in the early days were extraordinarily simple and consisted of blocks and little men that were built from blocks. The little man would run around on the videogame screen while you tried to fire at him, or sometimes you were the little man firing at someone else. Regardless of what the game schematic consisted of, there were blocks involved. Sometimes you were the good guy block and sometimes you were the bad guy block, but obviously, you were a block. Featuring all manner of phenomenal graphics on machines such as the Commodore 64 and the Atari 2600, video games and video game consoles weren’t exactly state-of-the-art in the days of Space Invaders and Pac Man.
As time passed, video games all but disappeared, as the technology stagnated in the United States for many years, showing up only in arcades that gobbled down quarters at an alarming rate. The introduction of Donkey Kong and later, Mario, brought video games back into the public eye in the United States with the Nintendo entertainment system. Shortly after, video games were all the rage and there was a video game for everyone, regardless of what they might enjoy personally. With more and more of these varieties of video games and the Nintendo entertainment system to play them on, there was no end in sight for all the different types of video game products, including a gun that fired at the screen to kill digital ducks.
Naturally, this incredible resurgence in video games lead to the evolution of graphics and artificial intelligence as well as pathfinding and overall game design. As graphics and game design became more focused, so did the attentions of game developers, as teams grew over the years, doubling, tripling and then doubling again. What could once be done by two men was now a matter of a 20 man team working around the clock for six to nine months of development for each individual game. Considering that graphics from the original Commodore 64 have almost no resemblance to the graphics of the Sony PlayStation that was eventually released, it is easy to see that the amount of development has steadily increased over the years to include much more work on graphic details as well as storytelling and game performance.
With all of this new technology to utilize, it was obvious that video games have cemented themselves in American culture as a legitimate entertainment activity and distraction. As video games continue to grow and become more and more popular, the technology hurdles that are being broken are nothing short of miraculous. With computer entertainment systems such as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 that perform amazing calculations and feature processors that are light years beyond anything that graced the motherboards of the Atari 2600, these systems do what has never been done before and will continue to lead the way into technological perfection in the future. Combined with the motion detecting properties of the Nintendo Wii, it is clear that innovation and new technologies are emerging from the videogame world on a regular basis.
