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History of the Video Game Industry Essay examples

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The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands

What comes to mind when someone mentions video games? A lot of people will think of a waste of time or a device for creating lazy children. That very well may be in a lot of cases, but from a different point of view, video games have very important uses. Instead of creating lazy children, they eliminate boredom for them. We all know what types of activities children find when they are bored. There is also a huge job market in video games ranging from programming to sales. It seems they have something for everyone, and in my presentation I try to convey how the video game industry became the big dollar industry it is today. The history really begins in 1889 when the Marufuku Company was …show more content…

Coleco releases the Colecovision in 1982. Nintendo, not doing well in the arcade market, licenses Donkey Kong among other games to Coleco. Colecovision's main appeal was an adapter to play Atari 2600 games. To compete with Colecovision, Atari releases its Atari 5200. It does poorly mainly because it took years to have the Atari 2600 adapter that Colecovision had all along. The very next year the Commodore 64 comes out. It is the best video game system yet and acted more like a computer. Because of this sudden flood of game consoles and software, 3rd party companies couldn't compete and went out of business. Their games became dirt cheap and soon people preferred to buy them than the expensive company's games. This all lead to a rough market. In 1985, Nintendo test-markets it's Nintendo Entertainment System. It's a huge hit and goes nationwide the very next year. Because of its popularity, Sega releases the Sega Master System and Atari releases the 7800 game console. No one is as popular as Nintendo and in 1988; Atari sues Nintendo for having a monopoly. Atari of course lose. The video game war rages on to this day with many companies joining wanting their piece of the market. Atari was a main treat until 1996 when they merged with JTS and never released a game console again. Sega put up a good fight until their Dreamcast bombed in 2000, causing them to

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