1931 to 2025 · 164 entries
The whole history of video games, in order
Coin-operated amusements, laboratory experiments, cartridges, arcades, discs, broadband, phones, headsets and streaming, arranged as one continuous record. Every entry is dated to the precision the evidence supports, explained in context, and traced to what it changed.
- Entries
- 164
- Periods
- 9
- Categories
- 12
- Last reviewed
- Sep 2, 2026
Step into a period
Each period opens with an original essay on what was actually happening, followed by every entry recorded in those years.
- Before 1950 Origins The coin-operated trade, the cathode-ray tube and the research computer all existed before anyone thought to combine them. 4 entries
- 1950-1959 The 1950s Rare and expensive machines, borrowed for an afternoon to show a crowd that a computer could follow the rules of a game. 6 entries
- 1960-1969 The 1960s Smaller computers, screens you could watch in real time, and the first serious argument that a television set could be a toy. 6 entries
- 1970-1979 The 1970s Ten years that took games from a university hobby to a business with factories, distributors, imitators and lawyers. 22 entries
- 1980-1989 The 1980s The best years the arcades ever had, a collapse nobody planned for, and a recovery built on the power to say no. 31 entries
- 1990-1999 The 1990s Sprites gave way to polygons, cartridges to compact discs, and the living room quietly took the arcade's place. 34 entries
- 2000-2009 The 2000s Broadband arrived in the living room, the shop moved inside the machine, and a telephone became the most important game device on earth. 23 entries
- 2010-2019 The 2010s The decade games stopped being products you finished buying and became services you kept coming back to. 24 entries
- 2020-2029 The 2020s Shaped so far by a pandemic, a buying spree and a hard correction, and still too close to judge with any confidence. 14 entries
Turning points
Six moments that changed the direction of everything after them. A short path through the record if you do not know where to start.
- Technology An oscilloscope tennis match becomes an open-house attraction Staff at Brookhaven National Laboratory built a tennis game on an oscilloscope for the laboratory's public open house, with a net, a ball that arced under simulated gravity, and a control box for each of the two players.
- Arcade Pong proves there is a mass market for video games Atari's first product reduced a video game to one knob, one rule and a single line of on-screen instruction. It became the first commercially successful arcade video game, drew a wave of imitators, and triggered a patent fight.
- Arcade Space Invaders sets off an arcade boom beginning in Japan Taito released Tomohiro Nishikado's game of descending aliens, which sped up as the player cleared it and kept a record of high scores. It filled Japanese arcades, spawned dedicated venues, and later transformed Atari's console.
- Business and industry An oversupplied American console market collapses in on itself Too many competing machines, an unmanageable flood of low-quality cartridges and no gatekeeping produced a severe collapse in the North American home console market, from which it did not recover until Nintendo arrived.
- Game development Super Mario Bros. sets the pattern for scrolling platform games Nintendo's Famicom platformer combined momentum-based jumping with levels that taught their own rules in sequence. Bundled with the console in the West, it sold in the tens of millions and became the genre's reference point.
- Home consoles Sony turns a failed partnership into a console launch Sony entered the console business after a disc partnership with Nintendo collapsed, bringing straightforward three-dimensional hardware, inexpensive disc manufacturing and tools developers liked. The machine reached North America and Europe the following September.
Read one thread end to end
The same history told five ways, each following a single strand from its origins to the present.
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Arcade games
For roughly two decades the video game business was a coin-operated business, and its rules came from the coin slot. A machine had to earn its floor space daily, from strangers, in a public room.
Read the history -
Home consoles
A console is not really a machine sold to players. It is a controlled market sold to publishers.
Read the history -
Handheld gaming
Portable game hardware has always been designed backward from a constraint nobody enjoys discussing: how long the thing runs before the batteries die.
Read the history -
PC gaming
The personal computer is the only major game platform that nobody controls.
Read the history -
Online gaming
Playing with someone far away was possible long before it was practical, and practical long before it was profitable.
Read the history
Or follow a category
Every entry carries one category, colored consistently across the whole record.
- Arcade Coin-operated machines and the public places built around them. 14
- Home consoles Dedicated machines made for playing on a television at home. 26
- Handheld systems Portable hardware, from single-game units to pocket libraries. 13
- Personal computers General-purpose machines that people also played on. 9
- Mobile gaming Phones and tablets, and the storefronts that filled them. 7
- Online gaming Networked play, shared worlds and competitive communities. 11
- Virtual reality Head-mounted displays and the long road to making them work. 4
- Cloud gaming Play delivered from a data center instead of a machine in the room. 3
- Game development Design breakthroughs and the craft of making games. 26
- Business and industry Companies, money, regulation, labor and consolidation. 23
- Technology The hardware and engineering that set the limits of play. 16
- Cultural milestones Moments when games reached beyond their own audience. 12
How this record is put together
A history of games is easy to get wrong. Release dates differ by region, famous firsts turn out to be contested, and a good story often outlives the evidence behind it. This archive is built to be careful about all three.
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Dates only as precise as the evidence
An entry states a day only when a day is documented. Otherwise it says the month, or just the year, and marks itself as such.
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Contested claims labeled, not smoothed over
Where historians disagree about who was first, the entry says so rather than picking the tidier version.
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Sources listed on every entry
Museum and institutional archives, primary documents, specialist books and contemporaneous reporting, named at the bottom of each record.