In 1972 Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell asked an engineer named Allan Alcorn to create a simple game people might play in bars for American quarters.
Mr. Alcorn did, and set it up in a local tavern. Soon, though, it broke down.
What went wrong? When Alcorn looked, the answer was clear. Nothing. Players couldn't stop. They had poured in quarters until the machine jammed.
Alcorn had invented ...
Pong.
Pong was one of the worlds first video game to reach mainstream audiences, it has received a cult status and is still played worldwide in many different forms ranging from the original Home Pong console to computer emulators to new versions on the ios platform.
From its beginning the video games industry has only grown in fact since 2005, the industry has grown eight times faster than the US economy. In 2011, the American video game industry says it Recorded $25 billion in sales.
This has led for times to change, recently the US declared that the athlete visa applicable to athletes entering the US to participate in a competition, should also apply to people entering the US for a video game competition, this means that competitors from foreign countries can come in and dominate any American competition. It also shows the beginning of video games as a recognized sport. It also allows the countries competitive scene to expand rapidly.
Call me a optimist but in the future I see an American video game culture similar to that of south korea (the nice one) who make a game called Starcraft a national televised sport who has a massive video game culture in basically all games that come onto the market.
People tend to think of video games a small group of people are misguided and ill informed, it rising form of new media that receives a lot of bad press from the old guard of television and newspapers that are losing ground to newer forms of entertainment.
Links to really interesting article:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2012/0318/Video-game-nation-Why-so-many-play
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