People have always played games from the board and dice genre enjoyed in ancient Rome, to the craze of Pac-Man in the 1980’s. Whether you are an avid video gamer, simply enjoy playing low variance slots on the weekend, or like a game of bingo every Tuesday evening, games are a huge part of our culture and have been for thousands upon thousands of years. The development of games over time, online and in video games, is impressive to say the least, and there have been several crazy achievements in the gaming community over the past few decades.
First Game Without A Controller
Created by PlayStation in the early 2000’s, the EyeToy was the first computer peripheral that allows its users to play a game without a controller and instead with their bodies. The EyeToy, impressively for its time, did this by using motion detection and computer vision. There were 25 different games that required the EyeToy in order to play them, most of which were light natured and generally fun. The technology was good overall, but the games were all fairly similar to one another, and sometimes the EyeToy would also fail to recognize what players wanted it to recognize. However, the EyeToy did mark the beginning of the next step for interactive gaming.
First Ever Interactive Games
When you think about interactive electronic games, you probably don’t expect that the first ever was developed and produced in the 1940’s. During their time serving in the Second World War, physicists Thomas T. Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann were inspired by the missile displays. From this inspiration, the men created a missile simulator game on a cathode ray tube. This game that they created used an entirely analogue set up to control the cathode ray tube beam and to point a red colored dot on the screen overlay.
Whilst Goldsmith and Mann’s game used a graphical display, the cathode-ray tube game is generally not considered to be the first ever video game, due to it using purely analogue hardware and not running on an actual computing device. Nevertheless, their cathode-ray tube game is widely considered as the first ever interactive electronic game as well as the first ever game to incorporate an electronic display, which is highly impressive and makes it a prototype to video games in the early history of the gaming world.
First Ever VR headset
The history of VR exploration and development in the gaming world began back at the start of the 90’s. The Sega VR was announced in 1991 and was later first seen at the 1993 Winter CES. However, it was never actually released due to numerous complications. The following year the Forte VFX1 was announced, then in 1997 Sony released the Glasstron. These VR headsets upped games like MechWarrior 2, by allowing players to see the battlefield from the cockpit of their craft. Whilst these early headsets ultimately failed commercially, they marked the first step of VR use in gaming.
First Ever Online Game
Back in 1981, a small company called “SuperSet Software” were founded in Utah. This company was responsible for creating the first ever game that featured networked game play, which was released in 1983: Snipes. This text-based game was played between multiple players on multiple IBM personal computer systems. The game tested and showcased the capabilities and potential of the new IBM machine and system. It was an incredibly simple game, the key objective being to control your creature by directing it around a maze in order to destroy snipes and their hives, as well as potentially destroying other networked players. Despite the game’s simplicity, it was the beginning of online gaming as we know and love it today.
First Game Featuring Gore
Whilst sometimes controversial, gory and violent games are all the rage now. From Battlefield to Grand Theft Auto to Call Of Duty, games involving war, violence and spewing blood are pretty popular within the gaming community. The first ever video game to feature blood and gore was a game called Chiller, an arcade game released in 1986. It involved light gun play, with the player taking control of the character and shooting everything on screen, from ghosts and zombies to human beings. Whilst of course the graphics on this 1980’s arcade game weren’t anything more than very basic by today’s standards, some of the graphics were intended to represent dismemberment and flesh being gruesomely torn off in chunks. At the time, a lot of people thought the game was far too disturbing, and it was actually permanently banned in the United Kingdom; the first and only game to be invariably prohibited, which is pretty humorous and crazy considering the levels of gore in many video games today.
Final Thoughts
Gaming has ultimately become what it is today through the many crazy achievements of the past decades. While many of these firsts are rather primitive by today’s standards, gaming simply wouldn’t be where it is now without them.
What do you think was by far the craziest achievement in gaming history? Let us know in the comment section below.
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