Video Game

Claude Shannon lays out the basic guidelines for programming a chess-playing computer in an article, "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess." That same year both he and Englishman Alan Turing create chess programs.

A. S. Douglass creates Tic-Tac-Toe on Cambridge's EDSAC computer as part of his research on human-computer interactions.

Programmers at New Mexico's Los Alamos laboratories, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, develop the first blackjack program on an IBM-701 computer.

The Raytheon Company develops a computer simulation of global Cold War conflict for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although it is sophisticated and even models the benefits of arms control, the simulation proves too complex for users unfamiliar with computers, so Raytheon creates a more accessible analog version called "Grand Strategy."

John Kemeny creates the computer time-share system and BASIC programming language at Dartmouth. Both make it easy for students to write computer games. Soon, countless games are being created.

Scientific American publishes the rules for LIFE in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column. In this simulation, isolated or overcrowded cells die, while others live and reproduce. Hackers rush to implement it on their computers, watching beautiful patterns emerge and change.

A missing slice of pizza inspires Namco’s Toru Iwatani to create Pac-Man, which goes on sale in July 1980. That year a version of Pac-Man for Atari 2600 becomes the first arcade hit to appear on a home console. Two years later, Ms. Pac-Man strikes a blow for gender equality by becoming the best-selling arcade game of all time.

Video game fans go ape over Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, featuring a character that would become world-famous: Jumpman. Never heard of him? That’s because he’s better known as Mario—the name he took when his creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, makes him the star of a later game by Nintendo.

The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) revives an ailing United States video game industry two years after the Nintendo Corporation released it in Japan as Famicom.

Microsoft bundles a video game version of the classic card game solitaire with Windows 3.0. Millions of users who would not normally pick up a game console find they enjoy playing computer games. Solitaire becomes one of the most popular electronic games ever and provides a gaming model for quick, easy-to-play, casual games like Bejeweled.