From two paddles to millions of taps: the history of games

This lesson has one main idea, and I'll tell you right away so you can test it against each story: every time games took a step towards simplicity, their audience grew exponentially. Below are five stories — five such steps. See if it holds true.

The bar, the arcade machine, and two paddles

1972, California. A young company, Atari, gave engineer Allan Alcorn a training task: create the simplest tennis game. Two white paddles, a dot for a ball, a score at the top — and Pong was born. They put the machine in Andy Capp's Tavern, and a few days later, the owner called: the machine was broken. According to Atari's founders, the breakdown was a pleasant one — the coin slot was overflowing with quarters. People lined up to play a game whose only rule fit on a single line on the cabinet: don't miss the ball. This arcade machine is often considered the start of the video game industry.

A puzzle from a work computer

1984. Mathematician Alexey Pajitnov, an employee at an academic computing center, spent his free hours creating a puzzle game about falling four-square figures — Tetris. The "Elektronika-60" work computer couldn't display graphics, so the figures had to be made from square brackets — the game was literally born from text. It then spread through offices on floppy disks, crossed borders, survived a complicated rights battle, and in 1989 became the flagship game for the Game Boy handheld console. No plot, no characters, not even an end — yet it was impossible to put down. Notice: both Pong and Tetris were made by one person, and both almost by accident.

Consoles: games come to the living room

The next step: from arcade halls to homes. In the 1980s, Nintendo consoles with Mario and that very Game Boy with Tetris transformed gaming from a trip to a special place into an evening on the couch. Families started playing: kids, parents, guests. The audience grew again, simply because the "you have to go somewhere" barrier disappeared.

Phones: everyone becomes a player

In 2008, the App Store — the app store for iPhone — opened, and the mobile revolution happened. Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, Cut the Rope: games you master in ten seconds because the controls are just one finger. The main change, once again, was in the audience. Everyone already had a phone in their pocket, and people who would never call themselves gamers became players: in line, on public transport, in the kitchen while soup was cooking. You buy a console for games — but a phone is already bought for everything else, and games came as a free bonus.

Doom: depth out of a flat map

1993. A tiny team at id Software — fewer than ten people — ships Doom: corridors, demons and the feeling of walking INSIDE the game instead of moving a figure across the screen. Technically it was still a trick — a flat map cleverly posing as volume — but players didn't care: for the first time the world surrounded them. Doom spread across the planet's office computers so widely that sysadmins banned it by special decree. Keep the key fact: the breakthrough came from a team smaller than a school class.

True 3D and the big leap

Then the volume became honest: Quake computed real three-dimensional geometry, the new console generation brought 3D into living rooms, and within ten years games went from blocky figures to whole cities you could simply stroll through. Every leap in graphics cost more — and the industry began splitting into two worlds that coexist to this day.

Games today: two worlds side by side

The first world is blockbusters. A modern big game is built by teams of hundreds, sometimes over a thousand people, over several years, on Hollywood-sized budgets: the press has reported sums in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the most expensive projects. Gaming as an industry has long out-earned film and music combined — it is the largest entertainment industry on the planet.

The second world is solo makers, alive and well since Doom's days. Stardew Valley — a farm played by tens of millions — was built by one person over several years: code, art, music, everything. Between these worlds lies the whole palette: studios of three friends, of ten, of fifty. The moral is simple: entry to the first world costs hundreds of millions; entry to the second costs an evening of your time. And tools like AI push the ceiling of that second world higher every month.

What this means for you

You're entering an industry where the biggest breakthroughs came from the simplest mechanics, often put together by one person: Pong was made by one engineer, Tetris by one mathematician. But you have a helper that neither Alcorn nor Pajitnov had — AI, which will handle the code and graphics. Your first game from Module 2 will be of the same breed as the heroes of this lesson: small, understandable at first glance, explainable in one phrase. The history of the industry suggests this is a worthy breed. The only question left is money — how much do such simple games earn — and the next lesson is entirely dedicated to that.

Do this now

Ask the oldest person you can reach today what their first video game was — and write down the answer. Then ask yourself the same question. Almost certainly, both games will be simple, and both will be remembered for decades — with their sounds, places, and people around them. Keep this observation in mind: simple things stick. In the next lesson, we'll check if simple things can also make money.