The Video Game: The History Of The Entertainment Industry

Video games are a huge entertainment industry. Video games produce over 10 billion dollars annually. The annual profit from video games greatly surpasses the annual profit of movies and music. Sixty seven percent of households in the US have a gaming console, and interestingly, it’s not just males who have these system. Forty percent of gamers are women. So how exactly did this incredibly popular industry, which lets us escape our run of the mill boring lives, to save princesses and fend off alien invasions start, and how did it get where it is today? The answer is a little complicated ("Video Game Industry Statistics").
Some say that gaming started with the “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device”, which was developed in the forties. While

It seemed like video games were doomed to be anther distant fad of the era. That was until a Japanese toy company would create a gaming system, or rather an entertainment system, which would change gaming forever. Their name was Nintendo and the name of their system was the Nintendo Entertainment System. The name of their system was important because after the crash retailers didn’t want to go near video games, so having entertainment system in the name helped. It came packed with a zapper gun that you could point at the screen and shoot like in the classic game “Duck Hunt” in which you shot the ducks. It also came with the robotic operating buddy or R.O.B. for short. R.O.B. was a toy robot that could plug into the console and spin toy spinning tops. Even with R.O.B. and the zapper gun the Nintendo Entertainment System was a tough sell to retailers. Some retailers eventually agreed to sell it and it became a huge success. Because it was so successful they stopped selling it with R.O.B. and the zapper gun. The developers felt it was no longer needed to sell the product. When one of the world’s most popular video games, “Super Mario Bros.”, came out it sold like hotcakes and the Nintendo Game System became even more popular. Some other popular games that came out for the NES around this time were “Contra”, “Castlevania”,

This game was way ahead of its time. Legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto worked on this game and it would come to define the system more than any other. He created it to be a sweet application for the new system, fully exploiting its unique advantages. This meant a full megabit of inexpensive storage space and the ability to save progress, allowing for a larger, more involved game. The game had exploration, transport puzzles, adventure-style inventory of gear you could collect, beat bosses, an action component, a monetary system using gems you could collect in the game, and a simplified leveling system for your character like the RPGs (role playing games) that were just starting to develop in Japan, and eventually it become a hugely popular genre of