The History of Video Games
by Chloe Reynolds
Back in 1958, American nuclear physicist William Higinbotham created “Tennis for Two”. The first video game had a small analog computer, two separate controllers and an oscilloscope for a screen. It was a simple, revolutionary piece of technology and when it debuted, hundreds waited eagerly to play it.
Today, video games are an enormous enterprise. Microsoft and Sony, retailers of Xbox and PlayStation respectively, are among the world’s largest public companies, and at-home gaming is one of the most prevalent entertainment methods of the modern era.
I took a look at a video game sales dataset provided by GregorySmith via Kaggle.com to make some visualizations of the rise of video games through the years. Data was scrapped from vgchartz.com.
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In the chart below, I simplfied the list of all video game publishers to identify the top ones. Please note that the Y-axis refers to total games sold across publishers and utilize the legend or hover effect to see each individual publisher's breakdown. The massive gray is an amalgamation of many smaller publishers. As you can see, Nintentdo, which started as a humble Japanese playing card company 130 years ago, has soared up to the topmost video game publisher spot. Keep in mind the colors of these top companies, Nintendo's blue, Microsoft's brown, and Sony's Green will be in the next chart.
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Zooming in on the top publishers who make hardware as well, I've arranged this breakdown of what platforms most games run on. As you can see, Nintendo, coded in blues, Sony, greens, and Microsfot, browns, have dominated the sale market.
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This last graph is a breakdown of game genres and their popularity by year. To bring order to the madness below, feel free to click through the legend and see which genres were popular when. I will point out that sports games had a spike in 2006, directly correlating to the release of the Nintendo Wii and it's home game. Similarly in 2017 there is a spike of shooter game popularity, correlating to Epic Game's infamous Fortnite, released in 2017.
