The history of computer games, which include personal computer games and mainframe games,

1950s and 1960s: Computer mainframes

1970s

The home computer and the BASIC language

As mainframe computers became more ubiquitous as essential computing devices for academics and businesses, and technology companies developed less expensive minicomputers and eventually microcomputers. With more people using these computers, most users were taught how to use the computers via the BASIC programming language, which had been created in 1964 by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College. The BASIC language had been created to be an easy-to-learn means to program computers compared to languages like Fortran and ALGOL, though had its fair share of critics from computer scientists, notably Edsger W. Dijkstra, as it introduced poor programming concepts.

One of the first versions of BASIC on a microconsole was on the 1975 Altair 8800, a machine developed by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). The Altair BASIC implementation was created by Paul Allen and Bill Gates, which they used to found Microsoft in April 1975. Those that purchased an Altair were given a discount if they purchased the BASIC interpreter from Microsoft along with it, establishing the idea of providing a programming language with the base computer.

The first commercial home computers arrived on the market in 1977, which included the Apple II, Commodore's PET 2001 and Radio Shack's TRS-80 (also known as the "1977 Trinity"), as well as kits that allowed users to build their home computer from scratch. Microsoft BASIC or a variant of this was offered on all three as shipped, and by this point, other versions of BASIC had arrived on the market with other features. This effectively gave every owner the ability to program their computer, along with using applications or playing games that were published for it.

At around this time, the arcade game industry was beginning to take off and home video game consoles were becoming common with the introduction of game cartridge-based system, so there was a wide interest in using home computers to play games. The availability of BASIC gave first time home computer users the opportunity to make their own titles. An influential work was BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl. The book was originally written in 1973 using source code that he and others had made in BASIC for text-based games that supported teletype terminals that predated monitors. With the 1977 Trinity home computers, Ahl reacquired the rights to BASIC Computer Games and republished it for the newfound group of computer programmers. Many of the games were relatively simple and implementations of common games or puzzles like Nim and Hexapawn, but among other notably programs included in the book included Super Star Trek based on the original Star Trek game, and Hamurabi, the precursor of simulation and management games. ^[1]

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1980s

The formation of the third-party developer

In the home console market, Atari released the Atari 2600 (at the time, the Atari VCS) in 1977, a console that used game cartridges to expand games on the unit. Atari had remained in control of the development and publication of its game cartridges (notably, Warren Robinett developed Adventure for release in 1980 based on Colossal Cave Adventure which is recognized as the first action-adventure game). Bushnell had sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1976 and left in 1979; his replacement Ray Kassar was more corporate and controlling, and implemented policies that would deny the programmers get due recognition for their work; this had led Robinett to leave his infamous Easter egg in Adventure. This also led to the departure of four other skilled programmers, David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, over similar recognition issues, and after working with Jim Levy, established Activision in 1979, and made their own Atari VCS games, including highly successful titles like Pitfall!. Atari sued Activision, but the matter was settled out of court, with Activision agreeing to pay Atari a small royalty for each copy they sold, but otherwise validating Activision as the first third-party developer. Importantly, Activision had the freedom to develop not only for Atari, but for all available platforms which by this point included other home consoles like the Colecovision and Intellivision, but for home computers like the Commodore 64.

Activision's success led several other companies to try to follow in their footsteps. Some, like Imagic and Parker Brothers, had reasonable quality compared to Atari and Activision's products, but too many were poor quality games made by inexperienced programmers. These games flooded the market, reduced the value of the quality games, and made it difficult to profit. Coupled with Atari's poor performance in sales in 1982 and the increase demand of home computers, the United States market for console games crashed in 1983 and did not recover for several years until the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985.

1990s

3D graphics