page_title: 20th century
section_title: Video games
hierarchical_section_title: 20th century / Culture and entertainment / Video games
caption_attribution_description: The Magnavox Odyssey, the very first video game console. Released in 1972, the Odyssey was a simple and crude device that generated shapes on the television that could be controlled and interacted with. It only produced black and white graphics and had no sound, but was limited to only using discreet components like diodes and transistors. It was replaced in 1975 with the Magnavox Odyssey series, a line of dedicated Pong consoles.
context_page_description: The 20th century was a century that began on
  January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000. It was the tenth and final century of the 2nd millennium.
  The 20th century was dominated by a chain of events that heralded significant changes in world history as to redefine the era: flu pandemic, World War I and World War II, nuclear power and space exploration, nationalism and decolonization, the Cold War and post-Cold War conflicts; intergovernmental organizations and cultural homogenization through developments in emerging transportation and communications technology; poverty reduction and world population growth, awareness of environmental degradation, ecological extinction; and the birth of the Digital Revolution, enabled by the wide adoption of MOS transistors and integrated circuits. It saw great advances in power generation, communication and medical technology that by the late 1980s allowed for near-instantaneous worldwide computer communication and genetic modification of life.
context_section_description: Video games—due to the great technological steps forward in computing since the second post-war period—are the new form of entertainment emerged in the 20th century alongside films.
  While already conceptualized in the 1940s–50s, video games only emerged as an industry during the 1970s, and then exploded into social and cultural phenomenon such as the golden age of arcade video games, with notable releases such as Taito's Space Invaders, Atari's Asteroids, and Namco's Pac-Man, the worldwide success of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. and the release in the 1990s of Sony PlayStation console, the first one to break the record of 100 million units sold.
  Video game design becomes a discipline and a job. Some game designers in this century stand out for their work, as Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, Sid Meier and Will Wright.
caption: Ralph Baer's Magnavox Odyssey, the first video game console, released in 1972.
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