Video Game Quiz
A hidden room in a 1980 cartridge started a tradition players still hunt for.
A video game quiz with answers that follows gaming from university labs to arcades and living rooms. Expect consoles, cheat codes and happy accidents rather than questions about a single series.
Did you know?
- The Magnavox Odyssey of 1972 could not produce sound or colour. Players stuck thin plastic sheets printed with tennis courts, mazes or ski slopes onto the television screen, and the console simply moved white squares behind them. Scores were kept on paper, and dice and cards came in the box.
- The PlayStation grew out of a failed partnership. Sony had been developing a compact disc add-on for a Nintendo console, but in 1991 Nintendo publicly announced a deal with a different company instead. Sony decided to turn its work into a console of its own, released in Japan in 1994.
- Mario's look is a product of tiny screens. With so few pixels available, designer Shigeru Miyamoto gave him a cap because hair was hard to draw, a moustache so that his nose stood out without a mouth, and overalls so that his swinging arms could be seen.
A short history of video games
Video games began as side projects in laboratories. In 1958 the physicist William Higinbotham built 'Tennis for Two' on an oscilloscope to entertain visitors at an open day at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The first console for home television sets, the Magnavox Odyssey, went on sale in 1972. It was based on a prototype by the engineer Ralph Baer, who is often called the father of home video games.
Boom, crash and recovery
The late 1970s and early 1980s are remembered as the golden age of arcades. Home consoles grew quickly too, but in 1983 the North American market collapsed. Shops were flooded with rival machines and rushed, poor-quality games, and industry revenue there fell by roughly 97 per cent within two years. Recovery came from Japan from 1985, with consoles whose makers approved each game before release and marked the box with a seal of quality.
New dimensions
Each generation of hardware changed what games could be. Cartridges gave way to compact discs in the 1990s, which stored far more music, speech and video. Three-dimensional worlds became normal in the middle of that decade, and controllers gained an analogue stick so that characters could move smoothly in any direction. Online play, which had existed on personal computers for years, reached consoles around the turn of the century, and touchscreens and motion sensors later widened the audience.
Games as culture
Video games are now collected and studied like films. In 2012 the Museum of Modern Art in New York added fourteen games to its design collection. The Strong museum in Rochester, New York, opened a World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2015. Orchestras perform game music in concert halls, players compete to finish games as fast as possible in an activity called speedrunning, and archivists work to keep old games playable as the original machines wear out.