From pixels to virtual reality

Long before video games entered living rooms and kid's bedrooms, they were found at universities and demonstrated what powerful computers were capable of. The game Spacewar! from 1962 was one of the very first computer games, developed by computer scientist Steve Russel, in collaboration with Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen, at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

As time passed, computers became smaller. From the late 1970s, home computers and game consoles made digital games accessible to anyone who was willing to shell out the cash. From today's standpoint, both the graphics and the scope of the games were severely limited. This had less to do with a lack of imagination on the part of developers and more to do with the computing power of the machines.

The science fiction game Elite from 1984 pushed computers to their limits. Sitting in a spaceship cockpit, players can explore space in real time and discover its galaxies and more than 1,000 planets. Elite opened up new worlds to players, and is regarded as one of the pioneers of the open world games, which are so popular today.

Another annoying problem was that early 8-bit consoles, such as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), had no memory function. So to see the end of a game, players had to keep going. When the console was turned off, the score disappeared. This changed with the new generation of consoles, and allowed developers to create even larger game worlds.

First-person shooter games came about with Doom (1993) and Quake (1996). Though this new genre polarized people due to its brutality (both of the games were on Germany's blacklist until 2011), the programming skills of the developers were phenomenal. For the first time, they created 3D worlds through which players could move freely. At the time, it was a revolution.

The introduction of the CD-ROM boosted the development of digital games even further. Diskettes had a storage capacity of 1.4 MB, console modules only slightly more. A CD, on the other hand, had 700 MB, and paved the way for film-like scene switching and editing, photorealistic graphics and high-quality sound. Some people even used their PlayStations as CD players due to their excellent sound.

Despite the retro trend, many games of the early 3D era are unplayable today. The graphics in particular have not stood the test of time well. As graphics cards have become more and more powerful, players have become spoiled. What once looked unbeatably good, now seems outdated. The shooter game Halo from 2001, for example, was considered the ultimate in graphics at the time.

The Japanese company Nintendo forged new ground with the Wii console in 2006. The controllers reacted to the movements of the players, causing some to break out into a sweat. Even older people starting playing on the consoles, suddenly being able to bowl or play tennis again. Fitness and dance games boomed. Other manufacturers also began developing motion controls.

As the internet developed, so too did browser games, which also ended up on smartphones. Easy, casual games conquered the games market and still generate high revenues today, although such games are often ridiculed by "real" gamers due to their lack of complexity and their rather basic graphics.

Collecting things and fighting — that's what Pokemon has been all about since 1996, when it first came out on the Gameboy. With the release of Pokemon Go in 2016, the cute pocket monsters leapt from the digital world and into reality thanks to augmented reality (AR) technology. It allows players to search for digital monsters in the real world and let them compete against each other in.

Virtual reality (VR) technology enables players to even more fully immerse themselves into the action. So far, however, it has not been able to compete on the mass market, although it offers plenty of innovative game concepts. It also has one big disadvantage: Some players get sick to their stomachs after just a short time in a virtual reality.