Video Games
Computing as play. The arcade and the console, the 3D accelerator, the engines, esports, and an industry that outgrew film without most people noticing.
Part of Technology
10 moments in this segment.
- - Tron - First Computer-Animated Feature. July 9, 1982. Tron's release. 15 minutes of computer-generated imagery; first feature film to make heavy use of CGI. The Visual-Effects Academy disqualified it because computers were considered "cheating."
- - Nintendo NES Launches in NA. October 18, 1985. Nintendo Entertainment System launches in North America after the 1983 video-game crash had killed the home-console market. Sold 62M units; rebuilt the industry single-handed.
- - Sega Genesis Launches in NA. August 14, 1989. Sega Genesis launches in North America. "Genesis does what Nintendon't." Sega briefly outsells Nintendo in the US (1991-94), the only time before or since.
- - Game Boy Released. April 21, 1989. Nintendo Game Boy. 118M units sold. Tetris bundled with launch. The handheld-gaming category as the West understood it for two decades.
- - The Matrix - "Bullet Time". March 31, 1999. The Matrix's "bullet time" sequence, 122 still cameras firing in sequence around Trinity's kick. Reshaped the visual language of action cinema for the next decade.
- - Second Life Launches. June 23, 2003. Linden Lab launches Second Life. By 2007: 1M residents, branded "metaverse" before the term was popular. The early-2000s template for every later virtual-world platform.
- - Oculus Rift Kickstarter Demo. August 1, 2012. Palmer Luckey's Oculus Rift Kickstarter video, duct-taped prototype on his head. Raised $2.4M; revived VR after a 20-year coma.
- - Twitch Plays Pokemon. February 2014. Twitch Plays Pokemon, 1.16M people typing inputs to control a single Game Boy emulator. The 16-day collective experiment that put Twitch on the cultural map; led to Amazon's $970M acquisition six months later.
- - Fortnite + Marshmello Concert. February 2, 2019. Marshmello plays a virtual concert inside Fortnite to 10M+ concurrent players. The first widely-attended metaverse event; predated Meta's rebrand by 32 months.
- - Roblox IPO. March 10, 2021. Roblox direct-lists at $45B valuation. By 2024: 80M daily active users (over half under 13). The first true mass-market metaverse platform.
