icelanceron Hacker News • Recommends
On “The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console”
Related: A great video documentary on The First Video Game, by one of the best YouTube producers in this field: link to this video
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- Recommended by 6 people: 4 on Hacker News and 2 on Lobsters.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2026.
- May be out of date. Uploaded 7 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
2.9M views7 years ago6 recommendations
Game developmentHistory and cultureRetro games and consolesHistory of computingGame design
An in-depth documentary explores the history of early electronic games to define what constitutes a video game and identify which was first.
Next up: Glock. Patreon: patreon.com/ahoy Soundtrack: xahoy.bandcamp.com/album/the-first-video-game Soundtrack also on Spotify: open.spotify.com/album/7aHFIw5GwuAUOPMCsHvzsA and iTunes: music.apple.com/us/album/the-first-video-game/1481787667?app… Introduction Popular Consensus What Is a Video Game? Applying The Definition Further Investigation The Answer When Did Video Games Become Video Games?Why it's here
6 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended as a meticulously sourced and thoughtful documentary on the origins of video games.
banana_giraffeon Hacker News • Recommends
On “EXoDOS: Collecting every game developed for DOS from original media”
This indirectly reminds me of this youtube video: link to this video It's a long one, but it tries to answer when the first video game was made. Most of it, though, is trying to figure out what it means to be a video game in the first place. Sometimes really the trouble with the question is the lack of precision in the definitions involved.
twicon Hacker News • Recommends
On “C Port of Ken Thompson's Space Travel”
Video games are like compilers, or computers themselves - there isn't really a first one. Far enough back, there are things which are clearly not video games; recently enough, there are things which clearly are video games, and in between, there is a parade of things which are not clearly video games or not. Here's an hour-long, meticulously sourced, rather thoughtful video on the question: link to this video (which naturally concludes that video games are a British invention!)
teddyhon Hacker News • Recommends
On “The First Video Game Was Just a Box in the Corner of a Bar”
Ahoy did a comprehensive video about it: < link to this video >, and a video is a more appropriate medium for discussing and demonstrating video games.
u/oh5nxoin r/C_Programming • Mentions
On ““A damn stupid thing to do”—the origins of C”
Long video from Ahoy, wondering what was the first video game, also tells about this Mr Stratchey. He seems to be worth a song or 3.
link to this video
M4v3Ron Hacker News • Mentions
On “Inventing the Adventure Game (1984)”
> The first video game was called Spacewar Spacewar! was not the first video game ever. Before it in 1958 came Tennis for Two and even before that, in 1952 Christopher Strachey made Draughts. 1 What Spacewar! can be considered, as per wiki 2 is one of the first recognized video games that enjoyed wider distribution behind a single exhibition system. 1 link to this video 2 link
u/lewisjein r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions
On “Is there a future for Blockchain and Web3.0 in general?”
To continue one of the analogies I made, there were definitely video games before the term was widely used for *Pong* and its clones, even without straining the definition of one: link to this video