The Original PlayStation Made Its Debut In 1995

On September 12th, National Video Games Day celebrates all the ways we enjoy a good video game challenge.

Video game players across the United States enjoy this day with much enthusiasm. From their very earliest days, video games have been a blend of art form and industry.

• 1940 – The first video game, ‘Nim’ is introduced at the World’s Fair by Edward Condon
• 1947 – Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed the first patent for an interactive electronic device in 1947.  It was called the “Cathode ray tube amusement device.”
• 1950 – Bertie the Brain was a video game version of tic-tac-toe, built by Dr. Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition
• 1951 – a computer was built called Nimrod. Nimrod was a computer built and displayed at the Festival of Britain in 1951 and designed to play a game called Nim.
• 1952 – 0X0 – a tic-tac-toe computer game by Alexander S. Douglas for the EDSAC (1952)
• 1958 – Tennis For Two – An electronic interactive game engineered by William Higinbotham (1958)
• 1972 – The Magnavox Odyssey launched the first home console.
• 1972 – Atari’s Pong followed with an arcade version in 1972 and a home version in 1975.
• 1977 – Atari’s first console, the Atari 2600, is released with games like “Frogger.”
• 1978 – ‘Space Invaders’ Started The Famous Enemy-Waves Gaming Idea. The idea of some “more aliens getting killed, the faster they come out” started as a fluke and hardware malfunction while playing Space Invaders – although it is one of the bedrocks of gaming today. Initially, the game’s hardware frees up whenever aliens get killed and that caused the game to run faster – it wasn’t the initial plan.
• 1983 – Walter Day and the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard out of Ottumwa, Iowa, founded the United States National Video Game Team.
• 1989 – For the first time, gamers can travel with their consoles as Nintendo releases the Game Boy in the summer.
• 1993 – Tetris was brought aboard a Soyuz TM-17 rocket to the MIR Space Station, where the Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr A. Serebrov played it. The game cartridge was later sold at an auction for $1,220. Who knows what’s happened to it since, but you can grab the renewed version here.
• 1995 –  the original PlayStation made its debut in North America
• 2008 – Barack Obama campaigned in 18 games.  During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama purchased ad space in 18 games that ran in 10 states. The “Vote for Change” billboards were in Burnout Paradise, Skate, Madden, and more games, which targeted the demographic of ages 18 to 34.
• 2010 – Though video gaming as a sport had existed since the 90s, it has seriously taken off since 2010, becoming a viable sport and way to make money for many gamers.
• 2015 – The longest video game session lasted 138 hours and 34 seconds for a Guinness World Record.
• 2020 – there are more gamers than ever. An estimated 2.7 billion people played video games in 2020 alone.
• 2024 – There are about 5 million existing video games as of 2024.
• 2025 – PlayStation 2 dominates the leaderboard with 160 million consoles sold. Nintendo Switch is second with over 153.1 million consoles.
• 2025 – Madden NFL, as a franchise, is older than half the players currently playing in the NFL. “It’s in the game!” and on your system of choice—Madden NFL has appeared on 33 different video game platforms and consoles.
• Their early games used interactive electronic devices with various display formats.
• With The radar display technology, it consisted of an analog device that allowed a user to control a vector-drawn dot on the screen to simulate a missile being fired at targets.
• The first game ever created is often thought to be Bertie the Brain, an artificial intelligence designed to play Tic-Tac-Toe. Considering that Bertie was a 4 meter (13 Ft) high machine built on vacuum tube technology, it was disassembled after the Canadian National Exhibition.
• “The commercial success of Pong led numerous other companies to develop Pong clones and their own systems, spawning the video game industry.”
• The voice actor who has played Master Chief in every Halo game to date is more famously known as Steve Downes, a radio DJ dating back to the late 1970s. Downes was most recently on Chicago’s WDRV “The Drive.”
• Core Design animator Toby Gard wanted to make an interactive movie starring a male character looking for treasure in Egyptian pyramids. The character was deemed too close to Indiana Jones and was quickly switched to a South American woman named Laura Cruz. Core ended up wanting a U.K. friendly name, so Core employees dove into a phone book and settled on the name “Croft.”
• In the Nintendo 64 game GoldenEye 007, Rare originally intended to include Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Sean Connery as playable characters in multiplayer. That plan was scrapped before release, but the character models for these famed actors were still on the cartridge. In 2005, a group called The Rare Witch Project cracked the game’s code and found them.
• E-sports is the professional competition for video games
• 960 gaming consoles have been released since the first generation of home video game consoles
• Minecraft is the best-selling video game so far.
• Antonio Monteiro of Texas holds the Guinness World Record for the largest video game collection at 24,268 video games. The collection features games from the 2nd to 8th generation consoles and over 100 devices to play them on. One of the most hardcore video game facts: It took Guinness 8 days to finish counting them all!
• People who play video games are more likely to be lucid dreamers than those who don’t.
• Studies have shown that playing Tetris can curb sex, drug, and food cravings.
• Pac-Man was supposed to be called “Puckman” for his resemblance to a hockey puck.
• Gamers actually agree on the worst video game of all time.  It was so bad, the creators buried the evidence. Literally. The Atari ET video game is widely regarded as the worst video game ever created, and years after it was created, copies were found buried in the New Mexico desert.
• Playing action video games trains people to make the right decisions faster.  Players develop a heightened sense of their surroundings and that helps them multitask. And surgeons who regularly play video games make 37% fewer errors and perform their tasks 27% faster than peers.
• Survey according to one of the top Market Research Agencies (Survey of 1,000 Americans):
  • What’s the best gaming console?
    #1: Playstation (38%)
    #2: Xbox (38%)
    #3: Nintendo (21%)
  • What’s the best video game franchise?
    #1: Super Mario (47%)
    #2: Call of Duty (21%)
    #3: Donkey Kong (19%)
    #4: Grand Theft Auto (19%)
    #5: Pokemon (16%)
    #6: Zelda (13%)
    #7: Sonic the Hedgehog (13%)
    #8: Final Fantasy (9%)
    #9: Halo (9%)
    #10: Crash Bandicoot (7%)
  • How often do you play video games?
    #1: Everyday (31%)
    #2: Rarely (31%)
    #3: 2-3x a week (23%)
  • When do mobile gamers like to play games on their phones?
    #1: Whenever I’m bored (66%)
    #2: When I’m watching TV (41%)
    #3: Before I go to sleep (39%)
    #4: When I’m on the toilet (34%)
    #5: During my breaks at work (21%)
    #6: Whenever I’m eating (20%)
    #7: Before I leave for work (12%)
    #8: On my commute to work (8%)
• By the numbers:
  • 360,000 – the number of arcade cabinets of the game “Space Invaders” sold by 1980.
  • $80,000 – the amount spent by a Japanese man on playing “Space Invaders”.
  • 40,000,000 – the number of copies sold of “Super Mario Bros” by the game’s 25th anniversary in 2008. 430 million games to date.
  • 3 – the number of discs that held the “Final Fantasy VII” game on PlayStation.
  • 56 – the number of vehicles drivable in “Grand Theft Auto: III”.
  • 3 – the number of days it took “Grand Theft Auto: V” to reach $1 billion in sales.
  • 13 – the number of novels written on the “Halo” universe.
  • 12,000,000 – the number of subscribers to “World Of Warcraft” in 2012.
  • 7 – the number of players originally limited to a football team in “Madden Football” due to hardware restrictions.
  • 92 – the number of production babies who joined the Bungie family in the game “Destiny” since 2010.

Sources:

National Day Calendar

Days of the Year

Game Informer

Facts

ID Tech

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