1900: Edison's kinetoscopes, able to show moving pictures on film up to 90 seconds long, are in coin-operated arcades. The buildings bear a striking resemblance to today's video arcades.
1961: MIT student Steve Russell creates Spacewar, the first interactive computer game. It runs on a mainframe computer, with ASCII text characters for "graphics".
1971: An arcade version of Spacewar. A mainframe version would cost too much so a simplified, dedicated ("hardwired") machine is used which can only do this single task.
1973: Pong kicks off the arcade games craze, followed two years later by Atari's home console version.
1977: Gunfight is the first game to use a microprocessor instead of hardwired solid-state circuits.
1978: Atari's Space Invaders, followed a year later by Asteroids.
1980: Battlezone, Pac-Man (originally called Puck Man).
1981: Nintendo's Donkey Kong. The hero, a fat wee carpenter called Jumpman, is later renamed Mario.
1984: The games industry's big crash. William Gibson, influenced by the immersive experiences of arcade games, writes Neuromancer and coins the term "cyberspace".
1988: VPL's Dataglove. Street Fighter (first called Fighting Street), and Tetris.
1989: Nintendo's $150 Gameboy. Commodore has sold over one million Amiga computers.
1991: Nintendo's Super NES machine, and Sega unveils Sonic the Hedgehog. Street Fighter II in the arcades.
1993: Panasonic's 3D0 marks the beginning of the 32-bit era.
1994: Commodore goes bust.
1995: Nintendo's Virtual Boy 32-bit portable game console, the Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation and Donkey Kong Country.
1996: Price wars, Nintendo sells its billionth cartridge.
1997: The rise and rise of the new super arcades, with high-end simulation games, Net access, on-site food etc.