Strong holiday sales for the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast earned the videogame industry $7.2 billion in hardware and software sales in 1999. (Box office receipts for the film industry were about the same.)
The figure for the games business could not have been foreseen when Pong in 1972 became the first true videogame. Since Pong there has been an avalanche of games, due in no small part to the phenomenal success of the Sony PlayStation, particularly in more recent years. That trend will undoubtedly continue. Despite inflation since the 1980s, game prices have remained constant, at £30 to £45.
Pong has its place in history as the first videogame that appealed to a wide audience. The gimmick of playing a "videogame" in itself was one of its best selling points. However, it wasn't until Atari released the Atari 2600 in the early 1980s that videogames began to become popular worldwide.
Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pacman, Pele Soccer, Missile Command, Donkey Kong, Pitfall, Defender and Combat are all classics, and many of them have recently been revamped to appeal to the 30-something gameplayer with a taste for nostalgia. Pitfall was a personal favourite and was unusual in that there was no shooting of any kind. The Pitfall Harry character didn't have any weapons and the goal was to race in less than 20 minutes through a jungle, collecting treasures on the way. Harry had to swing from vines, leap over ponds, jump flames and avoid scorpions - among other things.
Success required 20 minutes of perfect play, and the player had to know the shortcuts to get the ultimate high score. Even a second's hesitation could ruin it. With the demise of the Atari the next "big" thing to hit the gaming world was the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Donkey Kong and Mario made their first appearances on this console and have appeared on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and more recently on the Nintendo 64. Sonic the Hedgehog on the Megadrive was Sega's answer to Nintendo's Mario and, like most videogame greats, he is still around today in Sonic Adventures on the Dreamcast.
On the PC, Wolfenstein 3D started the first-person shooter craze, Doom and Quake followed, and System Shock, Half Life, Duke Nukem and Unreal Tournament have all cemented the genre as one of the most popular. Other games that have been influential, ground-breaking or just very popular are the FIFA series, Sensible Soccer, Championship Manager, PGA Tour Golf and Links 2000. Pole Position, Grand Prix 2, Colin McCrae Rally and Gran Turismo made motor racing simulations popular.
Adventure games are unfortunately thin on the ground these days. Monkey Island was probably the first great adventure game but Grim Fandango, Day of The Tentacle, Little Big Adventure, Gabriel Knight and the Alone In The Dark trilogy were all very entertaining.
Strategy games of note are Dune, Command and Conquer, X-Com, Starcraft, Civilisation, Sim City, Dungeon Keeper, and Age of Empires from Microsoft.
In the future we will undoubtedly see more great new games, but Sonic, Mario and Lara (and their reputations) will be around for quite some time.