A history of playing games

Spacewar! - 1962

Arguably the first video game as we know it, Spacewar! was developed by ambitious student hackers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A simple two-player battle game, it ran on a gigantic mainframe computer and was stored on reels of paper tape

Multi-User Dungeon - 1978

Created by an Essex University student, MUD let people all over the world adventure in the same game for the first time. It sowed the seeds of modern phenomena such as World of Warcraft - and entranced the engineers who developed the internet

Home Computers - 1982

Sold to parents as educational devices, computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum truly succeeded because of their early prowess as gaming systems. In the end education won out - a whole generation of kids became computer literate and went on to turn Britain into a game-development powerhouse

3-D Graphics - Mid-1990s

There was an explosion in the Nineties in the development of 3-D technology, fuelled by consumer demand for increasingly complex 3-D games. Prices tumbled and performance improved exponentially - and the knock-on effect opened up 3-D imaging to a host of medical and military applications

PlayStation - 1995

Sony's entry to the video game market precipitated a huge change not only in video games, but also in youth culture as a whole. Games escaped the schoolyard and started being promoted in nightclubs - and the new obsession with Tekken, WipEout and Final Fantasy has fuelled trends in fashion, music and cinema ever since

Nintendo DS - 1997

With its sights set firmly on new markets, Nintendo's ground-breaking handheld console featured an intuitive touch-screen interface - and a host of software designed to break out of gaming's existing congregation and provide entertainment to young and old, male and female. It worked. The diminutive system is set to sell its 100 millionth unit this year