10 Video Game History Facts That'll BLOW YOUR MIND

“They just made what they thought would be fun.” It says so much that this idea sounds revolutionary.

My guy, Wozniak wasn't just "the other Apple guy" - he WAS Apple. Jobs was just the money man who gathered the initial investors and even then not only ripped Woz off by pocketing most of those initial money but bounced on the company shortly after the intro of the OG Mac in the 80's and stayed gone until the turn of the millenium. Woz designed, built and assembled all the OG hardware when Apple was just a startup. Jobs had no technical background and glommed on to Woz, just like Musk did with Thiel and co for Paypal.

Ultima 7 throwing shade at EA is the kind of passive-aggressive energy I aspire to have in my life. Next time I'm mad at someone, I'm just gonna develop a whole game about it. 🎮😂

7:35 - OK, the causality is a bit backwards here: games were designed in graph paper back then because displays buffers were tile-based in the 8-bit era for the most part. You can substitute "tile" for "character" too. And even machines that used bitmaps arranged those bitmaps in such a way as to make rendering 8x8 characters to the screen easy. Graph paper is a natural medium for design when when this is the case.

The CD-ROM consoles of the 90s contain more history than some textbooks. I'd love to see you guys do a whole video on that age of the console wars.

Funny thing about the scratch and sniff discs, the GT2 one of which i owned; i actually later worked in a department that used that same technology for fragrance. Known as microencapsulation, it's basically perfume inside timy polymer beads that rupture under pressure. Didn't realise it was UK only though.

I just love it that the 1989 Master System is still offically sold and produced in Brazil as of 2021/2023.

I vaguely remember learning in school how to program pictures on a computer, translated from graph paper. This was 35 years ago or so. Haven't thought of that in awhile. It was TEDIOUS. Hard to imagine people creating whole games that way.

Man.. if they hated EA 30 years ago, what would they say now??

It's not about releasing videos everyday but it's about how you guys manage to keep it fresh everyday. My favorite gaming channel for a reason❤

Fun, I flipped through a Tomb Raider IV guide book, an actual book with like 200 pages with hundreds of color photos today. Now TR IV is not from the 80s but I did wonder how they managed to capture the screenshots. They are printed small but they look really good. Maybe Windows had tools already, maybe they had to come up with something. Printed guides from that time are crazy anyway. So much effort. Reminds me of how I recorded the music of video games by setting up a microphone in front of the speaker. I later figured out a way to patch the audio cable into a tape recorder and then forward it to the TV so I could listen to it while recording but... yeah I was obsessed with some games.

Bro that dolphin story...I had to do a report on it in college. Ugh, I didn't think that memory would resurface from a Gameranx video.

The groundbreaking puzzle game Myst was created in the early 1990s using HyperCard, “virtual Rolodex” software that ran on Macintosh. The game was made entirely by two people - Rand and Robyn Miller. That’s pretty mind blowing!

scratch and sniff aside, does anyone miss game manuals? did anyone read the old manual for doom 1, it had a sweet short story about the origin of doom guy. he was a engineer that was told to wait on the dropship while marines went in and when they all died he had to fight his way to another ship to leave.

How are you pronouncing Wozniak? What?

Please do a part 2. Really cool facts about gaming history

When Tetris was created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a software engineer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, it was originally designed as a test for new hardware rather than as a commercial product. Pajitnov created Tetris on an Electronika 60, a Soviet computer that lacked the graphical power of its Western counterparts, meaning the original game didn’t even have the colorful blocks we associate with Tetris today. Instead, it used brackets to represent the Tetris pieces. The game was later ported to the IBM PC by Vadim Gerasimov, a 16-year-old high school student working with Pajitnov, and it was this version that started to spread around the world, leading to its eventual global success.

For my computer science project in the 80s I had my friend who was an amateur photographer take pictures of all the screens for my dissertation. Most people didn’t do that, so their write-ups were full of mock-ups of what the software looked like rather than actual screens. I got top marks and I think at least some of that was because I found a way to take a screenshot!

if you think the scratch and sniff disc was odd, you should have seen what Sierra did with their Larry Laffer 7 game love for sail (arguably the last Larry Laffer game that was worth playing excluding the remakes). Each game was packaged with a card with 9 numbered tiles (no bigger than than the CD case itself). Whenever you entered a room in the game, a voice would announce "Cyber Sniff 2000" and the the appropriate number on the card would flash in screen.... You could then scratch it to get a whiff of what the room smelled like. And in a game where one of the challenges was to score a perfect score in a veeeeeeeeeeery particular activity of the horizontal type .... well.... you can see where a sniff card could go ....places.

Dude, Virtual cop. Just brought back OLD memories of my brother and I at the arcade.