Crash Course: Games

Welcome to Crash Course Games! In this series our host, Andre Meadows is going to discuss the history and science of games. We’re going to talk about video games of course, but also board games, role-playing games, card games, even sports!

From the ancient Egyptian game of Senet to the Aztec's Patolli, games have been played since the beginning of civilization. Today, your host Andre Meadows is going to take a look at a few of these games, including some that are actually still played today.

Over the next few episodes, we're going to talk about the history of video games. Today, we're going to start with the first re-programmable computers in the 1940s

Today, Andre is going to talk about the rise of Atari and with it the rise of the video game industry. So if you remember from the last episode, we mentioned that the first arcade machine, Galaxy Game, happened to have a coin slot, but this was just the beginning.

So last week Andre talked about Atari's role in the rise of the video game industry, but Atari wasn't the only major player in the 1970s. So we're going to step back a few years and first talk about Ralph Baer who designed the first video game console - the Magnavox Odyssey.

So the 1980s was the golden age of arcade games. Games like Donkey Kong, Pac- Man, Space Invaders, and Centipede had become a cultural phenomenon. These games had expanded the gamer demographic and even encouraged the rise of competitive gaming.