Consolidated Devices, Inc. history

In 1973, Jim Bowery released Spasim for PLATO — a 32-player space shooter — which is regarded as the first example of a 3D multiplayer game.

It wasn't just watching from the sidelines, it had secured the rights to distribute Magnavox's Odyssey system in Japan during 1974.

Technological advancements, such as Intel’s invention of the world’s first microprocessor, led to the creation of games such as Gunfight in 1975, the first example of a multiplayer human-to-human combat shooter.

The creator and designer of Space Invaders, Nishikado, under the game developer, Taito, has cited Atari's popular 1976 game Breakout as inspiration for Space Invaders.

By 1977, Atari had gained enough of a name through Pong to be able to take back their Home Pong system and sell it under their own brand.

Four-star programmers left the company in 1978 to begin the competing ActiVision, which Atari tried (unsuccessfully) to sue.

Emboldened by this win, Nintendo then began manufacturing colourful little consoles of its own, the first of which was the Nintendo Color TV Game Series, beginning with the Color TV Game 6, with three more to come by 1979.

The integration of the microprocessor also led to the release of Space Invaders for the Atari VCS in 1980, signifying a new era of gaming — and sales: Atari 2600 sales shot up to 2 million units in 1980.

William von Meister unveiled groundbreaking modem-transfer technology for the Atari 2600 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 1982.

Too many gaming consoles, and too few interesting, engaging new games to play on them, eventually led to the 1983 North American video games crash, which saw huge losses, and truckloads of unpopular, poor-quality titles buried in the desert just to get rid of them.

The popularity and heft of Nintendo's new console was necessary because it allowed the brand to go head-to-head with the SEGA Master System, launched later in 1986.

In 1987, MidiMaze was released on the Atari ST and included a function by which up to 16 consoles could be linked by connecting one computer’s MIDI-OUT port to the next computer’s MIDI-IN port.

By the time it was out of production in 1992, it had only managed to sell 1.5 million to 2 million units in the United States — but its games were still unsung heroes.

Multiplayer gaming over networks really took off with the release of Pathway to Darkness in 1993, and the “LAN Party” was born.

In 1995 Nintendo released Satellaview, a satellite modem peripheral for Nintendo’s Super Famicom console.

Dark black, beautifully thin and incredibly compact, the PS2, as it would come to be known, sold over 70 million consoles by the year 2000.

The release of Runescape in 2001 was a game changer.

Since smartphones and app stores hit the market in 2007, gaming has undergone yet another rapid evolution that has changed not only the way people play games, but also brought gaming into the mainstream pop culture in a way never before seen.

In 2013, for example, Square-Enix began work on a subdivision of gaming known as "Shinra", a company dedicated to gaming using "super computers" or cloud gaming.

According to the ESA Computer and video games industry report for 2015, at least 1.5 billion people with Internet access play video games.

So popular was the PS1 that the creators released a ‘PlayStation Classic’ reboot in 2018 with 20 of the most loved games pre-loaded.