November 22, 2007

It is Thanksgiving in America today. For all of you foreigners not in the know, it's the anniversary of the first time in which the pilgrims and the Native Americans ate together. The Native Americans saved the pilgrims from starvation, so the whole holiday is about giving thanks. What should gamers be thankful for? I'll list a few of the many answers right here.

- Ralph Baer's creation of the Oddyssey (the first gaming console.) This sparked Atari, and they stole the legal rights to Baer's tennis game. Britannica even says that Atari created video games. As you probably know, Pong was the first successful video game.

- Nintendo's launch of the NES first in NYC, and then in the whole United States. This saved the industry from the crash that happened not too much earlier. The cause of the crash was a plethora of crap games released on the Atari 2600. The worst of these was E.T. You wouldn't be reading any of this now if it wasn't for Nintendo.

- The release of the Sega Genesis. Nintendo was almost a monopoly until Sega got a head start in technology with this little black box. This pushed Nintendo to become even greater. This also leads to my next and final listing.