A Closer Look at Gaming: Interactive Video Entertainment

Video gaming is one of the biggest money-making industries in the world today. It evolved over the last few decades, when it was realized that the public wanted a computer that would cater solely to the processing of games alone. This is when video gaming consoles began to sprout from different companies.

A video game console is a computer that allows entertainment to be interactive. This means that people who use these computers are free to control characters within the games themselves. The very first gaming console to reach the market was called the Magnavox Odyssey. It wasn't a successful product until the gaming company Atari released a game called Pong that took the world by storm. Since the game was so popular, Magnavox created a console that only played Pong. It was called the Odyssey 100. This was the start of a video game revolution that had consumers flocking to the supermarkets to buy their very own gaming systems.

Future efforts in Japan brought the gaming console market to another level. In 1983, Nintendo released the Famicom which supported color gaming and high resolution graphics for its time. The games were longer and had better detailed graphics. It was release in the US as the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) and was marketed as a toy since the gaming industry was not doing so well at the time. Soon, it became a hit, especially with the release of the breakthrough game Super Mario Brothers.

All sorts of gaming consoles then started to see the mainstream gaming market. They were released by companies like Sega, Atari and 3DO. But it wasn't until the release of Sony's Playstation that the industry started looking at gaming as a hardcore business opportunity. The fifth-generation gaming console took graphics and sound to a level never before imagined by its competitors. It hailed in the use of CDs, unlike the Nintendo 64 which was still in the cartridge phase. One important factor was that it was cheaper.

As the years passed, more consoles started to see the light of day and some of the older companies dropped out of the race, focusing their attention more on the development of games. Sega's last release was the Dreamcast. The three main players that survive until today are Sony, Nintendo, and fairly new to the gaming market, Microsoft. They have currently each released some of the best gaming consoles ever such as the Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii (pronounced 'wee') and the Xbox 360. These consoles have brought the gaming experience to a totally new level, offering graphics that are almost as real as life itself.

Each new generation of gaming console offers a greater technology than the last. The machines today also serve other purposes. They can be used to play movies in DVD formats and also can be used to access the Internet for a new phenomenon known as Network gaming that allows people from around the world to play the same game simultaneously and against each other.