Video Game History - The Beginning

By Teddy Peterson on January 15th, 2007

Japanese video games plays crucial role in this billion dollar gaming industry. But ironically video games did not originally come from the land of the rising sun! The first of the kind of consoles were American brands like Atari and Coleco. Brands like Managa are quite popular but they are still lagging behind some Japanese brands and game titles. It is also funny to know that while games hit pretty deep inside the American market but the Japanese movies and music rarely come even close to the American masses.

Initially as with every Japanese product, the Japanese video game titles were in existence and quite popular, but within Japan. They never really came out of the boundaries of the Japanese arcades. Then a US based company bought them and brought the product to America. After that while the gaming industry crashed in Americas, the Japanese were forming new companies like Nintendo. These were the people who were passionate about games and create new standards of video gaming and hence they release many titles and the video game systems called Famicom with an American alias, NES. With the help of this system and the game the markets were reignited and again started flourishing with new video game consoles.

There was one period where all of the gaming titles were created by the Japanese companies. All of the game creator companies were using and creating Japanese systems and selling them. Companies like Nintendo were one of the major players and was dominating the gaming market. Whereas, the other gaming companies were still reluctant to enter the American market.

It was an era of Japanese products floating all over the world market including America. The worries of American Economists increased, when it was flooded with Japanese Consumer Electronics, Japanese Motorcycles, and Cars and of course, Japanese Video Games. Although most consumer didn’t even aware that these games were actually made in Japan. These game freaks just wanted their favorite games to be playable on their Japanese systems. Statistics revealed any of the non-Japanese systems made it to consumer better except Microsoft’s X-Box.

No matter what, the Japanese had made their permanent place in the video game industry. At present many American companies have also made their mark in the American market and have acquired almost 50% of the market. But the land where the Mario was born still carries its love and reputation in our hearts!

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