Tag Archives: video game industry

Today in Gaming History: 11/3/13

Today_in_Gaming_History

November 3, 1962: Happy birthday Gabe Newell! 
The ubiquitous presence with the games industry of Valve CEO Gabe Newell wasn’t always so ubiquitous. Newell, however, got a very fortuitous start with Microsoft, where he worked on at least a few Windows releases. Newell raked in some serious cash at Microsoft, so is wasn’t as if he started Valve on mere pennies. He and one if his co-workers, Thomas Harrington, did, however invest what they could into Valve in 1996 and its first release, a little game you might have heard of called Half-Life.

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Things are so different than the were 30 years ago…or are they?

Image by inju: https://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/
Image by inju: https://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/

Though we’re just a few months into 2013, it’s already shaping up to be quite a year for gaming. As we now look to the next generation of consoles, established companies have disappeared (THQ, LucasArts) or met with financial strain (Atari). A plethora of new sequels and new IPs have promised (and, in some cases delivered) nothing less than sheer gaming ecstasy. And new technologies continue to push the boundaries between gaming and reality, forcing the question “what is a video game?”

But 2013 also marks something else a little less spectacular (or just a spectacular, depending on your point of view) — the 30th anniversary of the video game crash of 1983. It was kind of a big deal then. And now that we’re in a time of gaming overabundance, I can’t help but ponder a few parallels.

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