From two paddles to millions of taps: the history of games

This lesson has one main idea, and I'll tell you right away so you can test it against each story: every time games took a step towards simplicity, their audience grew exponentially. Below are five stories — five such steps. See if it holds true.

The bar, the arcade machine, and two paddles

1972, California. A young company, Atari, gave engineer Allan Alcorn a training task: create the simplest tennis game. Two white paddles, a dot for a ball, a score at the top — and Pong was born. They put the machine in Andy Capp's Tavern, and a few days later, the owner called: the machine was broken. According to Atari's founders, the breakdown was a pleasant one — the coin slot was overflowing with quarters. People lined up to play a game whose only rule fit on a single line on the cabinet: don't miss the ball. This arcade machine is often considered the start of the video game industry.

A puzzle from a work computer

1984. Mathematician Alexey Pajitnov, an employee at an academic computing center, spent his free hours creating a puzzle game about falling four-square figures — Tetris. The "Elektronika-60" work computer couldn't display graphics, so the figures had to be made from square brackets — the game was literally born from text. It then spread through offices on floppy disks, crossed borders, survived a complicated rights battle, and in 1989 became the flagship game for the Game Boy handheld console. No plot, no characters, not even an end — yet it was impossible to put down. Notice: both Pong and Tetris were made by one person, and both almost by accident.

Consoles: games come to the living room

The next step: from arcade halls to homes. In the 1980s, Nintendo consoles with Mario and that very Game Boy with Tetris transformed gaming from a trip to a special place into an evening on the couch. Families started playing: kids, parents, guests. The audience grew again, simply because the "you have to go somewhere" barrier disappeared.

Phones: everyone becomes a player

In 2008, the App Store — the app store for iPhone — opened, and the mobile revolution happened. Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, Cut the Rope: games you master in ten seconds because the controls are just one finger. The main change, once again, was in the audience. Everyone already had a phone in their pocket, and people who would never call themselves gamers became players: in line, on public transport, in the kitchen while soup was cooking. You buy a console for games — but a phone is already bought for everything else, and games came as a free bonus.

Hyper-casual and tap games

The "simpler means wider" logic reached its peak in two genres. The first is hyper-casual: games you understand before the first touch, like "jump to the beat" or "stretch the rope." The second is tap games. In 2024, Hamster Kombat exploded within Telegram: a game where you tap a hamster and watch numbers grow. According to press reports, that summer it was written about as a game with hundreds of millions of launches. You could argue if it's even a game — but from the perspective of our lesson, the phenomenon is clear: the mechanic is described by one word, "tap," and the barrier to entry has completely disappeared.

What this means for you

You're entering an industry where the biggest breakthroughs came from the simplest mechanics, often put together by one person: Pong was made by one engineer, Tetris by one mathematician. But you have a helper that neither Alcorn nor Pajitnov had — AI, which will handle the code and graphics. Your first game from Module 2 will be of the same breed as the heroes of this lesson: small, understandable at first glance, explainable in one phrase. The history of the industry suggests this is a worthy breed. The only question left is money — how much do such simple games earn — and the next lesson is entirely dedicated to that.

Do this now

Ask the oldest person you can reach today what their first video game was — and write down the answer. Then ask yourself the same question. Almost certainly, both games will be simple, and both will be remembered for decades — with their sounds, places, and people around them. Keep this observation in mind: simple things stick. In the next lesson, we'll check if simple things can also make money.