Video games find place in history

Video games have moved on dramatically since their early days

By CNN's Jim Boulden

LONDON, England -- What do you get when you put together a few bored students and a digital equipment computer?

A global multi-billion dollar video game industry, which is now celebrating its 40th anniversary.

At a lab in the U.S. state of Massachusetts in 1961, the students invented "Space War" -- considered to be the world's first video game.

Video game popularity since then has survived decades of criticism -- being blamed for everything from truancy to theft and violence.

VIDEO Forty years of video games Real Windows QuickTime

It has escalated with a cult-like following, with older fans treasure-hunting for relics from history.

In 1978, Space Invaders started the mainstream video game craze, being one of the first games with animated characters and state of the art sound.

Twenty-two years later, copies of Space Invaders and more simple predecessors like Atari's Pong are still coveted by gamers.

The ever-popular original Pac Man is even sought after by those who were not born when the yellow character first chomped his way across screens in the early 1980s.

Barry Morgan, of Computer Exchange in London, said though the earlier games were not as visually technical or aesthetically pleasing -- not at all like the life-like characters seen in today's video games -- the makers compensated with game creativity.

"They [early video games] are very simple. But essentially it's pure game play. It's when games didn't look that good, so they had to make up for it. They made them more playable and most varied as they could possibly be," he said.

Computer Exchange stores in Britain sell hundreds of dollars of the old games everyday to excitable customers.

Morgan said: "The screams and oohs and aahs I get when they come down here looking, staring at the cabinets, pressed up against the screens, remembering all their old machines."

The early games paved the way for people like Frontier Development's David Braben, who helped migrate games from the arcade and television realm to the newly created PC.

Braben and a fellow Cambridge University student created the computer game 'Elite' in 1982 after finding the games on the market for his BBC computer "appallingly bad and expensive."

Elite sold more than a million copies and helped Europe become the home of games developers such as Ubisoft, Infogrammes, Eidos and Lionhead.