The latter part of the 1980s and early 1990s saw video games driven by improvements and standardization in personal computers, and the console war competition between Nintendo and Sega as they fought for market share in the United States. Nintendo released its Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States and other Western markets in 1985, helping to rebound the failing video games sector. The crash set the stage for Japan's video game industry to take leadership of the market, which had only suffered minor impacts from the crash. A major crash of the United States home video game market occurred in 1983 as the market was flooded by too many poor-quality games, consumers lost confidence in the major companies involved, and the sector saw competition from inexpensive personal computers and new types of games being developed for them. Coupled with rapid growth in a golden age of arcade video games with titles such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man, the home console market also flourished. Numerous companies sprang up to capture Pong 's success in both the arcade and the home by creating clones of the game, causing a market contraction in 1978 due to oversaturation and lack of innovation.īy the mid-1970s, low-cost programmable microprocessors replaced the discrete transistor–transistor logic circuitry of the early hardware, and the first ROM cartridge-based home consoles arrived, including the Atari Video Computer System (VCS). The early 1970s brought the first consumer-ready video game hardware: the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, and the first arcade video games from Atari, Computer Space and Pong, the latter which was later made into a home console version. The history of video games began in the 1950s and 1960s as computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations on mainframe computers, with MIT's Spacewar! in 1962 as one of the first such games to be played with a video display.