Sega and Nintendo pushed each other to further innovate in video games. Going from all cartridge based systems to looking at putting games onto discs. This is how Sony entered the video game landscape. Sony had plans to develop a CD based add on for the SNES called the “Nintendo PlayStation”, but Nintendo and Sony couldn’t come to terms they both agreed to on the business end and instead Nintendo partnered with Phillips to develop games for what would become the Philips CD-i.

The next few years were slow for video games. It seemed that gamers at the time were fed up with games that had no oversight and no quality and turned to other hobbies. That was until 1986. A small Japanese company named Nintendo that had primarily been known for making playing cards for almost 100 years had created a home video game console of their own.

We know a little about the life and times of William Higinbotham, but what came next? “Tennis for Two” was a neat little novelty, but where could the medium go after that and how can it be monetized to bring this novelty to the mass market and into homes?

Video games as we know them have now existed for over 50 years. It’s a well known fact that the release of the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972, the first majorly available home video game console, started a cultural phenomenon that has yet to be extinguished (with a notable exception in the 1980’s but that is a topic for another day). But there is a lesser known fact about gaming that many seem to gloss over. Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell may claim to be the fathers of gaming and in almost all aspects they are correct, but there was one man who came before them that gets less credit than he deserves for his contribution to the gaming sphere. In order to tell this story correctly we have to go back to World War 2 and the development of the Atomic Bomb.