The Rise And Fall Of The Old Video Gaming Systems There have been home video games

for about 45-50 years. I remember plugging a vi deo game machine into our TV via the antenna socket; the screen went blank; you turned the console on and the screen would go green and black. In tennis mode, y ou had to move a paddle up and down your side of the screen to hit the ball back In a later version, you could challenge an opponent other than the machine and t here were other games as well, such: as shooting 'deer' in the form of small obl ongs with a gun; 'Space Invaders' and 'Break Out'. Pubs were full of the bigger video games in the early Seventies and you literally had to line up to be able t o put your 10p into the machine. We are now on the Seventh Generation of games consoles. The first of this new ge neration was Microsoft's Xbox 360 and that was soon followed by Sony's Play Stat ion 3 (or PS3) and Nintendo's Wii, all of which have proved to be highly popular . Gamers have their favourite consoles and type of game. It is astonishing though how quickly a favourite video game console may be repla ced by a better model and left to gather dust at the back on a cupboard. Three-D imensional (3D) games are already in the shops such as the latest version of Mor tal Kombat, sometimes known as Mortal Kombat 9. Mortal Kombat first came out in 1992 - 20 years ago! The first home computers for which games were programmed were Clive Sinclair's Z X80 and ZX81. They had very small memories and poor graphics, but they were very popular. However, they were soon obsolete by the Sinclair Spectrum and the Comm odore 64. These were real computers but with idiosyncratic operating systems. As the cost of chips fell, powerful, devoted gaming machines were brought out li ke the Atari 2600 and later the Atari 5200. These were dedicated gaming devices although there was also the Atari 256 and Atari 512 and later the Atari 1024 whi ch were computers that could play games. These Atari gaming consoles had the reputation for being difficult to write game s for because of their limited technology. However, they were well-liked amongst gamers in the late Seventies and early Eighties until they=y were superseded by the Atari 7800 Prosystem in June 1986. The Atari 7200 Prosystem was intended to win back market share from the set-ups of Colecovision and Intellivision The Atari 7800 was an odd hybrid, because it could be upgraded to a real home co mputer by adding chips and memory. Atari went broke not long after this and game rs were dissatisfied by the lack of games obtainable for their machine. The Atar i 7800 was soon withdrawn as a hopeless case. There have been tens of other gaming consoles, but none of them lasted long. It seems that in the Eighties and Nineties, gamers preferred to have a computer tha t also played games instead of paying a lot of money for a games console. However, the pendulum seems to have swung to the other extreme now because all t he best 7th Generation video machines will go on line and read and send email. Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on numerous topics, but is currentl y involved with <a href="http://mortalkombat4.org/mortal-kombat-trophies.html">M ortal Kombat Trophies</a>. If you have an interest in hair loss, please visit ou r website now at <a href="http://mortalkombat4.org">Mortal Kombat 4</a>.