Crash Course Games

Welcome to Crash Course Games! In this series our host Andre Meadows is going to discuss the history and science of games. We’re going to talk about video games of course, but also...

From the ancient Egyptian game of Senet to the Aztec’s Patolli, games have been played since the beginning of civilization. Today, your host Andre Meadows is going to take a look a...

Over the next few episodes we’re going to talk about the history of video games. Today, we’re going to start with the first re-programmable computers in the 1940’s. Now, these comp...

Nolan Bushnell, often considered the Father of the Video Game Industry, saw the opportunity for the commercialization of video games. Bushnell founded Atari and oversaw the develop...

So last week Andre talked about Atari’s role in the rise of the video game industry, but Atari wasn’t the only major player in the 1970s. So we’re going to step back a few years an...

So the 1980s was the golden age of arcade games. Games like Donkey Kong, Pac- Man, Space Invaders, and Centipede had become a cultural phenomenon. These games had expanded the game...

Even though the video game market had collapsed in the United States, demand for video games remained strong in Europe and Asia. Nintendo of Japan, originally a playing card compan...

So we ended the last episode nearing the close of the 1980s and Nintendo had become the dominant player in the home console market, but Sega, originally a slot machine game company...

In 1994, Sony introduced their Playstation console which successfully coupled cutting edge technologies with some great games. But Nintendo and Sega weren’t just sitting around. In...

Today, we wrap up our discussion of the console wars by taking a look at Microsoft’s Xbox which was announced in 2001. The early 2000s saw a lot of innovation in hardware and games...