🎮 When is National Video Game Day 2024

People love playing games. They adore this activity like Alice from Wonderland does, “to imagine you as a king or a queen” and forget about problems, routine, and real life. So, computer games just complemented this aspect as it doesn’t matter what to play.

Well, for last four decades computer games spread and infected the whole world so much that nowadays we cannot imagine our life without it. Despite the fact the first video-games cost very expensive and only real programmers could afford it, today we can see hundreds of thousands of games spread everywhere. Well, let’s get down to business and discover when National Video Game Day in 2024 is?

National Video Game Day is held every year on 12th of September and is organized to emphasize such discovery in our modern life as computer games. To honor the first guys who made an exploration and filled our lives with colors the day was founded.

History

Well, if we want to get instantly what day National Video Game Day is, we should imbue with the history of the day.

In the distant 1961 in the Massachusetts Technological (the famous MIT) on one of the mainframes a computer game called Space War for the first time was born. This event remained virtually unknown to anyone since computers of those times were a bit expensive to play on them. But, of course, it did not stop the real programmers working for them, to make games for themselves and play it.

The famous Space War was very curious from the technological point of view: at that time there were not yet usual raster graphic displays, only text terminals and, as the top of graphical capabilities, vector graphic displays, where the electron beam on each frame does not run in rows, and directly draws the programmed object paths.

The essence of the progenitor game was very simple: two small ships fly on the screen and shot each other with shells. So the first genre in the world is, of course, an arcade.

The name “arcade”, incidentally, comes from an architectural detail, such a covered corridor, where the slot machines were traditionally located, which were to be born almost exactly ten years after Space War appeared.

In 1971, Nolan Bushnell created and began selling the first commercial arcade game: Computer Space. At the heart of it is the same Space War, the same vector graphics, the same plot, but instead of a supercomputer – quite an intelligent and almost affordable iron box.

Alas, it is not easy to be a pioneer, and the first attempt, as it often happens, failed. It seems that the market was not yet ready for such a complex game.

But Nolan did not give up, he renamed the company to Atari (the name comes from one of the moves in the table game) and in 1972 released an epoch-making game that began the era of commercial games. The famous Pong, a simple arcade where two plates run by two people or a man and a computer, beating the ball, trying to keep it on the playing field, made so much noise that almost every self-respecting player still sighs reverently at the mention of its name.

Further – less epoch-making, but well-known Odyssey, released by Magnavox, and Tank by Kee (by the way, the first game where ROM was used for the first time with the program).

The end of the almost undivided rule of arcades finished in the mid-seventies: a group of developers led by William Crowder developed the game Adventure, the first textual version, setting the genre of the adventure game.

In 1976, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications for twenty-six million dollars, and it focused on the home market, something like modern consoles, but with a single game.

And then the others came: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak came up with Breakout, which is better known today in the game of the company Taito as Arkanoid.

A year later, in 1977, Atari released 2600 VCS, the first game console with several games. Its technical characteristics at the present time can cause only a smile, but at that time two kilobytes of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM were ample enough to provide considerable commercial success.

And then everything went with incredible speed, like an avalanche on the mountainside. In 1977, Apple began selling Apple II, in 1978 the famous game Space Invaders was born in the same Japanese firm Taito, and in 1979 developers from Atari founded the company Activision. At the same time appeared Atari 800, where for the first time an eight-bit processor was used.

The eighties very quickly showed that the time of computer games has come seriously and for a long time. Phillips, connecting to the general race, creates Odyssey-2, Mattel releases Intellivision, albeit with better graphics, but a very eerie control device. Namco invents a game that has survived to this day with virtually no changes: the great Pac-Man, and to this day is regularly implemented on different platforms and in different forms.

The industry in those years safely took a major line: more than one billion dollars (and if you count this figure for up-to-date exchange course, it will be about two and a half billion). About 300,000 consoles and slot machines were sold.

Atari did not stop and continued inventing Asteroids, and other genres were involved: in adventure games, a classic text quest by Infocom called Zork (later developed into series) was born, and the first game of the Ultima series was released in the same 1980.

And the next year the boom reached an unimaginable extent. Sales of more than six billion dollars and dozens of games: Donkey Kong from Nintendo, Galaxian, Centipede, Tempest, sister of Pac-Man’s named Ms.Pac-Man.

Meaning

Knowing what National Video Game Day means will undoubtedly facilitate all the details and traditions. So, when National Video Game Day is held, the main target is to gather your friends and relatives and dive into the life or virtual reality playing different joint video games both on consoles and PC. Also, you can get old consoles and show the first video games to the new gamers’ generation or friends if they haven’t seen it.

Definition

What is the date of National Video Game Day 2024? The calendar has supervised us with this topic and we can change for another.

The holiday means you should recollect all the old games and shake your antiquity by completing all of the time during the day. On this day, many video games festivals are held and you are completely free to visit them in order to get positive emotions, feelings, and memories.

Traditions

Generally speaking, each country has its own traditions in celebrating and you should navigate yourself depending on the country you are in.

The newest traditions of the Day:

1. To gather with friends, families, colleagues in video game establishments and take a bit of your favorite game.
2. Play as much as possible and don’t be aware of the dependence on this day.
3. Holding games quizzes and competitions. The most famous multiplayer video games are Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Call of Duty, Battlefield etc. You should taste a bit of each one.

Video Game Day Facts

1. In many games, developers accidentally put their names. For example, in Half-Life 2 the names of the developers are indicated in the locker rooms, in Fable the Lost Chapters the name of the company director is immortalized on the tombstone. And there are a lot of such games.
2. Currently, such genre as escape gains popularity. Escape from imprisonment or escape from the evil pursuer is the goal of the game escape. You need to be observant and savvy to play such games.
3. The very first video game was made in 1961 by student Steve Russell. It was called Space Wars.
4. The Sims was one of the top-selling UK games for two years.
5. According to the research from the Entertainment Software Association, the average age of a person playing computer games is 33 years.

So, let your wishes connect to the traditions of the day and do not forget to stop before the dependence has come to your mind.