Game On Science Museum Technology In Pictures Revealed, Game On Consoles

The Game On exhibition at the Science Museum in London brings together more than 120 different Video games, spanning the entire history of gaming – from the first videogame, SpaceWar in 1962, to the Xbox 360.

The Science Museum Technology tells the history of the computer game - and gives you a chance to have a go at the games your parents (father & mother) used to play!

Development of computer gaming

This is about the history and culture & development of computer gaming. Computer Gaming has moved on loads over the last 40 years with huge improvements in graphics, sound and design.

As Science museum want to know what you think of the old classics. Perhaps you own some old consoles and enjoy the more simple game play? Or perhaps do you think the graphics in old games annoy you and put you off playing them?

How do you think they compare to the latest and greatest releases? It will be very interesting to see how kids, who are used to 3D visceral games, react to a game like Space Invaders.

The Science Museum is about presenting science, industry and technology to the public and the videogame industry is all of those things.

The exhibition has been designed to be very hands on; visitors can not only read and learn about the development of games and the milestones in game production but also get to play some of the defining titles of the last generation.

Games such as Space Invaders (1978), Elite (1984), Mario Kart (1992) and Ridge Racer (1994) can be played on formats such as the Super Nintendo system, PlayStation and original aracade machines.

Computers games are something we play every day now, we can play on our mobiles, on our PCs, viral games, handheld consoles, and even on our iPods.

Played on a computer the size of a small family car, with graphics resembling little more than a series of lines and dots, it bears only a passing resemblance to the sensory overloaded world of modern gaming.

The exhibition, sponsored by Nintendo, also examines some of the more controversial elements of computer gaming, such as whether it is bad for society, and the effect it has on the body and brain. However, it is the games that will create most excitement.

Games have had lots of cultural influences – Japan and the West have had an amazing impact culturally on gaming. Most people say that Japan has had the biggest impact on the culture of gaming – from Pacman and Donkey Kong to the PlayStation.

The internet may have revolutionised gaming, allowing thousands of players to play together at one time using three-dimensional, pixel graphics, but this is where it started.

The first commercially-marketed game "Computer Space" will be on display. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who went on to found Atari, it predated Magnavox Odyssey - the first games consul - by six months and Pong, the iconic table tennis game, by more than a year.

By the end of the 1970s, Space Invaders became perhaps the most influential game of all time, although non-space-based rivals emerged in Japan, most notably Pac-Man, created by Namco employee Toru Iwatani, and the Japanese dominated the industry in the 1980s.

The game on exhibition Science Museum also examines Communist modes of play. Just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German computer scientists developed Polyplay, a multi-game platform which included shooting, skiing and driving. The coin slot was often made free-flowing, resulting in vast crowds of youngsters forming.

According to Mr Gaetan Lee (programmes developer at the Science Museum), the Communist regime allowed coin slot because it featured deer hunting, which was much favoured by party bosses. The exhibition runs from 21 October to 25 February.

The great games

• Pong - Atari's tennis match classic was first tested in a small bar in Grass Valley, California. Within a day queues formed outside as eager players waited for it to open.



• Space Invaders - Primitive by modern standards, this adaptation of the carnival shooting gallery concept caught the zeitgeist of the post-Star Wars America.



• Donkey Kong - Nintendo's reworked version of a failing Popeye game was its big breakthrough in the arcades. Also introduced Mario.



• Poly Play - East Germany's only venture into computer gaming was a huge hit with the consumer goods-starved masses with the simulated deer-hunts and driving thrills.



• Pac-Man - Devised as an antidote to the alien invader domination of the arcades, Namco's ghost-chase game became the most popular of the 1980s, scoring a hit animation series and a chart-topping single.



• Spacewar - Devised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Model Railway Club in the early 1960s, was at the very cutting edge of technology then and spawned a multi-billion pound industry.



• Played on a computer - the size of a small family car, with graphics resembling little more than a series of lines and dots, it bears only a passing resemblance to the sensory overloaded world of modern gaming.



• The intergalactic shoot-out - Paved the way for the computer gaming revolution which gave the world "Space Invaders" and "Donkey Kong".



• The PDP-1 - Operated on a punch paper tape system with just 0.0002 gigahertz of processing power.

The Video game Microsoft Xbox 360 console system is much sleeker than the original Xbox and features a powerful 3.2-GHz processor. It is expected that Xbox 360 will contains microsoft's killer application, a first-person-shooter game called Gears of War.

The Video game Sony PlayStation 3 version 20-GB or 60-GB system is equipped with a hard drive and a Blu-ray disk drive for reading high-capacity game disks and playing Blu-ray movies.

In addition, its 3.2-GHz Cell processor makes it technically the highest-end game console on the market.

The Video game Nintendo Wii console system is equipped with a wireless motion-sensing controller, which makes it the most drastic change in user input since the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The Will Nintendo console also will let users download classic games from Nintendo and other game libraries.