How do video games get made, and how did they grow into something that so many people play? Game development is the process of designing, prototyping, building, testing and refining a game. Games are made of smaller pieces such as 3D models, scripts and audio files, and a game engine is where all the parts of making a game come together. Game studios rely on teams of people, such as designers, programmers and artists, to make video games. Let's look at how a team tests and tunes a game, and at how games grew from small beginnings.

Let's look at where the first computer games came from. Several historically important computer games began as technology demonstrations, developed as after-hours amusements by students and technical staff. Some early computer games were made for testing or demos, and others just for fun. Spacewar!, made at MIT in the early 1960s, is one of the earliest video games for a digital computer. It was made to show off what a new computer, the PDP-1, could do. In 1970 there was no video game industry.

In 1970, video games were mostly on university and research lab computers that the public could not use. Early arcade and home console games were simple because of limits in display technology, microprocessors, other parts and memory. Early home consoles could play only a limited number of built-in games, usually Pong or a close copy of it. Magnavox put out the Odyssey in 1972, shortly before arcade Pong, after six years of work by its creator, Ralph Baer. Pong was a simple game with two paddles and a ball.

Then the arcade era began. Atari put out the arcade game Pong in 1972, and the first Pong machine, in a Sunnyvale, California, bar, stopped working because it was full of quarters. Soon after Pong came out, Atari had tens of thousands of copies in restaurants and bars across the country, and the arcade era had begun. Home Pong sold hundreds of thousands of copies and became a hot Christmas gift. Computer Space, made in 1971, was one of the earliest coin-operated arcade video games.

Next, cartridges, which were a way to play different games on a game system. In 1976, the Fairchild Channel F was the first game console to use swappable game cartridges. The Atari 2600 came out in 1977 and played games stored on cartridges, and it stayed in production for fifteen years. The Atari 2600 sold more than twenty million units in the 1980s, and more than 900 game titles came out for Atari's 8-bit consoles. Some game systems let players switch games by putting in a cartridge.

In 1983, sales of home video game systems dropped sharply. In the mid-1980s, Nintendo's NES helped turn the video game market around after a slump. Super Mario Bros. (1985) was the brainchild of Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto and had vibrant graphics, catchy music and power-ups. Tetris was first programmed in 1984, reached the West in 1987, and became a worldwide hit the next year when Nintendo packaged it with the Game Boy. Pac-Man debuted in 1980 and became a mass-culture hit, with songs, toys, comic books and TV shows.

Small changes to movement speed, timing, collisions or controls can change how a game feels. A prototype is a simple early version of a game that a team builds to see if an idea works. In an early prototype, a player character might be a floating capsule and a level an empty room. Designers have people play a game and use what they learn to change it. Different game engines suit different games: some make 2D visual novels and others suit 3D sandbox games.

Testing is its own job. A QA tester is the last line of defense between the consumer and a broken product. If a bug gets into a game that has come out, players will find it, so testers try to find bugs first. Game testers check a game for bugs and other problems while it is being made. Game testers check for bugs and other problems while the team is still making the game, and testers try to find bugs first.

Why do people play? According to the ESA's 2025 Essential Facts report, more than 205 million Americans play video games, as of December 2025. In the ESA's 2026 report, the top two reasons Americans play video games were to relax and to have fun, as of November 2026. A 2017 conference abstract said that reward schedules, operating on operant conditioning principles, may encourage excessive gameplay behavior. That is the claim of one conference abstract.

Not every game comes from a big studio. An indie game is a video game developed by an individual or independent studio, typically with greater creative and financial independence from major publishers. Easy coding tools let kids and other beginners make their own games. Scratch lets kids start with pre-drawn characters, backdrops and sounds, upload their own, or draw their own. An ESRB rating of E means the content is generally suitable for all ages, as of November 2026.

Words to know

• prototype: early version
• indie: independent
• testers: bug hunters
• cartridges: game holders
• industry: whole business