In 1978, Atari Football was released, representing an important advance in sports simulation. In the wake of Pong, many new types of arcade games proliferated in the mid-to-late 1970s, including sports games. Pong was an extremely simple game in terms of both graphics and gameplay, but it was also entertaining and addictive enough to become the first runaway hit in the video game field. It was, in fact, another game inspired by tennis (through tennis’s cousin ping-pong) that launched the video game industry. Not until the advent of arcade games in the 1970s did sports simulators become widespread. Only one version of the game was created, however, and it remained relatively unknown in its own time.

In 1958, an American physicist named William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope. The first sport to be translated into video game form was tennis.

Popular sports provided a ready-made subject for video games, since players would typically already know the rules and have some experience playing the flesh-and-blood version of the game. Sports simulations have existed since the earliest days of electronic gaming. Due to the nature of the sports on which they are based, sports simulations are often intended to be played by multiple players competing against one another, though many single-player sports simulations also exist in which the player competes against computer-controlled opponents or the clock.īecause the field of sports simulation is so diverse, only a brief sketch of the genre’s history is offered here. These include team sports such as baseball, basketball, and football, as well as a wide variety of other sports such as tennis, track and field, hunting, racing, bowling, rowing, and many more. A sports simulation is a video game modeled on a real-life sport.

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