Before we all had unlimited amounts of games on our mobile devices, Windows 98 had the iconic Solitaire game. We could waste entire days dragging and stacking those cheesy, pixellated cards all over the screen. While computer solitaire graphics have vastly improved since then, we’ve still got a nostalgic soft spot for that old game. Evan Roth brought back the iconic card game with the Solitaire.exe card deck.

The deck is a faithful pixel-by-pixel recreation of the classic Windows solitaire game, down to the sweet beach scene on the backs of the cards. Roth got special permission from Microsoft to use the immediately recognizable card faces and backs before creating the limited edition of just 500 decks. Sadly, the cards all sold out quickly – but maybe with enough demand the designer will be able to bring them back, allowing all of us to play the classic game in meatspace.

The post Digital Fun Made Physical: Windows Solitaire Cards in Real Life first appeared on Gajitz.

When we think of the very first video game, most of us think of Pong. But there were actually several video games before that iconic home entertainment system. The room-sized beast above was the very first one to ever receive a patent. Dubbed the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, it was patented in January 1947 by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. It was based on the radar systems used to control WWI missiles. Players would use the knobs on the front of the tube to adjust the trajectory and speed of a single dot on the screen which represented a missile. Every plane that the missile hit scored one point for the player – but points had to be added up by hand.

The CRT Amusement Device was never actually produced, but of course that wasn’t the end of the blossoming video game industry. The next game to make an appearance was Tennis For Two, a simple little device developed in 1958 by William Higgenbottom at the Brookhaven Lab. Today it is thought of as the granddaddy of all video games.

The world had to wait all the way until 1971 for the very first commercially available video game. Computer Space was a coin-operated game developed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who later became the founders of Atari. The game play consisted of guiding a rocket ship safely through a playing field fraught with danger from flying saucers. The game was not a huge commercial success, mostly thanks to the steep learning curve involved, but it did go down in history as a memorable part of gaming history.

The post Games That Launched a Billion Geeks: First 3 Video Games first appeared on Gajitz.