Games / Sports / Simulations Timeline Outline

The First Olympic Games
(776 BCE)

Playing Cards: One of the Earliest Forms of Block Printing
(1007 – 1072)

The Earliest References to Playing Cards in Europe
(1377)

Printing Playing Cards
(1418)

Card Printing in Venice Has Outside Competition
(1441)

The Earliest Work Printed in England to Contain Color Printing
(1486)

The First Automaton to Simulate Biological Processes
(1739 – 1742)

The First Printed Book Specifically for the Amusement of Children: No Copies of the First Edition Survive
(June 18, 1744)

The Chess-Playing Turk
(1769)

The First Successful Speech Synthesizer
(1791)

Invention of the Two-Wheeled Bicycle- the First Personalized Mechanical Transport
(June 12, 1817)

The First Book on Baseball
(1859)

The First Compilation of Baseball Statistics
(1860)

The Invention of "Basket Ball" (Basketball)
(December 1891)

The First Decision-Making Automaton
(1912 – 1915)

The Minimax Theorem
(1928)

The First Flight Simulator
(1929)

The First Electronic Speech Synthesizer
(1936 – 1939)

Project Whirlwind Begins
(1943)

The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
(1944)

Probably the Oldest Interactive Electronic Game
(1947)

Cybernetics: The First Widely Distributed Book on Electronic Computing
(1948)

The First Weather Forecast by Electronic Computer
(1950)

The First Technical Paper on Computer Chess
(March 1950)

One of the Earliest Computer Games
(February – October 1951)

The First Graphical Computer Game
(1952)

The First Video Game
(1958)

Game Tree Pruning
(October 1958)

Machines Can Learn from Past Errors
(July 1959)

Spacewar, the First Computer Game for a Commercially Available Computer
(1962)

The First CAD Program
(December 1962)

The First Graphical User Interface
(1963)

Programming Language for Education and Games
(1965 – 1969)

First Virtual Reality Head Mounted Display System
(1968)

Commercializing the Use of Computers as Simulators
(1968)

The Earliest Coin-Operated Computer or Video Game
(September 1971)

The First Commercially Sold Coin-Operated Video Game
(November 1971)

The First Home Video Game Console
(May 24, 1972)

Pong: The First Successful Computer Game
(June 27, 1972)

SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums
(December 7, 1972)

The First Networked 3D Multi-User First Person Shooter Game
(1973 – 1974)

The First Computer Role-Playing Game, Dungeons & Dragons
(1974 – 1975)

The Roots of the PostScript Page Description Language
(1975 – 1978)

The First Computer Text Adventure Game
(1975 – 1976)

The Warez Scene
(Circa 1975)

Home Pong
(1975)

First Successful Video Game Console Using Plug-in Cartridges
(1977)

First Multi-Player Computer Games
(1977)

Zork
(1977 – 1979)

The First Hand-Held Entirely Digital Electronic Game
(1977)

The First Graphical Computer Adventure Game
(1979 – 1980)

The First Flight Simulator Program for a Personal Computer
(January 1980)

Pac-Man is Introduced
(May 22, 1980)

The First Cheap Home Computer
(August 1982)

Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0
(November 1982)

"Dial-a-Game": the Earliest Origins of America Online (AOL)
(1983)

Avatar in the Context of Online Representation of a User
(1985)

Nintendo's Super Mario Bros.
(1985)

Kasparov Defeats 32 Different Chess Computers
(1985)

The First Computer Games Developers Conference
(1988)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is Founded
(1990)

Chinook, a Computer Checkers Program, Defeats the Human World Checkers Champion
(1994)

Steve Jackson Games v. U.S. Secret Service
(October 31, 1994)

PlayStation
(December 3, 1994)

IBM Deep Blue Defeats Gary Kasparov
(May 11, 1997)

Where's George?
(December 23, 1998)

Xbox
(November 15, 2001)

Machinima
(2002)

Grand Text Auto
(May 2003 – May 2009)

Over 102 Million Units Shipped
(March 31, 2005)

"The Greatest 200 Videogames of Their Time"
(February 2, 2006)

The "Cyber Storm" War Game
(February 6 – February 10, 2006)

Checkers is "Solved"
(April 29, 2007)

Game-Based Learning for Virtual Patients
(March 2008)

Cyber Storm II
(March 10 – March 14, 2008)

Towards the Open Advancement of Question Answering Systems
(April 22, 2009)

IBM's Watson Question Answering System Challenges Humans at Jeopardy
(April 27, 2009)

Employment in the Field of Simulation
(June 14, 2009)

"Whatever Happened to Second Life?"
(January 4, 2010)

"The World's First Full-Size Robotic Girlfriend"
(January 9, 2010)

Kinect for Xbox
(November 4, 2010)

IBM's Watson Question Answering System Defeats Humans at Jeopardy!
(February 14 – February 16, 2011)

Texting During the Climb up El Capitan in Yosemite
(November 2011)

The Youngest Person to Create a Mobil Game App
(January 17, 2013)