1960s
Mainframes rule, the space race drives innovation, and integrated circuits miniaturise electronics.
1960
7 eventsAndrew Braybrook born
Paradroid, Uridium, and the diary that taught Britain how games were made
Anita Sinclair born
Pioneer of interactive fiction
Fixed-Point Maths
Fixed-point arithmetic gives 8-bit systems sub-pixel precision for smooth movement, physics, and animation—all with fast integer operations.
François Lionet born
Creator of AMOS and STOS
Richard Bartle born
Father of MUDs
Sega
From American slot machines to Japanese arcades to console wars with Nintendo, Sega's journey defined competitive gaming.
Will Wright born
Architect of simulation
1961
3 eventsKoji Kondo born
The sound of Nintendo
Yoshiki Okamoto born
Capcom's arcade visionary
Yuri Gagarin becomes first human in space
Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbits Earth aboard Vostok 1, winning a major victory in the Space Race and inspiring a generation.
1962
9 eventsCharles Cecil born
Broken Sword's creator
Emulation Techniques
Emulation techniques translate one computer architecture to another, preserving playable software when original hardware becomes scarce.
Grant Kirkhope born
Sound of Rare's N64 era
Hironobu Sakaguchi born
Final Fantasy creator
Ian Bell born
Co-creator of Elite — the quiet half of the partnership that defined the open-universe game
Jeff Minter born
Llamasoft, the llama, the camel, Tempest 2000, and forty years of one person making the same kind of game his way
Mark Ferrari born
Palette cycling master
Scott Miller born
Shareware visionary
The Game Loop
Every game runs on the same fundamental pattern: read input, update state, render graphics, repeat. Understanding the game loop is the first step to building anything interactive.
1963
3 eventsBrian Fargo born
Interplay founder
Hideo Kojima born
Metal Gear's cinematic auteur
President Kennedy assassinated
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas shocks the world and marks a turning point in American political culture.
1964
6 eventsBASIC Programming Culture
BASIC put programming within reach of ordinary people, creating a generation of developers who learned to code by typing in magazine listings.
David Braben born
Co-creator of Elite, founder of Frontier Developments, co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation
Ed Boon born
Mortal Kombat creator
Julian Rignall born
From ZZAP! to IGN
Manami Matsumae born
Voice of Mega Man
Ron Gilbert born
Father of the adventure game verb
1965
7 events1966
12 eventsASCII Art
ASCII art creates images using text characters, from simple emoticons to elaborate scenes that adorned BBS systems, demos, and NFO files.
Ben Daglish born
Melody maker of the SID scene
Graeme Devine born
7th Guest creator
Jez San born
3D pioneer
Ken Sugimori born
Pokémon's artist
Koji Igarashi born
Master of the castle
Mark Sibly born
Blitz Basic creator
Martin Galway born
The SID chip's orchestrator
Matt Furniss born
Sega sound specialist
Matthew Smith born
The teenager who wrote Manic Miner — and what happened next
Neil Baldwin born
NES audio innovator
The Darling Brothers born
Codemasters founders
1967
10 eventsDavid Perry born
Earthworm Jim creator
David Simons born
Simons' BASIC creator
David Wise born
Rare's musical soul
Eric Schwartz born
Amiga animator
Jonathan Dunn born
Ocean's musical voice
Raffaele Cecco born
The artist-programmer behind Cybernoid, Exolon, and Stormlord
Run-Length Encoding
Run-length encoding compressed data by storing repeated values as count-value pairs, dramatically reducing storage for graphics with large uniform areas.
Tecmo
Tecmo developed challenging action games and the Dead or Alive fighting series before merging with Koei to form Koei Tecmo Holdings.
Tim Schafer born
Adventure game auteur
Yuzo Koshiro born
Techno warrior of the Mega Drive
1968
7 eventsChris Hülsbeck born
Germany's game music maestro
Chris Roberts born
Wing Commander creator
Henk Nieborg born
Amiga art excellence
Marshall Cavendish
British publisher whose part-work magazines including Input taught computing to a generation through weekly collectible issues.
Mike Dailly born
Lemmings co-creator
Tim Follin born
The composer who made the beeper sing prog rock
Tobias Richter born
From Amiga to Hollywood
1969
5 eventsJohn Tobias born
Mortal Kombat artist
Konami
Japanese arcade pioneer Konami created Frogger, Gradius, and Castlevania, plus gaming's most famous cheat code.
MOS Technology
MOS Technology created the 6502 processor and the engineers who designed the SID and VIC-II—the silicon heart of the Commodore 64.
The Oliver Twins born
Philip and Andrew Oliver — the teenagers behind Dizzy
Apollo 11 Moon landing
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon, watched by an estimated 600 million people worldwide.