10 Reasons To Love America

8. Video Games

I know what you€™re thinking €“ don€™t video games come from Japan? Many of the best ones do. Nintendo is a Japanese company and many of the classic franchises launched on the Nintendo Entertainment System were developed by Japanese designers, including Nintendo€™s own Mario games and Legend of Zelda, Capcom€™s Mega Man and Street Fighter and countless others. But as with most great inventions in modern history, the origin of video games is multinational. The very earliest successful video games were developed by American designers for American companies like Atari. Like so much post-War technology, video games originated in the military. The earliest interactive light displays on a screen were based on radar systems and eventually gave birth to American games like Pong, growing increasingly complex from there to Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Today, American developers like Naughty Dog and Blizzard Entertainment dominate much of the video game market. The difference between Atari€™s simplistic, three-light Pong and Naughty Dog€™s recently released cinematic masterpiece Last of Us is so vast it€™s hard to imagine they're even considered in the same family of technology. But the prominence of video games in American culture since the 1970s and their development from short, graphically unimpressive games on massive arcade cabinets to epic, interactive movies on tiny discs is an important part of our story. Americans of a certain age can all tell you where the first Warp Whistle is in Super Mario Bros. 3. Many can describe in rich detail their memories of their first time playing through Ocarina of Time. New games continue to provide a shared heritage for generations of children to come. Video games provide early encounters with story and are often amazingly scored, fostering an early interest in music. They provoke the imagination and develop early hand-eye coordination. Whoever it is that€™s making them, video games are an adored aspect of American life.