Today is National Video Games Day, a day for gaming communities to come together and look back at the history of gaming while playing together and even pocketing some fun free goodies.
National Video Game Day is July 8 and National Video Games Day is September 12, wiith both days dedicated to video games as a hobby, career, and community interest. While everyone can celebrate video games in their own way, the most prominent ways to spend National Video Games Day is to learn about the history of video games and how they’ve shaped our culture, as well as spending some time gaming with friends and new people alike.
These days, video games are seen as a part of everyday life for many of us. We just turn on our PC or favorite console and load up a game. We see advertisements for games everywhere, and we can watch others stream games whenever we want. But video games have come a long way to get here.
In the 1950s, the earliest computers were too massive and expensive to be found in any household. Despite their huge size, early computers only had simplistic games like tic-tac-toe. But in the 1960s, a group of MIT students decided to experiment with one of the school’s computers, eventually coming up with a game called Spacewar.
Image Credit: Nintendo
When Americans started spending their days in front of the TV in the 1960s, engineer Ralph Baer, now commonly known as the “father of video games,” wanted to see if he could bring the fun of these little games to more accessible venues and devices. It started with a dot on the TV screen that could be manually controlled by the viewer, proving it was possible to interact with television sets. Then came the Brown Box, a video game system with multiple games that was released as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. It wasn’t really a huge success, only selling 200,000 units.
At the same time, a young Nolan Bushnell recalled playing Spacewar at college and started figuring out how to get it to run on regular TVs. In 1972, Bushnell founded Atari, Inc. with Ted Dabney and released Pong, initially as a machine found in west coast bars. This was followed by an at-home version a few years later, and video games had finally struck a cord with the general public.
Games and consoles started pouring into the at-home market, many of them low in quality. The industry’s momentum started to fizzle out until Nintendo released its Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. Gamers were introduced to a character they could to latch onto in Mario of Super Mario Bros., and from there, video games would grow at an astronomical pace.
Over the years, games have not just received better graphics, but brought us deeper stories, more detailed levels, mature writing and characters, and more intense competitive gameplay. Technology has allowed for deeper immersion as gamers crave more and more.
Video games have gone from simple pixelated gameplay in the 1980s to complex worlds ready to be explored in the present day. It’s crazy to think of Borderland 4’s hundreds of weapons and expansive locations to unearth when top video games were just pixels on a screen a few short decades ago.
Image Credit: Nintendo
We’ve come a long way, but there’s still so far to go. Upcoming video games promise to push boundaries, whether it’s larger and more detailed worlds that feel more alive than ever before, breathtakingly realistic visuals, or more complex competitive gameplay.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is bringing the series’ action-packed crime-focused gameplay back to the forefront in May 2026. Not much is known about the game except that there are two protagonists, including the first-ever female main character, and that it’s heading back to Vice City, developer Rockstar’s version of Miami. This will be almost 20 years after the first GTA game was released in 1997. With GTA 6 looking like a game with endless gameplay opportunities within a massive city, it’s easy to forget that the first game was basically like Frogger with car theft.
No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games is also working on Light No Fire, which promises an open planet to explore that’s roughly the size of Earth. Gamers in the 90s could never fathom even the possibility of creatures, resources, and vegetation on a truly planet-sized world.
Image Credit: Hello Games
2XKO is a heavily anticipated fighting game from Riot Games that will features 2v2 co-op action. When you think back to the simplicity of the first Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games inside a dimly lit arcade in the early 90s, the complexities in 2XKO are mind-blowing. Competitive players deeper gameplay to master, and the highest levels of video game competition have given birth to the esports industry with its pro players and legions of diehard fans.
While you’re waiting for GTA 6, you can celebrate National Video Games Day to distract yourself. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Play games with friends. Get some friends together after school or work to play some of your favorite current games. Marvel Rivals if you’re feeling competitive, Borderlands 4 if you just want to blast some stuff, Mario Party if you don’t want to think at all. Or pull out some games you used to play when you were younger. The original Super Mario Bros. for the NES still holds up.
Watch someone else play games. Whether you prefer Kick or Twitch, there are plenty of gamers streaming a wide range of titles every day. Twitch is offering special emotes and other free rewards for tuning in on Video Games Day.
Learn more about gaming history. There’s so much more to learn about gaming history that wasn’t even covered here. Head to YouTube to watch some videos about the early days of gaming, and discover how your favorite franchises came to be. There are also some fascinating blunders along the way, like that E.T. game that was buried in a ditch.
Watch esports competitions. While we are all passionate about gaming, watching the best-of-the-best do things beyond comprehension is always a fun time. Check out matches from The International, one of the biggest annual competitions in all of esports.
Featured image credit: Riot Games
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