Pinball mafia

I'm tired today. I stayed up late reading "The History of Video Games," a fascinating book Michelle picked up for my birthday.

Stuff I didn't know:

  • Sega started as an American company.
  • Atari is not the word for the game 'Go' in Japanese, it's the word for a situation similar to Chess's 'check' in the game of Go.
  • Pinball was illegal in New York until the 80's because of some silly political belief that it was affiliated with the mafia.
  • Nintendo started out in 1893 making playing cards. Curious that Pokemon is also now a card game. Silly Nintendo.
  • The original Spacewar ran on a PDP-1 and was later made into what we would think of as an "arcade machine" by Atari's Nolan Bushnell prior to him founding Atari.
  • Spacewar was not popular with the general public because most people at the time didn't understand the conservation of momentum in space.
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