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Now widely regarded as the first video game to achieve serious commercial success, Atari's 1972 "Pong" allowed two people to play a basic game of table tennis on a black screen. The graphics were simple, but it was a hit - a version of the game designed to play at home sold more than 100,000 units and set the stage for the multibillion-dollar gaming industry we know today.

The success of "Pong" laid the groundwork for an explosion of arcade games in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the frenetic "Pacman" and alien shoot-em-up "Space Invaders" raking in billions from coin-rich youngsters desperate to post a high score. But it was the advent of home consoles such as the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo NES around the same time that took video games from arcades into living rooms.

Games popularised in this period still resonate today. One early Nintendo game - the 1981 platformer "Donkey Kong" featured a character known as Jumpman, later known as Mario, one of the best-known video game heroes of all time. As the market for games grew, so too did competition between hardware manufacturers, leading to the first of many "console wars" in the early 1990s between Sega and Nintendo.

First-person-shooters like "Goldeneye" and action-adventure puzzler "Tomb Raider" revolutionised both graphics and storytelling, offering a more mature experience for an increasingly diverse audience. By the turn of the century, the stage was set for a new generation of home systems - and an all-new round of console wars, this time between the PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and a new contender from Microsoft, the Xbox. The PlayStation 2 won that fight, becoming the best-selling console of all time with 155 million units moved, according to Forbes.

Sony and Microsoft are about to go head to head again with their latest offerings, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, promising never-before-seen graphics and a range of exclusive titles as battle lines are drawn. Facing stiff competition from PC gaming and changing habits among players, whichever pricey new console emerges victorious will truly have to live up to the hype.