From Geek to Chic in 33 Years

By Text by Lev Grossman, Kristina Dell

1972 It begins: Pong is invented

1978 Space Invaders blips its way into arcades everywhere

1977 The Atari 2600 game system sells millions of units and brings arcade action home

1980 Pac-Man released

1982 First hit song based on a video game, Pac-Man Fever: "I got a pocket full of quarters ..."

1981 First all-video game magazine: Electronic Games

1982 Video games first appear on the cover of TIME

1982 Tron, the first movie about video games, tanks at the box office

1983 E.T. becomes a video game --and flops

1983 A-list athletes star in games like Julius Erving & Larry Bird: One-On-One

1983 Journey is the first rock group to have its own arcade game. It's not much better than ...

1990 ... the King of Pop's Michael Jackson's Moon-walker

1993 First legislative outcry: the Senate investigates video-game violence

1993 Myst is released. People start to wonder, Are video games art?

1993 First movie based on a game: Super Mario Brothers

1995 Sony releases the PlayStation in the U.S.

1994 Big-name actors are popping up in video games. Dennis Hopper lends his voice talents to Hell

1996 Video games get their first sex symbol, Lara Croft

1996 Suddenly game sound tracks are seriously hip: WipeOut XL features the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers and others

1997 Tamagotchi mania!

1998 Seinfeld's "Frogger" episode airs, in which George obsesses over his high score on an old arcade game

1999 First Classic Gaming Expo opens in Las Vegas. Vintage games sell for top dollar. Video-game nostalgia is officially a phenomenon

1999 The Columbine shootings create new wave of video-game anxiety

1999 First game with an old-skool rap sound track. Thrasher: Skate and Destroy boasts Run DMC, Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and the Sugar Hill Gang

2000 Games imitate life as The Sims sells millions of copies

2002 G4, the first all-games TV network, debuts

2005 The Detroit Symphony Orchestra performs Japanese composer Nobuo Uematsu's score for the video game Final Fantasy