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''I absolutely had no idea videogames would become what they are today,'' says Nolan Bushnell, 59, a father of eight whose L.A. home has every videogame platform on the market. They're not just for his kids. Bushnell plays too, which isn't surprising, since he's the progenitor of the industry. ''I used to make predictions of the industry becoming very, very big, and I was derided as being a wild-eyed optimist. But when I was thinking big, I was thinking hundreds of millions of dollars -- not billions. If I knew then what I know now, I never would have sold Atari.''

In the beginning, there was Pong, and it was good. It was also very, very simple: two white paddles and a tiny square ball against a black-olive screen. Pong, which made its debut in bars and amusement arcades in 1972, was an instant hit for Atari, and begat a phenomenon. Like ever-quickening columns of Space Invaders raining from a TV sky, they came: the crazymazy wokkawokkawokka fun of Pac-Man, the blitzkrieg sci-fi of Defender and Tempest, the virtual Disneyland of Donkey Kong. Their appeal was almost elementary. ''Of my products, Asteroids and Breakout were the ones I liked the most,'' says Bushnell. ''In both of those games, I felt there was a feeling in most people -- a need -- to 'clean things up.' In Asteroids, it was breaking up asteroids. In Breakout, bricks. That was it.''

Japanese companies like Nintendo and Sega began building faster, stronger, sleeker playing machines, and the personal-computing revolution brought into the home densely packed discs of multimedia that broadened the notion of what a game could be. SimCity and Populous created the ''God Game category,'' which allowed you to build worlds from the ground up. Myst was the inverse, offering a mysterious, atmospheric world that could be explored only by solving complex brainteasers. John Madden Football took sports games to new levels of realism, both graphically and conceptually. Doom was a revolutionary first-person creature-feature shoot-'em-up, influenced by the aesthetic of Aliens and the ethos of hackers; players could build their own levels, even compete against each other via these little accessories called modems. The sci-fi Wing Commander series, inspired by Star Wars and starring (yes, starring) actors like Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell, imposed cinematic narrative on games.

''My games were mostly about stories and characters,'' says Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts. ''The inspiration for Wing Commander was 'What if instead of being about trying to get a high score, it's about trying to finish a story?'''

In 1995, when Sony introduced a new-wave platform with all the graphics-generating power of a PC, console jockeys finally got the machine they felt they deserved. That was the moment when ''the 'kid stuff' stigma went away,'' says videogame historian (yes, historian) Johnny L. Wilson, citing the sequence in the '96 hipster flick Swingers in which Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, and their pals nearly come to blows while playing NHL Hockey.


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