In the beginning computers were created only as a means to make life easy for government and private organizations. With the computers available in the early stages playing games using a computer was not even thought of. As time went on computers became available at a high price to individuals who could afford it. The earliest computer games came out as experiments.

These games were quite different to the computer games which are available to the consumer today. During the 1970s university students started to develop games for university mainframe computers. Some of these computer games included the first computer baseball game which was written by Don Daglow in 1971, star trek created by Mike Mayfield in 1971 at MIT, Hunt the Wumpus in 1972 by Gregory Yob, text adventure by Will Crowther in 1975. The first version of air was created by Kelton Flinn in 1977 and in 1980 Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman Ken Arnold released a game called the Rogue.

The leap came after the introduction of home computers. Home computers also known as personal computers came into the scene in the 1980s. This caused lots of programmers and software organizations to concentrate more on the entertainment side of computers. This led to developing computer games for personal computers. In 1980 there was a sudden rise of computer gaming. The earliest online games also started to come out during these times. The dialup bulletin board system was some times used to play online computer games. Commercial servers also started to spring out and more and more people started to play computer games. There were text based servers which operated on larger mainframes like The Source and GEnie. Apart from the text based servers there were servers based on graphical interface as well. Some of these platform-specific servers are PlayNet, Apple link and Macintosh.

The next generation of computer games came out in 1990s. These computer games really started to fire off after the introduction of Windows 95 which had a total graphical user interface or GUI platform. Software companies started building and developing computer games which were gaining popularity. After the introduction Windows 98 in the year 1998 the gaming industry reached yet another level of greatness. The games that came out during this time had far better graphical interfaces and had great AI (Artificial Intelligence) abilities. Games started to be categorized as first person shooters, third person games, strategy sports and so on.

After the new millennium, computer games started to reach a new level with high performance capabilities of computers. Now 3D computer games which are played in virtual environments have been introduced. The computer gaming industry has come a long way since PAC MAN was created. But the future will surely hold much more surprises for computer gamers.