#11: …TRAZ (Cascade Games, Commodore 64, 1988)

Though it was the starting point of this project, Super Mario Bros. was not the first video game. What exactly was the first video game is rather hard to pin down, and depends on how exactly you define the term and its applications to things that existed before the term itself was coined. But one fairly reasonable candidate for the title would be Tennis for Two, a 1958 tennis simulation displayed on an oscilloscope. This was followed in 1972 by Pong, which was essentially a tennis simulation with realism removed and arguably the first commercial success in gaming history. Tennis for Two begat Pong begat Breakout in 1976, which divorced ever further from depicting a real game of tennis by removing the second player and replacing them with a brick wall to be chipped away at and ultimately destroyed. Then in 1987, this was jazzed up in Arkanoid with the addition of power ups and a ludicrous sci-fi storyline. And a year later, …TRAZ puts this through a funhouse mirror, throwing in things like multiple paddles to be controlled on both the horizontal and vertical planes, and glass blocks that refract instead of reflecting the ball.