With Wimbledon under way, I am going to grasp the opportunity to make a perhaps contentious claim: tennis is the most important sport in the history of video games. Sure, nowadays the big sellers are EA Sports FC, Madden and NBA 2K, but tennis has been foundational to the industry. It was a simple bat-and-ball game, created in 1958 by scientist William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, that is widely the considered the first ever video game created purely for entertainment. Tennis for Two ran on an oscilloscope and was designed as a minor diversion for visitors attending the lab's annual open day, but when people started playing, a queue developed that eventually extended out of the front door and around the side of the building. It was the first indication that computer games might turn out to be popular.

Believe me when I say: I truly thought I knew the story of Tetris. The puzzle game's journey from behind the iron curtain in 1980s Moscow to multi-million-selling video game has been the subject of countless articles, a greatly entertaining book and a recent film. I have played Tetris in various forms for more than 30 years, from the Game Boy to the Nintendo Switch, even in VR. So when I loaded up Tetris Forever, an interactive documentary on Tetris's 40-year history from the developers-slash-archivists at Digital Eclipse, I wasn't expecting to learn anything new. I was proven very wrong.

Walking through the doors of this exhibition, you are immediately greeted by the PDP-10 - the gigantic mainframe computer that was used to program SpaceWar, considered by everyone except extreme computing history pedants to be the first recognisable video game. Puck Man (later Pac-Man) and Space Invaders cabinets stand side by side just beyond. These are very familiar sights to anyone with a knowledge of gaming history, and they set the tone. If you're a keen (or, let's be honest, old) player then it's highly unlikely that you'll learn anything new at Game On, but you will nonetheless have fun. Beginning in 2002 at the Barbican in London, the Game On exhibition of video game history has been touring the world for all this time, only ever packed away entirely during the Covid-19 pandemic.

An eBay listing popped up this week that likely has game console collectors salivating. Someone based in France is selling more than 2,200 consoles, including as many models, color variants and special editions as they could get their hands on. Per Google Translate, the seller, who goes by Kaori30, says the collection covers 50 years of gaming history. It includes console variants that were only offered through contests. Along with the consoles, the listing (by way of Kotaku) includes a few hundred games, some statues and other collectibles.

Playing violent video games regularly makes people less sensitive to disturbing images, warns a new study. Scientists found regular players were better at disregarding graphic content while viewing a rapid series of images. In the experiment, this meant they were better able to remember more of the images than non-players. Experts believe this is because they suffer less from emotion-induced blindness, which occurs when a person's emotions impact their perception of the world. Playing violent video games regularly makes people less sensitive to disturbing images, warns a new study.

Video games are a unique, nascent art form and it makes sense to preserve them. While efforts by the Internet Archive have been underway for a while, it hasn't been a priority for the gaming industry to archive their own products. Most archival projects happen thanks to the unpaid efforts of super fans bent on saving their beloved gaming experiences. Today, though, The Strong Museum, also known as the National Museum of Play, announced that Scott Adams, the developer behind 1978's text adventure game Adventureland, has donated a ton of materials from his long career in the industry. Adams' donation includes some of the code for the earliest commercially available computer games, along with printed source code, promotional materials, photographs, magazines, comic books and other documentation from Adventure International, the company Adam's co-funded.