By Christopher Sciacca

The first video games debuted in the1950s, later reaching mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 80s with arcades and home video systems like Atari and Commodore 64. Remember SpaceWar! and Pong? While limited by the capabilities of the hardware, they laid the foundation for the games we develop and play today, which by 2025 is expected to be a whopping $256 billion industry.

This history and the importance of these early video games was not lost on Qiskit’s James Wootton. In 2017, he created the world’s first video game for a quantum computer, Cat-Box-Scissors, based on Rock-Paper-Scissors. He continued creating other quantum games, in the process attracting quantum enthusiasts and video game developers who wanted to try something new. And soon, games incorporating quantum computing concepts will be available for anyone to play.