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Grand Theft Auto and the biggest moments in video game history

Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA V) made headlines as the biggest video game release of all time, selling more than $1 billion worth of copies in three days. But GTA V didn't get to this landmark moment by itself. Find out more moments that changed the course of video game history in this list, from most recent to the beginning of (video game) time.

2. Gaming goes social and mobile

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor
A fan plays Angry Birds on his smartphone.

Remember the days before Angry Birds or Farmville? These days it’s hard to do as social and mobile games have taken over nearly everyone’s social media accounts and mobile devices.

An early social success, Farmville, was based on a simple premise: maintain your own online farm and let your friends in on the fun. Though simple, Farmville charmed 40 million people per month into playing, and ended up very profitable, as advertisers could reach an audience quickly and effectively, and users could purchase crops to better their farm (and best their online neighbor).

Mobile, on the other hand, has evolved from simple games like Snake and Tetris to more complex offerings like Angry Birds and Candy Crush. Though the graphics and gameplay of these titles are often relatively simple, these have become an integral part of mobile devices today and have only increased in popularity, as phones have gotten smarter. In 2012, Angry Birds hit its 1 billionth download.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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