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.

3. Wii gets players off the couch

Gamers haven’t always had a reputation for being physically active – all that is required of playing video games is sitting on the couch with a controller. That is, until Wii.

Nintendo released the Wii console in 2006 as the first motion-controlled gaming console. Gamers hold a small remote in their hand and the remote's movement is mimicked on-screen, translating to everything from brandishing a sword to swinging a tennis racket. The extremely popular Wii Sports offered games like bowling and boxing, and later titles like Wii Fit offered workout routines, changing both the technology of video games and physiology of gamers. The competition quickly followed, with Microsoft Kinect (for Xbox) and PlayStation Move motion controllers seeing release in 2010.

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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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