To satisfy the urge to summarize the content of the article, I will simply say this: A lesson in videogame history spanning their genesis to the Crash, ending on a note questioning the staying power of video games.
Certainly, the article makes its point. If Spacewar! is your thing, Spacewar can provide reams of entertainment which may or may not be matchable by modern machines. Spacewar can be found here: http://spacewar.oversigma.com/ and is a two-player game. You can’t honestly play it by yourself. Still, I can imagine playing spacewar and dealing with the black hole (not present in the original version, added to increase the difficulty) and your opponent providing quite a large chunk of fun, as you and your opponent attempt to outwit and outgun.
A game which I remember coming installed on older computers for some reason is Battlezone, which Atari helpfully maintains a copy of on their website (more advanced than the one I recall playing as a child) here: http://atari.com/arcade/arcade/battlezone As the article suggests, Battlezone was a serious innovation, giving the concept of videogames as more than entertainment, and also demonstrating their actual capacities to the market (even if skirting its actual technological abilities using procedural generation and vector graphics).
You can easily google your favorite copy of Pac-Man, being a ubiquitous game, but it uses a few things which suggest that innovation has indeed helped the industry. Spacewar can be a frustratingly limiting game. It’s a game with no margin for error, you either shoot your foe or they shoot you, and that will be the end of things, and what’s more it has to be restarted when a player is victorious, as the game has no provision for multiple matches or lives or score-keeping, which are all elements handleable by the player, but something in this day and age we *expect* from a game.
Getting back to the article’s point, the gloom-and-doom concept of the video game market crashing is best described as plausible. It could happen again, we can see how it can happen again, and every day you can go to a gaming news site and find yourself some equally stormy prediction about how Call of Duty is Ruining Videogames (http://www.gamejudgment.com/how-call-of-duty-is-ruining-gaming#more-6064).
A lot of discussion amongst myself and my friends, being gamers of different stripes, myself an Xbox360-PC gamer, a friend PS3-360 and a former Gamestop employee, another exclusively PC, and yet another PS3 and handhelds, each of us bringing different arguments to the table, and different evidence, have come to the conclusion that the success or failure of videogames hinges on the WiiU in this upcoming cycle. Evidence for this is of course circumspect, it’s not as if we went out and properly researched this, but it is a real concern amongst gamers right now, though whether it is with just cause remains to be seen.
A last side note on this: It reminds me of people who compare Rome and America with the intent that “as Rome fell, so too shall America” somehow neglecting that the odds of survival for any nation are statistically low, and infinite duration isn’t plottable.