Video Game History
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Introduction
However much you loathe or love video games, they are here to stay. Invented in 1971 as a cultural and lucrative phenomenon by Nolan Bushnell, initial steps towards this "invention" were already made in the fifties.
At this moment games are everywhere and are played by nearly everyone. They have carved their way into the precious free time we have almost as much as more traditional pastimes like books, music, television, movies etc. Some say the amount of money going around in "the business" is more than what goes around in the movie industry. We are not quite there yet, but maybe some day we will...
The Early Years
1958
Steve Russel is sometimes wrongly acknowledged for being the very first games programmer. 'Game development' already began in 1958. A physicist named William Higin-Botham, at that time working at the Dept. Of Nuclear Energy in the US, made a working model of a Pong like game. The machine did not use a single transistor, but worked with vacuum tubes. His "Tennis" game-type was exposed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory for almost two years.
1961
In 1961 MIT student Steve Russel created the very first video game. Spacewar ran on a Digital PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor - 1, see [1]) mainframe computer. It was incredibly limited because of the low graphics capabilities at that time. ASCII characters were used to build up the gaming environment. The PDP-1 looks like being a relatively small machine on this photo but it was made up from a few components as seen in this scan of the original brochure.
Spacewar, which would be modified extensively by other students, simulated two-dimensional space combat between two ships. The game's graphics consisted of ASCII text characters, and controls were a set of four switches on the side of the PDP-1. Two switches rotated the ship left or right, another switch accelerated the ship, and a fourth fired torpedoes. Compared with current games, Spacewar seems hopelessly antiquated, but visitors were awed during the 1962 MIT open house when Spacewar was demonstrated. The prevailing image of computers at the time consisted of punch cards and scientific calculations; it was a shock to see students playing a game on a computer.
Spacewar quickly spread to other PDP-1s. Eventually Digital would acquire a copy. The engineering staff used it as a diagnostic for new PDP-1s before shipping, and the sales staff would run the world's first video game for customers.
ca. 1968
By the late 1960s Digital had produced several versions of the PDP mainframe computer. It would be on the PDP-10 that the next significant step in video gaming would emerge. The game known as Adventure was programmed by Donald Woods at Stanford. Foregoing any type of graphics, the game used text to describe events and environments to the player, who would interact with it by typing in simple commands such as "go west" or "open mailbox." While Spacewar was the forerunner of today's shooter genre, the game Adventure would produce the adventure and Role Playing Game genres.
1971
As Spacewar spread from the original MIT PDP-1 to other computers, a copy made its way into the University of Utah. There it captured the imagination of a young engineering student by the name of Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell would graduate in 1968 and move to California to become an engineer at Ampex. He moved his daughter out of her room to create a laboratory. There he created a game based on Spacewar called Computer Space. Instead of designing Computer Space around an expensive mainframe computer, Bushnell's game required some inexpensive electronic parts. In 1971 Bushnell left Ampex to become a product engineer with Nutting Associates, a small pinball machine company. Nutting manufactured several Computer Space machines, but the game never became popular and didn't sell. Computer Space was too complex, requiring players to read a full page of instructions. Bushnell left Nutting in 1972, determined to create a simpler and more successful game.
1972
Bushnell and a friend formed a company named Syzygy ( a term that refers to the conjunction or opposition of two related objects ). After both investing in the new company, they discovered that the name Syzygy had already been taken. So they changed the name to Atari, which is the Japanese equivalent of Check in the game of Go. The first game that Atari developed was Pong. Pong was the first successful Coin-Op game and paved the way for the games industry as it is today. Computer Space may have been earlier, but because of its failure to have the customers feed it their change it is not seen as the first game. Since Nolan Bushnell was the first to make money out of the new phenomenon "Video Game", he is regarded as being the actual Father of Video Games.
External Links
- Brains 09:49, 26 May 2005 (BST)
