In It’s beginnings, the history of games is not one of game
artists. It’s a history of programmers and computer enthusiasts appropriating
serious technology for their own use.
Before the late 1950s, computers were the realm of the
military, academics and industry; in 1943 Project whirlwind was created to
train fighter pilots, and Colossus was used to break the German’s code in world
war two. Big, serious computers like the 1946 Eniac were used to keep track of
inventories in large corporations and more often than not took up an entire,
large room. Hardly suitable for casual gaming as they required physical
reprogramming with cables or transistors until 1951 which saw the first use of
magnetic tape as a device to store information and programming with the Univac.
It’s around this time when computers started to display screens – cathode ray
tubes were used to generate images and from there what we’d think of as the
modern computer was beginning to take shape.
In
1952, OXO was created as part of a PhD on Human-Computer interaction by A.S.
Douglas at the University of Cambridge. He created it on the Electronic
Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) and used it to study Humans and
Computers interactions. Coming a full seven years before Space War! OXO allowed
the player to use a light pen to play a game of noughts and crosses against a
computer. It’s a game played against a computer’s artificial intelligence, I
would argue it was the first game, though its initial purpose was not
entertainment.
Next
came Tennis for Two in 1958, a predecessor of Pong by fourteen years,
Tennis for Two simulated a game of Tennis on an Oscilloscope that is similar
enough to the later arcade game, except the player viewed the field from the
side, rather than above. Using a controller with a dial and a button, the
player could control the angle the ‘ball’ flew when it was hit back towards the
net (which happened when you pressed the button) it was developed by William
Higinbotham as a way to entertain people touring the Brookhaven National Laboratories’
Instrumentation Division and it takes him three weeks. Generally speaking it’s
not really a game of much skill – pressing the button randomly will keep the
ball in the air and unless you’re doing it yourself there’s no keeping track of
the score. (If you’re interested in playing, the above source link links to a
page where you can download a remake of Tennis for Two that allows you to play
over the internet) The following YouTube video shows you footage of both game play,
and also the machine the circuit was made for.
It
was as late as 1959 before really interactive, programmed games started to
emerge proper. Usually these were designed and programmed on academic computers
like the TX-0 at MIT which saw ‘Mouse in the Maze’ which allowed a player to
create a maze with rewards and set a ‘mouse’ free to roam in it and ‘HAX’
allowed the user to create various graphics and noises by adjusting two console
switches.
Then came Spacewar!
( http://spacewar.oversigma.com/ )In 1961, along with a Baseball simulator
created by John Burgeson where the player would pick a dream team for a game
then watch as the computer printed out the outcome of that fictional game. Spacewar! set the tone for many video games to
come; Steve Russell wrote Spacewar! on a PDP-1 Digital Equipment Corporation
interactive minicomputer. This Computer used a Cathode-ray tube display and a
keyboard input. It took about 200 man-hours to program and it allowed for two
players to battle each other in spaceships, firing lasers at each other whilst
avoiding the sun’s gravitational field.
Steve Russell later transferred to Stanford University where
he introduced Nolan Bushnell, the man who would later go on to found Atari (And
the Chuck-E Cheese’s Pizza-time Theatres chain) to game programming.
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| http://www.uvlist.net/game-164857-Space+Travel |
In 1969 Space Travel was made
for the Multics operating system by Ken Thomson. Though he had to switch
halfway through the project to a GECOS operating system of the General Electric
GE 635 Mainframe computer due to AT&T pulling out of the MULTICS project.
This cost about $75 to run for an hour, which meant he had to switch again to a
PDP-7. However in the process of this, they were able to start the development
of UNIX and Space Travel, a game that simulated a simple solar system that the
player could attempt to explore and even land on these little 2D planets, can
be considered the first Application for UNIX.
Then came the first consoles and the early arcade games.
The first coin-operated arcade game was Galaxy game in
1971, and a coin-operated arcade version of Spacewar! was created by Nolan
Bushnell and Ted Dabney in the same year. Nutting Associates manufactured 1500
machines of his game under the name Computer Space and although the game was unsuccessful,
it paved the way for others to come.
In
1972 then, the same two programmers created Pong with help from Al Alcorn
and started Atari computers in the same year. Pong was re-released in 1975 as a
home video game.
In 1972 we saw the first videogame consoles for home use.
The Odyssey came programmed with twelve games and was released by Magnavox.
Players needed to insert a cartridge that contained bridges and extra pieces of
circuitry that would essentially re-wire the console so that they could play
the desired game. The players also had to tape sheets over their computer as a
way to get colours and areas on the video game.
 | |
| http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-9838693-52.html |
Though there was a crash in 1977 that stopped eventually by
the huge success that was Taito’s Space
Invaders in 1978 – a game everyone knows, that allows the player to fend
off attacking aliens that descend down the screen towards the little houses your
simple spaceship is protecting - that
was licenced to the Atari VCS (Or Atari 2600) and quadrupled the consoles sales
(Did you know that because it’s processor’s
weren’t powerful enough to run it as intended, space invaders instead rendered
the alien graphics faster when there were fewer on screen? This was later kept
as a challenging gameplay dynamic.).
This resurgence in video game
popularity meant that developers began once again creating. They created video
games that contained the games in the cartridge rather than the console itself
and beginning with the Fairchild Video Entertainment System (The VES) plastic cartridges
containing ROM chips were used to store game information instead, meaning that
a cartridge could be plugged into the console where it would become part of the
console’s microcomputer. This opened up a much less expensive way to play
games, since there was no longer a need to create a new console for each new
game, developers merely had to create a new cartridge.
As this was happening, mainframe computers were being surreptitiously
appropriated by students for programming games. This use of very expensive
technology blossomed in the early seventies and though many of the titles
programmed in this time were lost or not recorded at all (Due to the dubious benefit
of using very expensive technology to write the games) We still know of many of
the most mainstream games produced in this time. Some Notable examples were Star
Trek created in 1971 for Sigma 7 Mini computer at the University of
California. This game allowed players to pilot the enterprise and fight
Klingons on small maps and on-screen text. Adventure the first
text-based adventure game, which could be likened to playing a session of
D&D by yourself at a computer (A PDP-10 to be precise). And Multi User Dungeon (MUD) of 1978 which
allowed more than one player onto a campaign at once and would pave the way for
MMORPGs of the future.
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