Robots!

It wasn't going to be long for a blog about Game Art to mention robots. Our course has a mentoring program set up between the first and third years, named Gurus & Grasshoppers, and they set us the task to create a robot. This would not go towards our grade, it is completely optional but the reason I want to get into the industry is to design cool things like robots, so I wasn't going to pass this up.

The brief was about as open as it can get: Design and make a robot with 2000 tris and texture it with 2 512s, so I could have gone down any route possible. I knew straight away I didn't want to make the typical death-kill-kill robot, I've seen plenty of these. I wanted to create something like Wall-E or C3-P0, an assistant bot, built for making human life easier. I hit the web for research, throwing together a mood board of sorts of different robots.

Once I had a good amount of reference I began sketching, my very first attempt was far too human so I tried to push away from the i-robots and more towards the Wall-E type robots. As I went on they became much more industrial and eventually I thought "What if they were made of scrap?"

Rough sketches

The 2 bottom right robots where my favourite, one made from junkyard scrap and another from car scrap. I picked the junk yard robot because I thought he could have more interesting silhouette and overall look. My idea was that this robot was foraging for scrap to stay alive, replacing parts that needed repair with whatever he could find. The spyglass is because he can't replace his own lens and he needs better vision over long distances. Next step was to finalize the design with some Photoshop.

Photoshop final - Using colour scares me :(

To start my 3D modelling I had to draw up the reference sheets, this was a first time for actually drawing them as so far I've only used photographs. I learned they require a huge amount of effort to make sure everything is aligned properly and consistent, they also should require more detail than I included, as I was using guess work for parts of it. Lessons learned! After reading Valve's DOTA 2 Character Art Guide I concentrated a large number of my tris towards the head and torso, this did lead me to a tight budget for the lower parts but I think I managed well.

Robot - Unsmoothed and naked at 1,980 tris

As this wasn't being graded I wanted to play around with the texturing, instead of using photographs I wanted to try and paint them, like Blizzard, Valve or many other developers do. I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into but I had a go. The hardest part for me was that the final outcome wouldn't be a flat canvas, I had to keep uploading the texture to get a feel for what was working and what wasn't. Looking back I could have increased the contrast on the finer details as they become almost invisible at a distance.

Both texture sheets side by side

I kept the colour of the robot quite dull, keep most of the colours in the muddy brown/red area. The first idea for the plated arm was to have it blue, but this clashed way too much with everything so I chose the dull green. If I was up to the challenge I should have experimented with different colours when I was painting the final concept, this could have opened up some interesting colour options.

The final model sits at 1980 tris, with the textures coming to 1.5mb. Overall I am happy with the robot, if I had more texture budget I would have liked to have placed an alpha on him for the hanging wires like I had in my concept. Below is the final render but he's unfortunately stood in a Christ the Redeemer stance, I've also put in a Sketchfab 3D model viewer, hopefully it works fine and you should be able to fully explore the final robot.

Scrapbot just wants a hug

Scrap Robot from Braden May on Sketchfab.

History of Gaming: id & the First Person Shooter.

It is without a doubt that the first-person shooter genre might not be as big as it is today without the help of id. Through out the 1990’s the company pushed the genre multiple times, helping place the FPS in the top spot for addictiveness and competitiveness. This post will briefly look over Id’s history with the genre and how they shaped it.

[1]

While id made the genre popular, they certainly did not invent it. Decades before, in 1973 a NASA intern named Steve Colley created a program that placed the user inside a maze, not just above it. The idea of 3D rendering at the time seemed far fetched but Colley and his co-workers figured mazes only needed 90 degrees angles, this made it much easier to create. The original game was boring, but 2 other interns, Greg Thompson and Howard Palmer saw potential in the program.

Thompson and Palmer had the idea to place more than 1 user in the maze and soon after shooting each other was introduced. At the start the game was passed around between friends but in 1974 Thompson returned to MIT and upgraded Maze Wars to run over an early version of the internet. Students battled it out across campus and the game grew in popularity, even being picked up by Xerox to port to other computers. (Olivetti, 2012) Maze Wars now appears to be mostly forgotten about, every resource I’ve read through so far seems to completely ignore it in the history of gaming, yet I believe it holds great significance in both the FPS genre and gaming in general with some of the first online multiplayer, a radar and a spectator mode.

In 1989, John Carmack met John Romero during a job interview for Softdisk. Both were very skilled programmers but Romero also had an artistic side. They also met Tom Hall and Adrian Carmack (no relation) there and began moon-lighting to create their own games, the first one being Commander Keen. Keen was a side-scrolling action game, very much like Mario but the people who played it said it was much better. The moon-lighting team began calling themselves Ideas From the Deep and eventually left Softdisk to create id Software, founded on February 1st, 1991.

J.Carmack - Front Left, Adrian Carmack - Hidden at the back, J.Romero - Middle, Tom Hall - Second from the right[2]

John Carmack, now id’s main programmer, wanted to create a fast-paced 3D game, instead of the slow 2D game, Commander Keen. After months of research Carmack and the others had come up with Hovertank. The game however was rather ugly due to the limitation of the computers at the time. Id continued work on Commander Keen to pay the bills and eventually wanted to explore the fast-paced 3D game again. The decision was made to recreate Wolfenstein by John Romero, an older stealth game that was well suited to Carmack’s engine. Romero also wanted the game to be bloody and violent, after growing up with films like Rambo and Friday the 13th, extreme violence had not been explored in video games yet. New technology such as texture mapping helped Wolfenstein 3D achieve a good visual style while also keeping the speed of the game high, the stealth elements were thrown away as they were “slowing the game down”. Wolfenstein 3D was released on May 5, 1992, with secret sliding doors, boss death cams, taunting difficulties and lots of violence and gore.

The game became an underground sensation. Internet forums and BBSs where filled with people talking about it. Eventually the media caught on and praised it too, even with all the violence. Wolfenstein 3D began to get hacked, or for a more modern term, modded. Due to the 3D nature it was more difficult to hack but this didn’t stop people replacing the enemies with Smurfs for example.

Wolfenstein 3D - No floor or roof textures yet [3]

John Carmack had again made advances with 3D rendering, creating an engine that enabled fading light and textures on walls and ceilings, he also had the idea to base their next game on demons with the title Doom. Carmack continued to push the engine, helping Romero and Adrian bring their demonic imaginations to life, while scrapping anything that would slow down the pace of the game, including the story. Tom Hall wanted to include a more cinematic story with Doom, yet Carmack said “Story in a game, is a like a story in a porn movie, it’s expected to be there but it’s not that important.”

Doom was released at the end of 1993, with faster gameplay, more violence, complex levels and multiplayer. A first person game of this speed had never included multiplayer before. Doom became an overnight hit, with any place having internet access grinding to a stop simply because people were playing. Intel and A&M had to take actions to stop their employees playing.

Doom - Roof and floor textures, with shadows! [4]

After seeing what modders had done with Wolfenstein 3D, Id made sure that Doom was much more accessible with WAD files, these allowed players to alter the game without destroying the code. Despite being so popular Doom was mostly an underground game, only available through shareware. Id worked on Doom II which would be released on CD-ROM, helping id so mainstream, while John Carmack began working on their next game engine.

Id grew, hiring more people to cope with the lengthening development time. Their next game would be Quake, they had planned this game for a while but their idea was different to the final out come. The original idea was for Quake to be a fantasy, melee combat game but as development became troubled id decided to stick with what they know - the FPS. One thing was certain though, the game would be playable over the internet from release, with 16 players. The various artists had all been in their own worlds while Carmack worked on the Quake engine, this lead to there being 3 distinct looks between the levels. Id stitched them together with a story about an invader using slipgates to assault different worlds.

[5]

Quake was released on June 22, 1996 and despite the rough development the game was a success... a massive success, due to Carmack’s ground-breaking engine and because the game was built from the start for multiplayer. Gamers played the game across LAN and the internet battling it out and forming clans. It didn’t take long for tournaments to begin and once this happened e-sports had begun. While gamers enjoyed Quake, Id had suffered during the development and the fallout hit them hard, with the majority of the talent leaving.They later released Quake II and thanks to Carmack’s coding was a success, but Id’s win streak was over.

April 20th, 1999, the Columbine killings took place, where 2 teenagers killed 13 others. Hours before, one of them recorded a video explaining his actions and he mentioned “it’s going to be like fucking Doom!”. This lead to a media storm over violence in video games and fingers were all pointed towards the creators of these games, such as id. Quake III was in development at the time but the pitchforks were already out. Gamers had also shifted in taste, but it’s unsure if the bad media was the reason. They wanted stories now, with games like Half-Life, System Shock and Marathon leading this change. To make things worst the development of Quake III was rough due to in-fighting and no real leadership, id began to fall apart again losing some of it’s newer members. (Kusher, 2003)

Half-Life: "Do you know who ate all the donuts?" [6]

This is where, in my opinion, the FPS left id’s hands and other companies began to push the genre. Companies like Rare brought quality first-person shooters to the console with Goldeneye 007, Bungie streamlined it with Halo 2 and Infinity Ward made it extremely popular with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Id’s latest game was RAGE released in 2011, while being technologically fantastic the gameplay didn’t do anything new and multiplayer was completely absent. The fate of the FPS is now open, with companies like DICE and Infinity Ward/Treyarch making little to no advancements for the genre, here’s hoping Valve has something ground-breaking in store with Half-Life 3.


Reference & Notes
Kushner, D (2003). Masters of Doom. London: Judy Piatkus Publishers. p37-276

Olivetti, J (2012). The Game Archaeologist: Maze War. Available: http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/06/12/the-game-archaeologist-maze-war/ . Last accessed 30th Oct 2013.


[1]http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/news2001/24183/id_software.gif
[2]http://dorkshelf.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/legends.jpg
[3]http://obrazki.elektroda.pl/4690575400_1336649125.jpeg
[4]http://media.desura.com/images/articles/1/122/121099/auto/doom-imp-pc-version.png
[5]http://static.zenimax.com/bethblog/oldcontent/925702-me0000485352_2_super.jpg
[6]http://www.xblafans.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/08/halflife1.jpg

Cars, bones & more cars.

After Bradgate Park our weekly drawing task was to sit in a local Museum and sketch the bones, this was a nice change simply because we didn't need to fight the weather! The museum is quite small, but had 3 quite large dinosaur skeletons in there, with plenty of other smaller skeletons placed around them.

The bones of a Plateosaurus, Fox, Anteater, Turkey and a Tree Kangaroo

While the dinosaur bones were fascinating I found the intricacy of the smaller skeletons much more interesting. The small skeletons were of much more mundane animals but that didn't bother me much, so for my final instead of focusing on one of the massive dinosaurs that loomed over everything I picked a small skeleton of a turkey. The turkey was standing in a corner, over-shadowed by a huge dinosaur yet the features of the neck and skull of the turkey attracted the attention of my eye.

Turkey final

The next drawing task was to draw cars. I've had a good amount of practice drawing people and landscapes, but cars are my Achilles' heel, I did not want to be beaten by them so I drew a lot of cars. I hit the required 12 cars needed for the task and kept going. I wasn't worried about hitting the target number of drawings for that week, I just wanted to get better at drawing cars! Below are a selection of sketches.

The final drawing I picked one of my favourite cars, the Subaru Impreza (Yeah, I know I have bad taste...). After spending 4 days practicing I was feeling a lot more confident in producing something I'd be proud of. The line drawing I was happy with but as I began to add values to the car I felt it slipping away from me, I definitely need practice on car rendering.The wheels also caused me problems through out, especially the spokes on the alloys so I left them as plain as possible to not draw attention to them.

Final - Subaru Impreza WRX STI 2005

History of Gaming: Part 3.

The 1980's from what I can gather was a weird decade. Bad hair, the cold war, strikes, riots, the Falklands and Thatcher, yet everyone says it was a great time to live, for the video game industry it saw a massive shift in the dominating market. At the start of the 80's, Atari dominated with its' 2600 but as the life the console dragged on the market became saturated with too many consoles and too many low quality games. This was the beginning of the end for Atari.

In 1982, Atari had released the E.T video game. Based off the hugely popular film Atari payed quite heavily to get the rights to this game, thinking it would make them lots of money in return. Unfortunately the game had to be made from scratch within 5 weeks in order to be on shelves for Christmas, because of this the game was terrible, leaving Atari with millions of unsold copies which were apparently dumped in a landfill, as Atari tried to hide their shame.(Raiford, 2009) E.T was the final nail in the coffin for Atari and they couldn't survive the North American Video Game Crash that happened in 83 from over saturation. The rising Japanese market was unaffected and so was the PC gaming market.

E.T - Is that Bert in the bottom left corner? [1]

In 1985 Nintendo released the NES which was an instant hit, almost single handedly reviving the US console market. This saw the first shift in power to Japan, ending the US dominance. In 87 Sega released the Master System (Probably one of my earliest gaming memories) in direct competition with Nintendo, but failed to make an impact. A year later, in 88, Sega released the Mega Drive (Named the Genesis too) which was one of the first 16-bit consoles but yet again failed to make a splash because of the release of Super Mario Bros.3 on the NES. At the end of the 80's, Nintendo released the Game Boy with Tetris, defining portable gaming and making Nintendo seem unstoppable with hit after hit.

Alex the Kid for the Master System - Pretty sure I couldn't get past this level... [2]

Through out the 80's there were many consoles released, such as the Coleco Telstar, the Emerson Arcadia, the Coleco Vision or the Sega SG100. All of these consoles though were pretty much dead on arrival, failing to sell and only adding to the saturated market. While this was happening the PC gaming market was rising, causing more strain on the console market and continued to do so through the 90's

The start of the 90's saw the end of the Soviet Union and then the end of the Cold War, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, to celebrate all this David Hasselhoff sang in a sparkly coat. Unfortunately, it also saw the start of the first Gulf War and the terrible Yugoslavian War, one of the worst wars since World War II. Console gaming was on the rise again with the release of the SNES in 1992, Nintendo's own 16-bit console. This lead to a console war between Nintendo and Sega, where they'd often use aggressive marketing to try and undermine their opponents. (Scullion C, 2009)

90's Wall of Text [3]

Sega released the Game Gear in '92 to try and combat Nintendo's Game Boy. I was lucky enough to play my sister's from time to time and the thing was the size of brick, but it did have a colour screen. Atari also released their portable gaming machine, the Lynx, but like Sega failed to beat Nintendo despite a colour screen as well. While this was happening the arcades where in decline.

1993 saw the release of the Atari Jaguar. The Jaguar was a 64-bit console, making it very a powerful machine but the console was difficult to program for, making good games a rarity. Things were on the rise for Atari however once games like Doom, Wolfentstein and Alien vs. Predator were released, but this didn't last long as in 1995 a new competitor was about to come into the gaming market. Sony had spent 4 years developing the Playstation and sold over 100,00 consoles in the first weekend, with it's new disk based format. Atari tried to compete but was quickly forgotten.

Sony Playstation - My first console [4]

Nintendo's response to the Playstation was the Nintendo 64, still using the older cartridges, was released in 1996. This time Nintendo didn't steal the market, Sony had already done that with clever marketing and an earlier release and because of this Nintendo was playing catch up for the first time. (Scullion C, 2009) Resident Evil was released for the Playstation in '96, using pre-rendered backgrounds and real-time poly models for the characters. 1997 saw Golden Eye released for the Nintendo 64, created by Rare the game was a massive success and now has a lasting legacy. Final Fantasy 7 was also released  in '97 for the Playstation and in 1998 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released for Nintendo's console. Both consoles had their fair share of great games.

Resident Evil - "I bet you're dying to smell these roses!" [5]

Sega in 1998 also had their last attempt at market domination with the release of  the Dreamcast. The console didn't launch well in either Japan or America, but in Europe, Sega's strongest region, the Dreamcast shattered records. The launch line-up was probably one of the best ever, but after this the games couldn't keep up with the likes of Mario and Metal Gear and the company was hemorrhaging money in the US and Japanese markets. When Sony released the Playstation 2 in 2001 this spelled the end for the Dreamcast, the decision was made to stop production of the Dreamcast and focus on making games for other consoles. (Fahs T, 2010)

During the 90's Bandai were also releasing consoles, but they didn't stop the epic battle between Nintendo, Sega and Sony. The 00's saw another competitor step into the gaming market to essentially create the 3-way console war that we have right now, all the while PC gaming is still sitting in the background, not effected too much by the shifting console market yet never rising to the top either.


References & Notes
Fahs, T. (2010). IGN Presents the History of Dreamcast. Available: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2010/09/10/ign-presents-the-history-of-dreamcast?page=10. Last accessed 15th Nov 2013.

Raiford, Guins. (2009). Concrete and Clay: The Life and Afterlife of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600.. Design and Culture. 1 (3), 345-364.

Scullion, C. (2009). History Of Nintendo: N64. Available: http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/12769/features/history-of-nintendo-n64/. Last accessed 15th Nov 2013.

Scullion, C. (2009). History Of Nintendo: SNES. Available: http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/12580/features/history-of-nintendo-snes/. Last accessed 15th Nov 2013.

http://www.nintendo.com/corp/history.jsp

http://classicgames.about.com/od/history/a/Atari2600Histor_2.htm

http://www.atariage.com

http://en.wikipedia.org

http://us.playstation.com/corporate/about/theplaystationstory/

[1]http://killscreendaily.com/articles/interviews/creator-worst-videogame-world-sees-
new-life-bdsm-film-and-therapy/
[2]http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/11/10/replay-alex-kidd-in-miracle-world.aspx
[3] http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/viewer.php?mode=article&id=24541
[4]http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gamelife/2012/09/ps1.jpg
[5]http://cdn.mashthosebuttons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/resident-evil-1.jpg

Adventure in Bradgate Park.

I have a couple finals to show off in this work update. Yay! First is of the Student Union, used to practice 2 point perspective. I complained about the lack of nature in the Archway piece and clearly karma was out to get me, as this picture is 99% man made and took me an age to complete. The front blinds on the building and the window reflections were also a huge problem. If I get the chance to return to a piece this is one that I'll definitely want to try again, with a larger piece of paper too, so I can plot everything perfectly.

Student Union final

Next up is Bradgate Park, which is located just outside of Leicester. I wasn't really sure what to expect when I got there but the place would fit right in with a Skyrim or Fable landscape, I never knew a place like this could exist in the Midlands. After being caught in a mini-tsunami and dodging horny stags on the first trip there I had to make a second outing. When you can sit down and draw the vistas it is a great place to practice drawing landscapes.

Selection of Bradgate thumbs

With the final piece I took the opportunity to improve the composition of the picture. In the view of the trees on the left, the castle could not be seen (it was further right), however I wanted something interesting sitting on the right side of the page as the viewer explored my picture so I shifted the castle across to be included in the scene. I think Jack Hamm, an author of a great book about drawing scenery, explains this very well:

"When the student goes outdoors to sketch, he should not feel bound to the scene before him...certain freedoms may be taken if they are judged to improve the work without apparent distortion to the facts. Be a creator and not a mechanical man devoid of imagination!"  

Jack Hamm, 1972

Bradgate Park final

Life drawing had us working on A1, so scanning them in is not an option. We did have a task of drawing people in public places though, some I think I captured really well while others (mainly center, right page) I struggled with for whatever reason.

Random people and flatmates

This week I took the opportunity to have a mess about in 3DS Max, and after following a tutorial on various uses for modifiers I had this monument sort of thing. The poly count is so high it probably isn't worth mentioning and I didn't have any textures for it... yet.

After a bit of help, and using some of the default textures I had this to show for a days work. It somehow turned into a bizarre, pimped out monument closely related to a hotel reception bell. Time well spent!

At least the magpies will enjoy it

History of Gaming: Part 2.

As promised the next part of my look into the history of gaming will actually involve more on games, with Spacewar being created in the early 60's this paved the way forward for the video gaming scene. Spacewar was so popular that the PDP computers it was built for began shipping it with every machine as a tester program, this made Spacewar a standard in universities and industrial laboratories. Video gaming wasn't out in the open public just yet, as it was restricted to only places with enough money to buy the machines but one man wanted this to change.

After playing Spacewar at University, Nolan Bushnell, a 1968 Utah graduate, had the idea to create an arcade game similar to Spacewar but for fairly priced computers, however this was not doable at the time, as an entire PDP system costed over $100,000. Luckily over the course of the development the cost of this technology improved and the price dropped. The game was titled Computer Space. It wasn't suited for arcade play, as the game was too complicated but the actual cabinet that Computer Space came in set the standard for the future arcade machines. Computer Space was released in 1971 and it was quite clear that this game would not be the hit they wanted it to be. (Lowood, 2009)

Computer Space - Lady in night dress not included [1]

Bushnell and his business partner Ted Dabney founded a new company off the failure of Computer Space. The company was called Syzygy, later renamed to Atari, and had attracted another engineer named Al Alcorn. Bushnell gave Alcorn the task of creating a simple ping-pong game. After a couple of months Alcorn had a working prototype using a standard TV and a couple of other components. (Lowood, 2009)

Pong prototype [2]

The prototype was installed in a local tavern and people queued up to throw coins into it. Pong was a huge success, unlike Spacewar and Computer Space, because it was very simple to understand and play. The entire cabinet was also much cheaper to build, even if it didn't look a funky as the Computer Space cabinet. (Lowood, 2009) By 1972 the Pong cabinets were being sold and this set up Atari to be a major player in the early computer game industry. Following Atari's success many other companies entered the market with their own cabinets, but they struggled to dethrone Atari at this stage. (Haddon, 1987)

During the early 70's the companies like IBM, HP and Xerox had been improving the computer immensely. The size of the computers had now come down to almost desktop size and were beginning to shift from needing multiple people running them to just one. Xerox played a huge role in the advancement of computers with their Pale Alto Research Center (PARC). Away from the peering eyes of the corporate minds the people at PARC were free to think and invent, coming up with a huge range of things, such as laser printers, bitmaps and the Ethernet. One researcher in particular, Charles P. Thacker had created the first personal computer, the Alto, which had a lot of the same functions as a modern PC. (Anthes, Thacker, 2010)

The Alto, almost like a desktop [3]

In 1973 Steve Colley, a NASA intern, had the idea to place people inside a 3D maze using the computers at his disposal. The game wasn't exactly fun to play, yet a couple of Colley's co-workers saw potential in it. They had the idea to place multiple people inside the maze and eventually the idea came about to shoot each other, this was the birth of the FPS, Maze Wars. In '74 Greg Thompson, one of Colley's co-workers, had taken Maze Wars back to MIT where he upgraded it to run on an early version of the internet, using the Alto computer. This caused Maze Wars to explode in popularity as people battled across the MIT and Stanford campus. Maze Wars was picked up by Xerox and it was upgraded and ported to many different computers for over a decade. (Olivetti, 2012)

More like Amaze-Wars! [4]

Atari in 1975 had released the home version of Pong. Bushnell had got computer gaming to the mass market thanks to the inventor Ralph Baer. Baer had created a TV console with a ping pong game, a chase game and even a shooting rifle, the console was named the Magnavox Odysseey and during the Christmas of 75 was in direct competition with the Atari console. Due to Baer patenting the TV videogame during it's creation there were many legal battles throughout the late 70's and the 1980's as he tried to protect his idea. (Lowood, 2009)

Atari's home console was a short term success but people began to lose interest after a while with only one game. The development time for these single-game consoles was also rather long, meaning gamers had droughts. Atari's engineers had come up with the idea to have interchangeable cartridges and in 1977 the VCS Prototype was created, by the end of 77 the Atari 2600 was released. The 2600 did not sell amazingly until 1980, when Atari brought the rights to Space Invaders off Midway. Space Invaders at the time was an arcade only game but still very popular and porting it over to a home console made it a massive hit. (Driscoll, 2002)

The Atari 2600, with modern wooden paneling [5]

The cold war was still dominating Russia, and continued to do so through out the 80's. Even today the Eastern European countries are not well known for their computer skills, with only a handful of video game development companies releasing anything noteworthy. This could be due to the problem of getting the needed equipment into the countries, because of things like "thieving customs officials" and other problems like that. (Rubin, 2013) Japan's silence however was about to be broken, as the 80's brought about the end of the US dominance in the video game industry, which I will look into in part 3.

References & Notes

Edward B Driscoll. (2002). The Atari 2600: The Cartridge Family Rides Again.. Poptronics. 3 (3), 23.

Gary Anthes, Charles P. Thacker. (2010). Committed to Success..Communications of the ACM. 53 (2), 22-23.

Jason Rubin (2013). Jason Rubin: Metro: Last Light is the "triumph of an underdog". Available: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-05-15-jason-rubin-metro-last-light-is-the-triumph-of-an-underdog?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=us-daily Last accessed 1st Nov 2013

Justin Olivetti. (2012). The Game Archaeologist: Maze War. Available: http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/06/12/the-game-archaeologist-maze-war/ . Last accessed 30th Oct 2013.

Henry Lowood. (2009). Videogames in Computer Space: The Complex History of Pong.. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 31 (15), 5-19.

Leslie Haddon. (1987). The History of an Interactive Medium. Electronic and Computers Games. 41, 52-73

[1] Image sourced from http://www.pinrepair.com/arcade/cspace.htm

[2] Image sourced from http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/File:Pong_Prototype.jpg

[3] Image sourced from http://www.cedmagic.com/history/xerox-alto.html

[4] Image sourced from http://theodor.lauppert.ws/games/maze_war.htm

[5] Image sourced from http://throwbackreviews.com/?tag=atari-2600