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