A Brief History of the Computer by John Dixon - HTML preview

Computer Games

Although the history of computer and video games spans five decades, computer and video games themselves did not become part of the popular culture until the late 1970s. Over the past three or four decades, video games have become extremely popular, either in the form of hand held consoles, or with games that run on computers or attached to TVs. The range of games available is also immense, with action, strategy, adventure, and sports games being very popular. In this chapter we will look at how computer and other video games have evolved since the 1960s.

Computer Games: The Beginning

1947 is believed to be the year when the first game was designed for playing on a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). This very simple game was designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. A patent application was filed on January 25th, 1947 and U.S. Patent #2 455 992 issued on Dec 14th, 1948.

Though the filing date was in 1947, the game was probably designed earlier in 1946. The system used eight vacuum tubes (four 6Q5 triodes and four 6V6 tetrodes) and simulated a missile being fired at a target, probably inspired by radar displays used during World War II. Several knobs allowed for adjusting the curve and speed of the moving point representing the missile. Because graphics could not be drawn electronically at the time, small targets drawn on a simple overlay were placed on the CRT by the builder of this game. It is believed to be the earliest system specifically designed for game play on a CRT screen.

A.S. Douglas developed OXO - a graphical version of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) - in 1952 at the University of Cambridge in order to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. It was played on the now archaic EDSAC computer, which used a cathode ray tube for a visual display. In spite of its technological antiquity, the game is still playable on an emulator available on the Internet.

Many people attribute the invention of the video game to William Higinbotham, who, in 1958, created a game called Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope to entertain visitors at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Unlike Pong and similar early games, Tennis for Two shows a simplified tennis court from the side. The ball is affected by gravity and must be played over the net. The game is played with two bulky controllers each equipped with a knob for trajectory and a button for firing the ball over the net. Tennis for Two was exhibited for two seasons before its dismantling in 1959.

Figure 5-1 � Tennis for Two

The 1960s

Many of the earliest computer games ran on university mainframes in the United States and were developed by individual users who programmed them in their spare time. However, the limited accessibility of early computer hardware meant that these games were few and easily forgotten by posterity.

In 1961, a group of students at MIT, including Steve Russell, programmed a game called Spacewar! on the then-new DEC PDP-1. The game pitted two human players against each other, each controlling a space ship capable of firing missiles. A black hole in the center created a large gravitational field and another source of hazard.

Figure 5-2 � Spacewar!

Spacewar! was soon distributed with new DEC computers and traded throughout primitive cyberspace. Presented at the MIT Science Open House in 1962, it was the first widely available and influential game.

One of the developers of Multics, Ken Thompson, continued to develop the operating system after AT&T stopped funding it. His work focused on development of the OS for the GE-645 mainframe. He actually wanted to play a game he was writing called Space Travel. Though the game was never released commercially (and apparently costing $75 per go on the mainframe), the game's development led to the invention of the UNIX operating system.

In 1966, Ralph Baer (then at Sanders Associates) created a simple video game called Chase that could be displayed on a standard television set. Baer continued development, and in 1968 he had a prototype that could play several different games, including versions of table tennis and target shooting. Under Baer, Bill Harrison developed the light gun and, with Bill Rusch, created video games in 1967.

The 1970s

Coin-Operated Games: Dawn of a Golden Age

By 1969 Ralph Baer had a working prototype console that hooked up to a TV set and played ball and paddle games. This prototype was sold to Magnavox who released it in May 1972 as the Odyssey - the world's first videogame console.

In 1971 Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created a coin-operated arcade version of Spacewar! and called it Computer Space. Nutting Associates bought the game, hired Bushnell, and manufactured 1,500 Computer Space machines. The game was not a success because many people found it difficult to play.

Nolan Bushnell attended a demonstration of the Odyssey in Burlingame California in January 1972. He played video Ping-Pong but found it uninteresting and unimaginative.

As Bushnell felt he did not receive enough pay by licensing games to other manufacturers, he founded his own company, Atari, in 1972. The first arcade video game with widespread success was Atari's Pong, released the same year. The game is loosely based around table tennis: ball is "served" from the center of the court and as the ball moves towards their side of the court each player must manoeuvre their bat to hit the ball back to their opponent. Atari sold 19,000 Pong machines, and soon many imitators followed. The coin-operated arcade video game craze had begun.

Exidy's Death Race (1976) sparked the first controversy over gratuitous violence in a video game because the object of the game was to run over "gremlins" - who looked more like pedestrians - with a car. The controversy increased public awareness of video games and has never ceased to be debated.

The arcade game industry entered its Golden Age in 1978 with the release of Space Invaders by Taito. This game was a runaway blockbuster hit that inspired dozens of manufacturers to enter the market and produce their own video games. The Golden Age was marked by a prevalence of arcades and new color arcade games that continued through the 1980s.

Figure 5-3 � Space Invaders

Also in 1978, Atari released Asteroids, its biggest best-seller. It replaced the game Lunar Lander as the number one arcade hit. Color arcade games became more popular in 1979 and 1980 (e.g. Pac-Man).

Other arcade classics of the late 1970s include Night Driver, Galaxian, and Breakout.

Games on University Mainframe Computers

University mainframe game development blossomed in the early 1970s. The history of this era is difficult to write in a comprehensive way for several reasons:

�         Until the late 1970s, game programmers never received any money for their work. The reward for designers of this era was praise from friends and an occasional fan letter from students at another university.

�         There is little record of all but the most popular games, since they were played on machines which are no longer operated and saved on tapes that no longer exist.

�         There were at least two major distribution networks for the student game designers of this time, and schools typically had access to only one brand of hardware and one supply of shared games. Many websites dedicated to the history of games focus solely on one system or the other, because the authors never had access to the "parallel universe" of the other hardware platform. The two largest systems were:

�         The PLATO System supported by Control Data Corporation under the support of William Norris and largely running on CDC mainframe computers, and

�         The DECUS software sharing system run by Digital Equipment Corporation for schools and other institutions utilizing DEC computers such as the PDP-10.

Highlights of this period, in approximate chronological order, include:

�         1971: Don Daglow wrote the first Computer Baseball game on a PDP-10 mainframe at Pomona College. Players could manage individual games or simulate an entire season. Daglow went on to team with programmer Eddie Dombrower to design Earl Weaver Baseball, published by Electronic Arts in 1987.

�         1971: Star Trek was created, probably by Mike Mayfield on a Sigma 7 minicomputer at MIT. This is the best-known and most widely played of the 1970s� Star Trek titles, and was played on a series of small "maps" of galactic sectors printed on paper or on the screen. It was the first major game to be ported across hardware platforms by students. Daglow also wrote a popular Star Trek game for the PDP-10 during 1971-72, which presented the action as a script spoken by the TV program's characters. A number of other Star Trek themed games were also available via PLATO and DECUS throughout the decade.

�         1972: Gregory Yob wrote Hunt the Wumpus for the PDP-10; a hide-and-seek game, though it could be considered the first text adventure. Yob wrote it in reaction to existing hide-and-seek games such as Hurkle, Mugwump, and Snark.

�         1974: Both Maze War (on the Imlacs PDS-1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California) and Spasim (on PLATO) appeared, pioneering examples of early multi-player 3D first person shooters.

�         1975: Will Crowther wrote the first text adventure game as we would recognize it today, Adventure (originally called ADVENT, and later Colossal Cave). It was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. The player controls the game through simple sentence-like text commands and receives descriptive text as output. The game was later re-created by students on PLATO, so it is one of the few titles that became part of both the PLATO and PDP-10 traditions.

�         1975: Before the mid-1970s, games typically communicated to the player on paper, using teletype machines or a line printer, at speeds ranging from 10 to 30 characters per second with a rat-a-tat-tat sound as a metal ball or belt with characters was pressed against the paper through an inked ribbon by a hammer. By 1975 many universities had discarded these terminals for CRT screens, which could display thirty lines of text in a few seconds instead of the minute or more that printing on paper required. This led to the development of a series of games that drew "graphics" on the screen.

�         1975: Daglow, then a student at Claremont Graduate University, wrote the first Computer Role Playing Game on PDP-10 mainframes, Dungeon. The game was an unlicensed implementation of the new role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Although displayed in text, it was the first game to use line of sight graphics, top-down dungeon maps that showed the areas that the party had seen or could see, allowing for light or darkness, the different vision of elves and dwarves, etc. 1975: At about the same time the RPG dnd, also based on Dungeons and Dragons first appeared on PLATO system CDC computers. For players in these schools dnd, not Dungeon, was the first computer role-playing game.

�         1977: Kelton Flinn and John Taylor create the first version of Air; a text air combat game that foreshadowed their later work, creating the first-ever graphical online multi-player game, Air Warrior. They would found the first successful online game company, Kesmai, now part of Electronic Arts. As Flinn has said: "If Air Warrior was a primate swinging in the trees, AIR was the text-based amoeba crawling on the ocean floor. But it was quasi-real time, multi-player, and attempted to render 3-D on the terminal using ASCII graphics. It was an acquired taste."

�         1977: The writing of the original Zork was started by Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Tim Anderson, and Bruce Daniels. Unlike Crowther, Daglow and Yob, the Zork team recognized the potential to move these games to the new personal computers, and they founded text adventure publisher Infocom in 1979. The company was later sold to Activision. In a classic case of "connections", Lebling was a member of the same D&D group as Will Crowther, but not at the same time. Lebling has been quoted as saying "I think I actually replaced him when he dropped out. Zork was 'derived' from Advent in that we played Advent... and tried to do a 'better' one. There was no code borrowed... and we didn't meet either Crowther or Woods until much later."

�         1980: Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman and Ken Arnold released Rogue on BSD Unix after two years of work, inspiring many rogue like games ever since. Like Dungeon on the PDP-10 and did on PLATO, Rogue displayed dungeon maps using text characters. Unlike those games, however, the dungeon was randomly generated for each play session, so the path to treasure and the enemies who protected it were different for each game. As the Zork team had done, Rogue was adapted for home computers and became a commercial product.

Early Handheld Games

The first portable, handheld electronic game was Tic Tac Toe, made in 1972 by a company called Waco. The display consisted of a grid of nine buttons that could turn red or green when pushed. The first handheld game console with interchangeable cartridges was the Microvision designed by Smith Engineering, and distributed and sold by Milton-Bradley in 1979. Crippled by a small, fragile LCD display and a very narrow selection of games, it was discontinued two years later. Although neither would prove popular, they paved the way for more advanced single-game handhelds, often simply called "LED games" or "LCD games" depending on their display system.

Mattel had seen car-race games in arcades and wanted to mass-produce something similar, but a video-game version would have been too costly. In 1974, Mattel engineers George Klose and Richard Cheng contracted with John Denker to write the Mattel Auto Race game as we know it, played on a 7x3 array of LED dots. Mark Lesser at Rockwell International Microelectronics Division ported the code to a calculator chip. The program was 512 bytes long. Subsequently, the same team produced Mattel Football I, which sold well over one million units and ushered in a short golden age of LED handheld games, especially sports games. At first composed of simple arrangements of LEDs, later games incorporated vacuum fluorescent displays allowing for detailed graphics in bright colors. The heyday of LED and VFD would last until the early 80s, when LCD technology became cheap and durable enough to be a viable alternative.

Gaming on Home Computers

While the fruit of development in early video games appeared mainly (for the consumer) in video arcades and home consoles, the rapidly evolving home computers of the 1970s and 80s allowed their owners to program simple games. Hobbyist groups for the new computers soon formed and game software followed.

Soon many of these games (at first clones of mainframe classics such as Star Trek, and then later clones of popular arcade games) were being distributed through a variety of channels, such as printing the game's source code in books (such as David Ahl's Basic Computer Games), magazines (Creative Computing), and newsletters, which allowed users to type in the code for themselves. Early game designers like Crowther, Daglow and Yob would find the computer code for their games -- which they had never thought to copyright -- published in books and magazines, with their names removed from the listing. Early home computers from Apple, Commodore, Tandy and others had many games that people typed in.

Another distribution channel was the physical mailing and selling of floppy disks, cassette tapes and ROM cartridges. Soon a small cottage industry was formed, with amateur programmers selling disks in plastic bags put on the shelves of local shops, or sent through the mail. Richard Garriott distributed several copies of his 1980 computer role-playing game Akalabeth in plastic bags before the game was published.

The First Home Video Games (1972-1977)

1972 also saw the release of the first video game console for the home market, the Magnavox Odyssey. Built using mainly analog electronics, it was based on Ralph Baer's earlier work and licensed from his employer. The console was connected to a home television set. It was not a large success, although other companies with similar products (including Atari) had to pay a licensing fee for some time. It wasn't until Atari's home version of Pong (at first under the Sears Tele-Games label) in Christmas of 1975 that home video games really took off. The success of Pong sparked hundreds of clone games, including the Coleco Telstar, which went on to be a success in its own right, with over a dozen models.

Early 8-bit Home Consoles (1977-1983)

Home video-game systems became popular during the 1970s and 80s. In the earliest consoles, the computer code for one or more games was hardcoded into microchips using discreet logic, and no additional games could ever be added. By the mid-1970s, video games were found on cartridges. Programs were burned onto ROM chips that were mounted inside plastic cartridge casings that could be plugged into slots on the console. When the cartridges were plugged in, the general-purpose microprocessors in the consoles read the cartridge memory and ran whatever program was stored there. Rather than being confined to a small selection of games included in the box, consumers could now amass libraries of game cartridges.

The Fairchild VES was the world's first cartridge-based video game console. It was released by Fairchild Semiconductor in August 1976. When Atari released their VCS the next year, Fairchild quickly re-named it to the Fairchild Channel F.

In 1977, Atari released its cartridge-based console called the Video Computer System (VCS), later called Atari 2600. Nine games were designed and released for the holiday season. It would quickly become by far the most popular of all the early consoles.

In 1978, Magnavox released its cartridge-based console, the Odyssey 2, in the United States and Canada. Philips Electronics released this same game console as the Videopac G7000 in many European countries. Although it never became as popular as Atari, it managed to sell several million units through 1983.

In 1979, Activision was created by disgruntled former Atari programmers. It was the first third-party developer of video games. Many new developers would follow their lead in succeeding years.

The next major entry was Intellivision, introduced by Mattel in 1980. Though chronologically part of what is called the "8-bit era", the Intellivision had a unique processor with instructions that were 10 bits wide (allowing more instruction variety and potential speed), and registers 16 bits wide. The system, which featured graphics superior to the older Atari 2600, rocketed to popularity.

Unique among home systems of the time was the Vectrex, the only one to feature vector graphics.

1982 saw the introduction of the Colecovision, an even more powerful machine. Its sales also took off, but the presence of three major consoles in the marketplace and a glut of poor quality games began to overcrowd retail shelves and erode consumers' interest in video games. Within a year this overcrowded market would crash.

The popularity of early consoles was strongly influenced by their ports of arcade games. The 2600 was the first with Space Invaders, and the Colecovision had Donkey Kong.

Early cartridges were 2KB ROMs for Atari 2600 and 4K for Intellivision. This upper limit grew steadily from 1978 to 1983, up to 16KB for Atari 2600 and Intellivision, 32KB for Colecovision. Bank switching, a technique that allowed two different parts of the program to use the same memory addresses was required for the larger cartridges to work.

In the game consoles, high RAM prices at the time limited the RAM (memory) capacity of the systems to a tiny amount, often less than a Kilobyte. Although the cartridge size limit grew steadily, the RAM limit was part of the console itself and all games had to work within its constraints.

By 1982 a glut of games from new third-party developers less well-prepared than Activision began to appear, and began to overflow the shelf capacity of toy stores.

In part because of these oversupplies, the video game industry crashed, starting from Christmas of 1982 and stretching through all of 1983.

The 1980s

In the early 1980s, the computer gaming industry experienced its first major growing pains. Publishing houses appeared, with many honest businesses (and in rare cases such as Electronic Arts, successfully surviving to this day) alongside fly-by-night operations that cheated the games' developers. While some early 80s games were simple clones of existing arcade titles, the relatively low publishing costs for personal computer games allowed for many bold, unique games; a legacy that continues to this day. The primary gaming computers of the 1980s emerged in 1982: the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

The golden age of arcade games reached its full steam in the 1980s, with many technically innovative and genre-defining games in the first few years of the decade. Defender (1980) established the scrolling shooter and was the first to have events taking place outside the player's view, displayed by a radar view showing a map of the whole playfield. Battlezone (1980) used wireframe vector graphics to create the first true three-dimensional game world. 3D Monster Maze (1981) was the first 3D game for a home computer, while Dungeons of Daggorath (1982) added various weapons and monsters, sophisticated sound effects, and a "heartbeat" health monitor. Pole Position (1982) used sprite-based, pseudo-3D graphics when it pioneered the "rear-view racer format" where the player's view is behind and above the vehicle, looking forward along the road with the horizon in sight. The style would remain in wide use even after true 3D graphics became standard for racing games. Pac-Man (1980) was the first game to achieve widespread popularity in mainstream culture and the first game character to be popular in his own right. Dragon's Lair (1983) was the first laserdisc game, and introduced full-motion video to video games.

With Adventure establishing the genre, the release of Zork in 1980 further popularized text adventure games in home computers and established developer Infocom's dominance in the field. As these early computers often lacked graphical capabilities, text adventures proved successful. When affordable computers started catching up to and surpassing the graphics of consoles in the late 1980s, the games' popularity waned in favor of graphic adventures and other genres. The text adventure would eventually be known as interactive fiction and a small dedicated following has kept the genre going, with new releases being nearly all free.

Also published in 1980 was Roberta Williams' Mystery House, for the Apple II. It was the first graphic adventure on home computers. Graphics consisted entirely of static monochrome drawings, and the interface still used the typed commands of text adventures. It proved very popular at the time, and she and husband Ken went on to found Sierra On-Line, a major producer of adventure games. Mystery House remains largely forgotten today.

In August of 1982, the Commodore 64 was released to the public. It found initial success because it was marketed and priced aggressively. It had a BASIC programming environment and advanced graphic and sound capabilities for its time, similar to the Colecovision console. It would become the most popular home computer of its day in the USA and many other countries and the best-selling single computer model of all time internationally.

At around the same