History Of Computer Games: Part 2

In the previous Game History Blog I covered the very early beginnings of computers and games. Games were simply the doodles of engineers expressing our natural interest in the possibility of playing against inanimate objects.

The next major steps like any fledging new technology are vast.

Spacewar!(Above) from 1962 is important because it’s the first sci-fi game, it’s not based on any sports or any other real life situation. The game was played on a Dec Pdp-1(Below) a “mini” computer only found in laboratories and commercial environments. Although referred to at the time as a Minicomputer these were still the size of small rooms, and extremely expensive. Despite this small audience the game was still successful, with the game made available by Dec.

Steve Russel the designer of Spacewar! later introduced computer game programming to a student called Nolan Bushnell. Nolan went on to create Pong in 1972 and founded Atari. He is considered to have begun the commercial gaming industry. Pong however was not his first commercial gaming venture. The year prior with an engineer called Ted Dabney he had created an arcade game called Computer Space. Although computer space wasn’t a huge success it was the first commercial coin operated computer gaming system, and thus the beginning of the arcade.

During this early period there seems to be a lot of “borrowing” of ideas. Computer Space, Atari’s Asteroids 1979, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tucks Galaxy Game 1971 (Which was the first coin operated gaming system, it just wasn’t really a commercial venture as it was only available to play at Stanford University) and many other games from this period are all basically clones of Spacewar!

Pong wasn’t even original game play, as this was stolen from Ralph Baer’s Magnavox Odyssey’s home system tennis game.  Ralph Baer at this point successfully sued Atari for patent infringement, as well as many other gaming companies over this decade including Nintendo. Nintendo interestingly as their defence stated that Ralph Baer’s Tennis Game was simply a copy of an even earlier tennis game, William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two from 1958.

(Picture Shows the box, console, controllers and all the accessories which came with the Magnavox Odyssey, including cards, scoring sheets and screen overlays for colour play).

But what about PC gaming? Well this requires the existence of a PC (personal computer) that’s accessible for home use.  Xerox PARK a research and development company designed what we today call a PC, this materialised as the Xerox Alto (Above) in 1973. It had a mouse, Monitor (wrong way round), keyboard and a separate computer cabinet, and all this could fit with in the area of a standard desk. But this was not for home use, and would not have been bought by individuals; the Xerox Alto was for commercial use only.

The Apple 1 is the first computer available to anybody, well anybody willing to hand Steve Jobs $500 in 1976. Your Apple 1 would then be made out of wood by Steve Woznak in his garage. Below is an advertisement for the Apple 1, it’s interesting because it states Gaming as one of its primary functions.

The Apple 1 came about after Steve Jobs was given a tour of the Xerox PARK facility in Silicon Valley California and shown the Xerox Alto. Jobs saw an opportunity here where amazingly Xerox didn’t.

“If Xerox had known what it had and had taken advantage of its real opportunities”, Jobs said years later, “it could have been as big as I.B.M. plus Microsoft plus Xerox combined-and the largest high-technology company in the world.”

The Magnavox Odyssey, Pong, and the Apple 1 bring us to a gaming world we could recognise today. In 18 years we have gone from games being something engineers could play in their laboratories with Spacewars! In 1958. To average Joe being able to game at their local arcade and even in their own homes on their dedicated gaming console or on their PC.

Gaming has arrived and is part of popular culture.

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