Video games is a different kind of spending quality time. They are becoming more and more famous by the year.
So let’s find out some more about their history and how they became what they are today.
- Spacewar! was conceived by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen in 1961
- It was programmed primarily by Russell, Saunders, Graetz, Samson, and Dan Edwards in the first half of 1962
- The game was inspired by the science fiction stories of E. E. Smith
- It depicted a duel between two spaceships, each controlled by a player using a custom built control box
- It was immensely popular among students at MIT
- Spacewar! spread to the West Coast later in the year when Russell took a job at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), where it enjoyed similar success
- The program subsequently migrated to other locations around the country through the efforts of both former MIT students and DEC itself
- As computing resources continued to expand over the remainder of the decade through the adoption of time sharing and the development of simpler high-level programming languages like BASIC, an increasing number of college students began programming and sharing simple sports, puzzle, card, logic, and board games as the decade progressed
- These creations remained trapped in computer labs for the remainder of the decade
- However, because even though some adherents of Spacewar! had begun to sense the commercial possibilities of computer games, they could only run on hardware costing hundreds of thousands of dollars
- As computers and their components continued to fall in price, however, the dream of a commercial video game finally became attainable at the start of the 1970s
- By 1970, the introduction of medium scale integration (MSI) transistor–transistor logic (TTL) circuits combining multiple transistors on a single microchip had resulted in another significant reduction in the cost of computing and ushered in a new wave of minicomputers costing under $10,000
- While still far too costly for the home, these advances lowered the cost of computing enough that it could be seriously considered for the coin-operated games industry
- At the time, the industry was experiencing its own technological renaissance as large electro-mechanical target shooting and driving games like Sega Enterprises’s Periscope (1967) and Chicago Coin’s Speedway (1969)
- These games pioneered the adoption of elaborate visual displays and electronic sound effects in the amusement arcade
- Consequently, when a recent engineering graduate from Utah with experience running coin-operated equipment named Nolan Bushnell first saw Spacewar! at SAIL in late 1969 or early 1970, he resolved to build a coin-operated version for public consumption
- Enlisting the aid of an older and more experienced engineer named Ted Dabney, Bushnell built a variant of the game called Computer Space
- In this a single player-controlled spaceship dueled two hardware-controlled flying saucers
- The game was released in late November or early December 1971 through Nutting Associates
- The game failed to have much impact in the coin-operated marketplace
- Meanwhile, Ralph Baer, an engineer with a degree in television engineering working for defense contractor Sanders Associates, had been working since 1966 on a video game system that could be plugged into a standard television set
- Working primarily with technician Bill Harrison, who built most of the actual hardware, Baer developed a series of prototype systems between 1966 and 1969 based around diode–transistor logic (DTL) circuits that sent a video signal to a television set to generate spots on the screen that could be controlled by the players
- Originally able to generate only two spots, the system was modified in November 1967 at the suggestion of engineer Bill Rusch to generate a third spot for use in a table tennis game in which each player controlled a single spot that served as a paddle and volleyed the third spot, which acted as a ball
- In 1971, Sanders concluded a licensing agreement with television company Magnavox to release the system, which reached the market in September 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey
- The system launched with a dozen games included in the box, four more sold with a separate light gun, and six games sold separately, most of which were chase, racing, target shooting, or sports games
- These games were activated using plug-in circuit cards that defined how the spots generated by the hardware would behave
- Due to the limited abilities of the system, which could only render three spots and a line, most of the graphic and gameplay elements were actually defined by plastic overlays attached to the TV set along with accessories like boards, cards, and dice
- Like Computer Space the Odyssey only performed modestly and failed to jump start a new industry
- However, the system did directly influence the birth of a vibrant video arcade game industry after Ralph Baer’s design ingenuity intersected Nolan Bushnell’s entrepreneurial ambition
- In 1972, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney decided to strike out on their own and incorporated their preexisting partnership as Atari
- After seeing a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey ahead of its release, Bushnell charged new hire Allan Alcorn to create a version of that system’s table tennis game as a practice project to familiarize himself with video game design
- Alcorn’s version ended up being so fun that Atari decided to release it as Pong
- Available in limited quantities in late 1972, Pong began reaching the market in quantity in March 1973
- After which it ignited a new craze for ball-and-paddle video games in the coin-operated amusement industry
- The success of Pong did not result in the displacement of traditional arcade amusements like pinball, but did lay the foundation for a successful video arcade game industry
- Roughly 70,000 video games, mostly ball-and-paddle variants, were sold in 1973
- The video arcade game market remained in a state of flux for the remainder of the decade
- The ball-and-paddle market collapsed in 1974 due to market saturation, which led to a significant drop in video game sales
- Smaller manufacturers attempted to compensate by creating “cocktail table” cabinets for sale to non-traditional venues like higher class restaurants and lounges, but this market failed to fully develop
- Larger companies like Atari and Midway turned to new genres to remain successful, especially racing games, one-on-one dueling games, and target shooting games
- Early hits in these genres included Gran Trak 10 (1974) and Tank (1974) from Atari, and Wheels (1975), Gun Fight, (1975) and Sea Wolf (1976) from Midway
- Wheels and Gun Fight were licensed versions of Speed Race and Western Gun developed by the Taito Trading Company of Japan
- This marked the start of Japanese video game penetration into the United States
- Gun Fight was also one of the first arcade games to incorporate a microprocessor,
- Thus starting a shift away from video arcade games engineered using dedicated TTL hardware to video games programmed in software
- The video game was one of several concepts that helped to reform the image of the arcade as a seedy hangout for delinquents
- This in turn aided the growth of arcades in suburban shopping malls
- The principle pioneer of the shopping mall arcade was Jules Millman, who established an arcade in a shopping mall in Harvey, Illinois, in 1969
- By banning eating, drinking, and smoking, and maintaining a full staff at all times to keep an eye on the facilities, Millman created a safe environment where parents could feel safe leaving their older children while browsing other stores in the mall
- Millman founded American Amusements to establish more shopping mall arcades
- It was purchased by Bally in 1974 and renamed Aladdin’s Castle
- Other entrepreneur’s imitated Millman’s format, and arcades became a mainstay of the shopping mall by the end of the decade
- The emergence of solid state pinball in the late 1970s, in which electro-mechanical technologies like relays were replaced by the newly emerging microprocessor, temporarily stole the limelight from video games, which once again entered a period of decline in 1977 and 1978
- While individual games like Atari’s Breakout (1976) and Cinematronics’ Space Wars (1978) sold in large numbers during this period, overall profitability began to lag
- The market surged once again, however, after the introduction of the Taito game Space Invaders by Midway in 1979
- The Magnavox Odyssey never caught on with the public, due largely to the limited functionality of its primitive technology
- By the middle of the 1970s, however, the ball-and-paddle craze in the arcade had ignited public interest in video games and continuing advances in integrated circuits had resulted in large-scale integration (LSI) microchips cheap enough to be incorporated into a consumer product
- In 1975, Magnavox reduced the part count of the Odyssey using a three-chip set created by Texas Instruments and released two new systems that only played ball-and-paddle games, the Magnavox Odyssey 100 and Magnavox Odyssey 200
- Atari, meanwhile, entered the consumer market that same year with the single-chip Home Pong system designed by Harold Lee
- The next year, General Instrument released a “Pong-on-a-chip” LSI and made it available at a low price to any interested company
- Toy company Coleco Industries used this chip to create the million-selling Telstar console model series (1976–77)
- Overall, sales of dedicated ball-and-paddle systems in the U.S. grew from 350,000 in 1975 to a peak of 5- 6 million in 1977
- A similar boom hit the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, with much of the market supplied by clone manufacturers in Hong Kong
- After 1977, the dedicated console market in the United States collapsed
- A new wave of programmable systems hit the market starting with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976 that offered the possibility of purchasing and playing a wider variety of games stored on cartridges containing mask ROM that could be plugged directly into the CPU of the console
- As older model dedicated consoles were heavily discounted and consumers with more purchasing power transitioned to the new programmable systems, newer dedicated systems with more advanced features like Video Pinball from Atari and the Magnavox Odyssey 4000 were squeezed out by their lower priced predecessors and their more sophisticated programmable replacements
- This caused a brief dip in the market and the exit of industry leader Coleco, which failed to transition to programmable hardware
- Fairchild remained in the new programmable market alongside Atari and Magnavox
- These companies released the VCS (1977) and Odyssey2 (1978) respectively
- By 1978, video games were well established in the U.S. coin-operated amusement industry, but their popularity was secondary to the industry stalwarts of pool and pinball
- That changed with the introduction of a new game developed in Japa
- While video games had been introduced to Japan soon after hitting the United States, the Japanese arcade industry had remained primarily focused on electro-mechanical driving and shooting games and a type of slot machine called the “medal game” that accepted and paid out in medals instead of currency so as not to be classified as a gambling game
- In 1977, the arrival of Breakout, distributed locally by the Nakamura Manufacturing Company, and the advent of table-top game units, pioneered by Taito, created new demand for video games in snack bars and tea houses
- Taito designer Tomohiro Nishikado decided to build on the popularity of Breakout by replacing the paddle in the game with a gun battery and the bricks in the game with rows of aliens that descended line-by-line while firing at the player
- Taito released this game in 1978 as Space Invaders
- Space Invaders introduced or popularized several important concepts in arcade video games
- These include play regulated by lives instead of a timer or set score, gaining extra lives through accumulating points, and the tracking of the high score achieved on the machine
- It was also the first game to confront the player with waves of targets that shot back at the player and the first to include background music during game play, albeit a simple four-note loop
- With its intense game play and competitive scoring features, Space Invaders became a national phenomenon
- Over 200,000 invader games entered Japanese game centers by the middle of 1979
- While not quite as popular in the United States, Space Invaders became the biggest hit the industry had seen since the Great Depression as Midway
- The game moved over 60,000 cabinets
- The one-two punch of Space Invaders and the Atari game Asteroids (1979) resulted in video arcade games completely displacing pinball and other amusements to become the central attraction of not just the shopping mall arcade
- Asteroids moved 70,000 units and popularized the recording of multiple high scores in a table
- Many of the best-selling games of 1980 and 1981 such as Galaxian (1979), Defender (1980), Missile Command (1980), Tempest (1981), and Galaga (1981) focused on shooting mechanics and achieving high scores
- Starting with Pac Man in 1980 a new wave of games appeared that focused on identifiable characters and alternate mechanics such as navigating a maze or traversing a series of platforms
- Pac Man sold 96,000 units in the United States
- Aside from Pac Man and its sequel, Ms. Pac-Man (1982), the most popular games in this vein were Donkey Kong (1981) and Q*bert (1982)
- According to trade publication Vending Times, revenues generated by coin-operated video games on location in the United States jumped from $308 million in 1978 to $968 million in 1979 to $2.8 billion in 1980
- As Pac Man ignited an even larger video game craze and attracted more female players to arcades, revenues jumped again to $4.9 billion in 1981
- According to trade publication Play Meter, by July 1982, total coin-op collections peaked at $8.9 billion
- Of these $7.7 billion came from video games
- Meanwhile, the number of arcades more than doubled between July 1981 and July 1983 from over 10,000 to just over 25,000
- These figures made arcade games the most popular entertainment medium in the country, far surpassing both pop music (at $4 billion in sales per year) and Hollywood films ($3 billion)
- After the collapse of the dedicated console market in 1978, focus in the home shifted to the new programmable systems, in which game data was stored on ROM-based cartridges
- Fairchild semiconductor struck first in this market with the Channel F, but after losing millions in the digital watch business, the company took a conservative approach to the programmable console market and kept production runs of the system low
- As a result, by the end of 1977, Fairchild had only sold about 250,000 systems
- Atari followed Fairchild into the market in 1977 and sold between 340,000 and 400,000 systems that year
- Magnavox joined the programmable market in 1978 with the Odyssey2
- While toy company Mattel released the Intellivision in 1979, which featured graphics superior to any of its competitors
Video games trivia | 100 did you know facts (part 3)
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