A Brief History of how video games came about!

The history of computer games 1940s-1970s

As with all great things, they all have small beginnings. It all started back in 1947, more than 60 years ago 2 American’s namely Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann (Heh, Rayman :D) requested for an invention they described as a “cathode ray tube amusement device” (which sounds like quite a fun torturing device) This was issued on December 14^th 1948 and it was described as a machine which had knobs and buttons to control the cathode ray tube beam much like an Etch a Sketch and would simulate firing at airborne targets.

Thomas T Goldsmith, Jr

Goldsmith and Ray Mann were both engineering students at Furman University. They both were inspired by radar displays used in WW2. It’s funny to think how the world’s best inventions were originally created for war and destruction or at least originated from war, such as the internet and computers for example. Oh humans.

In 1952 A.S Douglas from the University of Cambridge created the world’s first graphical computer game. Tic-Tac-Toe. He was another University student and was writing his PhD degree on human-computer interaction and wanted to demonstrate his Thesis with the game. The game was programmed on an EDSAC vacuum tube computer which had a cathode ray tube display. The player would compete against the computer which was a big step towards the entertainment factor.

TX-0 Computer

By 1955 the TX-0 was created it was designed at MIT Lincoln laboratory and whilst previous computers would require a whole floor of equipment and machinery just to run itself, the TX-0 was the first computers that was significantly reduced in size and would fit in a smaller room as well as being able to run faster than the previous computers!  We still see the development today, technology is getting smaller and faster every year now. It’s basically in overdrive!

I think one of the big early games was Tennis for Two which eventually led to the making of Pong in the 70s. It was created using an oscilloscope and analog computer by William Higinbotham in 1958 and was used to entertain visitors of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. He was an American Physicist and he was another man who created his game to entertain, just like Goldsmith and Ray Mann.

As we can see the majority of computer games so far were created by university students as their hobbies and were run at labs at universities, it wasn’t really a system where people would play in their homes or anywhere locally as of yet. They would require the universities mainframe computers to run on which meant they were small in number and they weren’t regarded as important or popular by the public.

Spacewar!

1961 saw the creation of a game called “Spacewar!” on a new computer called the PDP-1 it was developed by Steve Russell with a group a students at MIT, yet more university graduates. The game was one of the first to start of the Player vs. Player era as it put two human players controlling spacecrafts. It was eventually distributed with the new DEC computers and traded on the primitive Internet! Which is quite amazing to think that they had a basic internet back then.

By the end of the 60s we saw the creation of more prototype games and several new computers and things were getting smaller and easier to handle. The prospect of video games running on consoles at arcades or at home was becoming more apparent.

 In September 1971 Galaxy Game the earliest known coin operated computer game console was installed at Stanford University, two months before the release of “Computer Space” which was created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, It was the first mass produced video game which was based on “Spacewar!” Nutting Associates had bought the game and manufactured 1500 copies of Computer space machines, while it was unsuccessful due to its difficulty it was the first mass produced video game.

Bushnell and Dabney went on and founded Atari, Inc in 1972 before releasing one of the most successful and well known games around: Pong. It was the first game which was widely successful. Atari went on to sell over 19000 Pong machines. And I have to say it was one of the more enjoyable retro games I’ve played. Well even if it was a imitation of the real pong.

The next big game was Gun Fight, probably the first pioneering games of the FPS Genre. As it was an on foot multi directional shooter designed by a Japanese, Tomohiro Nishikado and was released in 1975. It included game characters and violence and human combat. Which evolved the outlook on videogames, Developers were starting to think outside the box instead of just plain old animated squares and rockets. Gun Fight was then adapted for the American release using the Intel 8080 making it the first game to use a micro-processor

Nishikado was soon inspired to use a microprocessor for the blockbuster hit in 1978 Space Invaders which grossed $2billion worldwide by 1982. Damn! That’s a hell of a lot for one of the earliest video games! What a start! We can always count of the Japanese to do things 10x better than everyone else haha

Gun Fight

The first home console was created by Raph Baer and his associates back in 1968 and it was a working prototype called the “Brown Box” it was eventually licensed by Magnavox and  By the end of the 70s they had created and sold over 2 million copies of the first consoles. The Magnavox Odyssey! 

So we now have 2 huge video game manufacture’s Atari and Magnavox competing against each other, It was going well until a couple of crashes in the industry came along due to consistent clones of existing games like Pong. This led to significant losses in the market. Luckily Atari revived the home video game market with Space Invaders.

The golden era of video games was almost over and the arcade console era was awaiting everyone in the 80s. 

Magnavox Odyssey

The origin of video games did start with university science students who were ambitious and thought outside the box for a change, and they developed and created new technologies thanks to their hobbies and love for computers and fun. I think that’s how most technological developments in today’s world came about, with ambition and a simple concept/idea.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post and learned a thing or two about where computer games originated from. Next time I shall talk more about the golden age of computer games and arcade games!

  Sources:

http://geek-life.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/tennisgame.jpg

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/still-image/dec/pdp-1_online/tx-0.two_men_working_on_computer.1980.102631218.lg.jpg

 http://www.movingimage.us/images/exhibitions/media/spacewar-detail-main.jpg

 http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/image_content_width/hash/ce/fe/cefe51a5f02ea19ae108984cc2827b71.jpg

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/10/106002/1503030-gun_fight_3.jpg 

http://www.playerschoicegames.com/magnavoxodyssey1.jpg

The Journey Begins

About me

Hey there everyone! My name is Rajesh Parmar, I’m 18 years old and I’m in my first year of studying Game Art Design at De Montfort University. I live in Leicester, so that’s right I didn’t need to move to another city and do the whole student move thing cause DMU is in my home town. Woo!

A Game Artist you say now!?  How did that all begin?

Demontfort University

Well it began in a strange way, I wasn’t always aspiring to be an artist when I was young; in fact I had never even taken art at GCSE’s. Art was just a side hobby for me which I loved to do, although I never really took it seriously. I thought I would end up doing science or computing and eventually end up in some dead end office job so I could have a “normal life” just like the rest of the herd. At the time I was really confused and in limbo. Being forced to decide your future so early was quite scary and worrying.

Arena time in WoW

But it was all thanks to one game which changed my whole career path the biggest MMORPG around at the time and I think everyone knows what I’m talking about. Yep. You guessed it. “World of Warcraft” Now I wasn’t the type of person who thought “OMG I want to work for blizzard and make 3D models and draw landscapes and characters and SHIZ! Drawing concept art all day!”

 It all began from wanting to make videos of me player killing in WoW since I’d seen other people post a lot of amazing videos of them doing some crazy PVP (player vs. player) in WoW with crazy video editing shots. I thought to myself that’s what I want to do. I want to be a video editor and create awesome CG effects for movies and TV shows when I grow up.  But by the time I had realised this I had already chosen what my work experience placement was. And it REALLY was an eye opener. I actually went into work experience working for a financial aid company as a clerk…

…Well let’s just say those were the most boring 2 weeks of my life and I thought to myself I don’t want to be doing something like this for the rest of my life. It was driving me crazy! I thought I don’t care about money? What’s so good about money if you don’t have happiness? Especially if you hate going into to work every day. The thought of doing that for the rest of my life was horrible. I could only see misery. So like most people on earth I was on a quest for a happy life.

So a year later I decided at A levels to fling myself into Art to pursue this career of being a CG animator, luckily I somehow got in thanks to a C in my D&T grade at GCSE and I have to say painting for the first time after 12 years was strange. But I was used to all the drawing with pencils. What kept me going was my competitive attitude. I really hated being 3^rd or 4^th I wanted to be the very best like no one ever was! (8)… wait what..?

It did help me quite a bit but procrastination got the better hand of me.. All my life and still to this day I had never put in my full 100% of potential. I was a particularly lazy person who would leave things to the last minute like an idiot. I hated having things unfinished and I don’t know why… I left things till the last day or 2 all the time. I really developed this laziness during summer and I really want to curb it and destroy it.

During the first term of sixth form college, I saw a random advert on TV called “Train2Game” and it was basically offering a course on animation, programming or game development to get into the games industry which intrigued me and I had to find out more, I saw that the games industry was booming at the time and I did some research and eventually came to the conclusion I may want to work in the games industry, but I wasn’t entirely sure.

A week later I heard someone was coming from DMU to talk about the Game Art Design course they had, Heather actually came down to our college to talk about the course and I thought what the hell is this? Some kind of divine intervention from the gods of gaming?

I skipped my maths class to go hear her talk about being in the games industry and I was the only one who was asking all the questions when her lecture finished, everyone else looked like zombies. I was surprised when she mentioned the employ-ability after university; even if it didn’t have the most amazing pay it looked pretty nice to get into, especially in the economic climate, having a job in the games industry straight after university would be awesome.

 So I came to the conclusion that I want to work in the games industry. Sure does beat working in some crappy office block filing reports on the computer and this would probably be the best option after choosing to do an art career.

Megaman X - My Favourite SNES game

While like most other people on the course I grew up with games thanks to my older brother who got me into gaming with the SNES, Still my favourite console up to this date, I used to spend hours and hours playing Megaman X, Super Metroid, Super Mario All-stars and many more classics on that lovely old box and never got bored of them. That was until I discovered the wonders of PC gaming. I think the PC shaped me to be who I am today as all I would be glued onto the screen for days and days. The first game I had on PC was an indie 3D space arcade shooter called “G-TOK” the graphics looked absolutely amazing cause I’d never seen 3D before and then my first real time strategy games, Worms Armageddon, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, then came Quake 3 Arena :3 But enough about games cause I could write a whole list of games I’ve played but I will save that for a later blog entry.

What about other interests?

I think my other main obsession apart from games would be watching anime and reading manga. That was and still is a big part of my life, I just loved the Japanese cartoons so much more, as they were so much more serious and cooler than the normal stuff you see on TV nowadays. It was like a whole new interesting world out there. I loved it so much that in fact I started to write my own manga novel out. It’s called “Warlock” but I haven’t worked on it in a year and it’s still pretty much just random idea’s and plot twists. But when I do have time I really want to write a story out in future. It’s just something that I want to do even though I haven’t read that many books. I just love stories. I wish I had read more books when I was younger but I always put them off.

Code Geass - The best anime ever!

My favourite anime is “Code Geass” at the moment, the amount of thought put into that is just crazy. The plot, characters are so unique and amazing. It’s something I’ve never seen done before.

Though I have been watching other big American drama series like “Breaking bad” and “Dexter” which are amazingly thought out. I love a good plot twist. And I love anti-heros!

My favourite movie at the moment has to be Star Trek 2009. That movie was brilliant and action packed right through to the end! Even though its star trek its nothing like the TV series. It’s a must watch.

When it comes to music, I was mainly brought up with rock songs from my brother when I was younger, with bands like Foo Fighters, Blink 182, Sum 41, Nirvana, Queens of the stone age etc. But that developed into more metal when I started playing WoW and everyone put heavy metal songs on their PVP videos.

At the moment, I listen to a lot of anime and games original soundtracks, anything goes really, apart from most RNB and Hip hop music. I even like Jazz, As long as it sounds good then it’s cool with me whatever it is. Be it Lady Gaga or Take That. But I still love my rock and metal roots.

What kind of Game Artist then? Where?

At this moment in time I was hoping somewhere close to Leicester, hopefully in Cambridge working with Jagex or with Rockstar gaming, as an environment artist.

Though I will only know as time goes on, at this stage I’m not sure if I want to be a character or a vehicle artist or an environment artist or even an interior artist. I’m leaning more towards vehicle and environment since there are more vacancies available for those two compared to character, and I can understand why character artists are all taken. And if I become a vehicle artist, I could work for a big motor company as well, like BMW or Nissan.  Just as long as I can get a job at the end of the course then it’s all good, that’s all that matters to me at the moment, I need more of a taste of what I really like doing.

Sources:

http://technutty.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/DeMontfortUniversity.jpg

http://mikebbetts.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/ss14.jpg  

 http://i.chzbgr.com/completestore/2009/12/25/129062495099320221.jpg  

http://www.mangaphoenix.com/anime/code-geass/cg.jpg 

 

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100125232438/waroflegends/images/f/fb/Jagex_Logo.png

 

http://media.nintendo.com/nintendo/bin/lSnBXEH2eQz-BeDzEOwIkvwJBzzlhc5W/dqZHaDRq12_m6Pj3VEEacGxHQvtqifpF.jpg