A Brief History of how video games came about! Part 2

The history of computer games 1980s -1990s

Space Invaders

 The 1980s saw huge changes in the gaming industry especially with so many new publishing companies appearing. People were beginning to realise the potential business of video games, especially after huge successful hits like Pong and Space Invaders in the 70s. In the 80s the first games were registered by the copyright office! These were Atari’s games: “Asteroids” and “Lunar lander”. This sold over 400000 arcade machines across the world!

The costs to produce new games were relatively low and it let forth a whole wave of new idea’s and unique, bizarre and awesome games which meant that a whole new array of games which defined the genres we all know today were created!

These ranged from Action, adventure, role playing, Beat em ups!, Platformer’s, Hack and slash, scrolling, Shooters, Real time strategy, Stealth games, vehicle simulators, and the list goes on…

As well as new games and genres being created, technology was also developing in full swing, a series of new cheaper rivals suddenly emerged in the early 80s, due to companies and businesses investing in the video games industry. These included the iconic Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit and many more different consoles. 

The new consoles were helping the Home Computer system and games market set up their foundations by raising awareness through many advertising campaigns. Nearly everyone was aware of what a video game was by now. Or they were being told about it.

I remember my brother and dad using a Commodore 64, and it looked exactly like the computer’s we use nowadays with the keyboard and everything, I remember playing Terminator 1 on there with a Joystick controller and typing silly things on the basic word program they had, though I was never any good at it, as I was only 4 or 5 years old I had no idea what I was doing.

The Commodore 64 was released in August 1982 and it was very successful due to its marketing and competitive price, it had the same controller ports as the Atari 2600 which allowed people to use their old joysticks again and it soon became the most popular home computer in the USA and was the single best selling computer model of all time internationally and still is!

The Commodore 64!

In 1985 there was the start of new 16-bit graphic machines, but they were way too expensive back then so they weren’t that popular during the 80’s however in the 90’s we saw a huge boom in sales for the 16 consoles. More than 8million American homes now had a video game console which totalled to more than $4billion a year!

Online gaming was starting to form and people were using their Dial up board systems in the 80’s for online gameplay they were very crude and people would often play text adventure games. So it wasn’t as popular as video games back then until MIDI Maze and Doom were released in the late 80s/early 90s.

Nintendo, a small company founded in 1889 started to invest in the video game industry and soon became one of the biggest game’s companies to date and one of the most influential ones at that.

During 1985 the market was dulling down but was swiftly revived by Nintendo’s release of the 8bit Console the Famicom, more commonly known as the NES! Oh yeah! It came with Super Mario Bros. and It became a huge Success instantaneously, it was dominating the American and Japanese markets up until the early 90’s It used game pads and debut the most famous game series out there.

Metroid on the NES

Some of the more famous games that we may remember from that era are: Pac-Man, The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Slayer, Kings Quest, Ultima, Wizardry, Dragon Warrior, Golden Axe, Metriod, Castlevania, Turbo and many many more.

   

Soon came the handheld era of the Game Boy, in 1989, This was my first proper console, and it has sold over 118.69 million copies worldwide, My first game was Tetris! Which was a huge hit selling millions across the world as it was bundled with the Gameboy,

The 90’s was the big decade for the rise of the best games franchises out there today in my opinion. It saw the release of MMORPG’s Such as Ultima Online, Everquest and Runescape!

It brought lots of change due to the development of technology and 3D graphics coming around being the big changer. The genres that were established were becoming more solid and given more importance as big games came around. As well as the introduction of proper competitive online gaming.

Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario!

It founded Sega’s mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog one of the most recognisable video game characters, next to Mario of course. Consoles such as the Sega Mega Drive, SNES, in the early 90s and during the late 90s Playstation and N64 were starting to come around. Amazing new 3D games were being released on the market, There was very little talk of arcade games after all of that had been released, it was inadequate and annoying compared to the home consoles we could play in the warmth of our own homes.

Goldeneye for the N64

It was the decade of truly amazing thought out games for the genres, Real time strategy games had a whole new meaning to them as games like Warcraft, Starcraft and Command & Conquer came out. These are the games which gave birth to E-Sports. Something I wish that will become a sport as big as football or baseball around the world. We got to see the Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil and Silent Hill be born, the main pioneers of survival horror games that we see today! As well as Doom, Quake and Golden Eye, the games that would create the basis of FPS games we see today!

I would say the 90’s was the foundation platform for most of the modern day games we see today, the games might look different with better graphics and amazing visuals, but the ideas that were forged in this era are still here in today’s games.

Next time we will have a look at the modern day era of computer games and what happened with the industry!

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