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Arcade Games Officially Over The Hill
evilandi writes: "Spacewar, the world's first arcade game, is 40 years old this summer. Read this article at the BBC and play Spacewar using a Java emulator- remember, this was a two-player only game, designed in 1961 when programmers had friends who were in the same room! Spacewar, which was similar to Asteroids, later shipped as standard software for the PDP-1." Well, maybe the first electronic arcade game ;) -- or can anyone cite counterexamples?
Heres a Did You Know for anyone who didn't: Spacewar was based on a mathmatical accident?
A coder was attempting to draw a curved line on the screen of the TX-0. However, he misplaced a symbol in the code, and when the code was ran, it drew a circle. This was a surprise to the coder, to say the least. He had just discovered a new mathmatical process.
That code to draw the circle, ended up being the code that drew the "black-hole" in the center of the screen.
O.K it's a tenious link, but still.
When I was Manager at The Computer Museum we had the code in the backroom on papertape. Since then I've seen it floating around for the PDP-1 emulators. It was in machine code so there was no source/compile/binary path.
As The Computer Museum (neé The Digital Computer Museum (Digital as in DEC)) had a full working PDP-1 out on permanent display for special occasions (or for Big Donors which is the same thing) we'd fire it all up & let folks play on the original hardware.
Speaking as not-a-big-gamer it was fun, challenging, impressively responsive. Invariably it was a crowd pleaser to both young and old alike. Considering that "glass teletypes" were a novelty when Spacewar debuted the vector-graphics & fluid motion were undoubtably a revalation to most folks.
Trivia:
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
So that's what the 'E' in all those e-businesses stands for. I would've done better in the NASDAQ if someone had told me sooner.
AlpineR
Actually it wasn't jammed, the coins fell into an empty milk carton, and the coins overflowed the carton, and landed on the PCB. The excellent Pong Story website has all the details.
Shameless plug alert: If you're in the Bay Area, you can get the real thing in about six weeks:
CA Extreme, September 15-16, in San Jose. Two days, all the classic arcade machines you can play. There's even a bunch of guys with a laser projector hooked up to vector games... (C'mon, what geek didn't fantasize about being able to play Tempest using a low-lying cloud as a projection screen, FAA regs be damned ;-)
And under the same roof at the same time, Vintage Computer Fest 5.0. The name says it all, tons of stuff to dr00l over.
LaserMAME. Laser projection isn't as simple as it looks, and it's taken about 20 years for the tech to get cheap enough to filter down to the geek level, but it's here.
(For the simpler graphics of SpaceWar, it could probably be done for less than $1000 in used/reconditioned parts, and would make an excellent science project if you've got high-school age sproggen.)
~=Keelor
Quotes:
it's in my head
Gotta love assembly!! Makes you wonder why we ever bothered inventing higher level languages....
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
I was just reading the H1B thread, and the IT-People-Are-Not-Ageist argument was being bandied about. Then I see 40=over the hill here :)
:)
Nah, this isn't a kingdom run by 25 year olds
When I was punk kid of 20, I used to wonder why the old farts of 40 used to smile at us when we so rightously derided their gray hairs and hairy ears. Now I know why they smiled...
If they would have said something in response, it would have been this: "It's your turn REAL SOON, monkey boy. And I'm doing yer girlfriend."
I hope the yunguns here enjoy the scenery, 'cause it ain't gonna last long for them. I wonder, with how much aplomb will they face the end of their careers at 35?
I'm hoping for 150 meself.
At the end of may I wrote up spacewar for my kisrael.com quote/link blog:
Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
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SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
A couple of bits of broken mirror, a pair of speakers to drive X-Y deflection, a laser pointer, and the side of a building...
Anyone? Anyone?
I seem to remember a story on the History Chanel about a tennis game played on Osciliscopes built out of stray tubes and solenoids. Happened around 1951 I think. Anyone have more info?
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Why! Im my day we had to walk 5 miles through the snow to get to the arcade!
We didnt have these fancy-schmancy game cards or tokens...Our machines used quarters! And we liked it!
We didnt have these 3d-shoot-em-up, Parallax-scrolling, 60 fps, CD-sound, thingamabobs! We had two colors, BLACK and GREEN and the game was about as fun as getting your back waxed and WE LIKED IT!
There is no spork.
Interesting timing. A few months ago Wired published an article detailing the history of electronic arcade games. Pong was the first electronic arcade game with a coin slot. The guys who invented it found it was popular in their local bar, so they started charging a little per game.
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Developers: We can use your help.
Pong Was the first, making it's debut in 1958 according to this article. I also saw the little History Channel's Lost and Found episode over the weekend, and while the guy that invented Pong, as a previous poster mentioned, didn't intend to do anything more than amuse the public, it does stand as the first publicly playable electronic game. Of course, no one charged money to play it, which may mean it doesn't count as the first 'arcade' game per se.
Incidentally, Spacewar is typically considered the first VIDEO game. As I'm sure lots of other people will point out, pinball had electronic components in it for a long time before 1961. And just for more useless trivia, the first HOME video game was the Oddyssey, built by Magnavox in 1972. So old, it didn't even have a microprocessor... just yards and yards of transistors and the like... those were the days all right!
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Where did all the time go?
On a side note, it's interesting that the first arcade game had something to do with:
- War
- Space
If you look at the date (1961), it all fits nicely into a cold war space race context, doesn't it?There is absolutely no reason to panic.