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History of Video Games
seer writes "There's a nice history of videogames over at GameSpot. It starts with pre-videogame activity in 1889 with the Marufuku Company (later Nintendo) and stretches to the recently released GameCube-DVD system."
Hey, it's sunday. No reason to knock yourself out reading the works of ancient
philosophers (unless you're taking Ancient Philosophers 230 and have
an exam this week).
I still enjoy my Atari 800!
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Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
that they don't have good innocent games like they used too. Pitfall, Donkey Kong, and Breakout... oh I'm getting too sentimental :-)
Esse quam vederi.
Because they saved a LOT of the videogames story. Project like
mame,
uae,
mess is simply amazing,
and thanks to any others that contributes.
With his discussion about caves and shadows and the perfect form.
As Plato said, we are nothing but imperfect shadows from the ideal form, which is in this cave, cast from the light from the perfect fire.
So all we have to do is find this cave and we can play the perfect video game.
...waka-waka-waka...
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I think what's interesting is that unlike today, earlier videogame designers were often very inventive in the look of the game itself.
It's too bad that Mattel's Intellivision system never really succeeded in the long run; they had games that in many cases were vastly superior to the competition at the time from Atari, Coleco, and so on. The PGA golf game on that system was quite playable for its time; and who can forget the games that used the Voice Module such as B-17 Bomber and Bomb Squad? The Bomb Squad game can be extremely unnerving, especially when you set it at the highest level of difficulty.
Hmm - this artice sucks.. and I read most of it. Where is the writing about the games that 0wn you for months and months at a time? It goes year by year talking about the consoles, talking a little about the games - If it wasn't for the games temselves who would buy a console? I know my reason for buying a n64 was goldeneye, my ps1 was bought for tomb raider..
I would rather snuggle up with some old philosophy books on a sunday morning than read that crap.
Which opponent to frag first often has other implications that can ruin your success in a game. And this is all split second decision making.
Of course, this is not Ancient Philosophy, but modern.
So a study of the history of games, the design of video games, etc, can be valuable.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
WOW! video games have been around since before computers, TV and everything we know in modern society! Cool!
DUMB ASSES!
Still, it's interesting to see how many of these companies start out; Nintendo started out selling playing cards, moved to computer games and then went back to cards with Pokemon (gotta buy 'em all!).
My particular favourite line was regarding "Death Race 2000": "Public outcry against video game violence gains national attention". This in 1976...
I think it should be pointed out that this article is a US centric version of the history of the video game. (Wooo, that's a suprise!).
From a UK perpective (which is supposedly the third biggest games producer in the world behind the US and Japan), the articles fails to mention the ZX Spectrum or any UK games which influenced generations of UK (and perhaps European) game developers.
Of course, every country has it's own unique history of video games (and the big US and Japanese companies have had a big influence no doubt).
But let's not get to US centric folks.
"Marufuku Company (later Nintendo)"
;)
No wonder they changed their name, but then again if they kept it maybe they wouldn't be accused of being a kiddie company
...I found this bit of the article amusing...
...So I guess the moral is, violence in video games is OK, so long as it doesn't involve pedestrians.
"Exidy Games releases Death Race 2000, a driving game based on a 1975 movie of the same name. You earn points by running over stick figures. Public outcry against video game violence gains national attention, and the game is taken off the market. "
which made me think of this game, 25 years later.
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
Very minor nit, but the PDP-1 was the first mini, not a mainframe. The name, Peripheral Data Processor was in response to the econimics of the time. Trying to get PHBs to see the wisdom of buying a couple of minis instead of an IBM mainframe was virtual job-suicide.
However, you could easily justify buying a peripheral to offload some data processing to. Thus was born the PDP and the mini (and eventually PDP was the reason for two of the best OSes of all time: VMS via DEC which is now Compaq and UNIX via Bell Labs which is now partly AT&T, partly Lucent and partly Caldera... what a long road).
If you want an informative (albeit poorly edited, IMHO) book about the early history of video games, check out "ZAP! The Rise and Fall of Atari" by Scott Cohen.
I remember the day when we all went to County Stadium in Milwaukee, WI. to play in the "atari Pac-man" championships back in the early 80's.
We never thought it could get better than that.
Has it?
What I'd like to see is a technical history of videogames. (There are some, but I want to find a more comprehensive and in-depth one.) I want all the details. I do some work with microcontrollers (AVRs are my new favorite). I'm not the best coder, but I enjoy mucking around in the bits and bytes of assembly language. The old videogames fascinate me, not for the games (I have yet to find a game I enjoy), but for the hardware. In today's world of bigger-faster-better, I think most people don't realize the incredible power of the systems they have. It seems people scoff at anything short of a GHz today, but the power of even a few KHz is simply incredible. When used right, it can do incredible things. (When slowed and bloated, it seems awful, but that's entirely due to the programmers.)
In my assembly class, people like to complain that the 68k chip we're programming is "outdated". They don't understand that "outdated" is a word that has almost no meaning in the embedded world. Remember the Sega Genesis? Neo Geo? Both 68k. Comparable to the processor in my Visor. The processor in the original PONG machines were comparable to what is used in the Nintendo Gameboy, 20 years later. Same processor as is in my TI-85 calculator, for which there is a raycasting Wolfenstein 3D look-alike. Not too shabby.
Anyway. I don't claim to be the most knowledgeable on this stuff, but I think it's very interesting. The workstations of yesterday become the pocket toys of tomorrow. Nothing ever dies, everything has its place. You can't always program in Java, you can't always throw more hardware at it and make the problems go away. Sometimes you have to use skill and ingenuity, and this is something that I admire greatly. I say, Cheers to the old game coders! Remarkable work.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
It's ~1:30am Monday morning (.au Time), with a deadline to be reached by 9:30am, and I can't stop playing a 3D shockwave version of Pong!
Talk about your history of games... Pong's appeal is ever reaching. It is God's gift to the CRT. It is the pixelated equivalent of a fresh spring morn.
In a word:
Quintessential!!!
Either that or procrastination is somehow involved.
:)
You might wanna pick up a couple of these titles. They certainly are worth the time and money:
"Homo Ludens - a Study of the Play-element in Culture" (Johann Huizinga)
"The Study of Games" (Elliot M. Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith)
"I have no words and I must design" (Greg Costikyan)
"The art of computer game design" (Chris Crawford)
"Finite and Infinite Games - A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility" (James P. Carse)
Hope you find this usefull.
naah sig schmig
and it was huge. the pdp-8 was small and cheap (at about the size of a fridge and $10.000).
it had lots of great peripherals, such as the teletype (standart for in/output, but in theory you could interact with 12 switches on the front panel that could set the accumulator directly, and 12 + 1 lights indicating its value), extra ram (magnetic - and expensive) or even a crt.
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making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
1993: Congress Notes Video Game Violence ... sigh... people never remember anything
Incensed by the violence in Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, Senators Joseph Lieberman (Connecticut) and Herbert Kohl (Wisconsin) launch a Senate "investigation" into video game violence, threaten to somehow effect a ban on "violent" games, and eventually soften their demands and concede to an industry-wide rating system.
they are still in office?
joe lieberman?
Runnin' On Empty
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hmm... First, they say that Spacewar uses ASCII graphics, then they provide a screen-shot with vector graphics. The screen shot is correct; a better article on Spacewar can be found here.
The Mame Story.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For those interested in reading a good book about the history of video games, check out The First Quater by Steven Kent. It starts with pre-pong era of games up until the playstation . It has some really good insight on all of the trials and such that happened during the 16-bit era.
could you provide us with a link to the shockwave version?
seems to pretty well done...
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making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
They forgot Nintendo's ROB the Robot. As far as I know it was the pinacle of modern video game mis-design.
i think you'll find it was called the marufuck you company.
thank you.
Oh why oh why did he have to die
why because he moderated a post
that specifically said not to
mod it down but he did it anway
now he's dead
Dead, dead... thats what I said
slashdot moderator dead...
they modify the Latin word sonus (sound) and come up with Sony
I saw an interview in the 80's with one of the guys who did come up with the name and he said that it was the whole California craze was just starting and they wanted to associate with those "sunny boys " out there.
I don't know which is right but I think it puts a whole different spin on the name.
So 30 years of research have done something good. At least my Dad can play something simple like "Moorhuhn" :-). And these Computer Space games seems to have an even simpler GUI than XP.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
Komm mein Heiland und bringe mich und meine geile Fotze zum Kommen! Wenn es dich geil macht, piss und kack ich auch auf Dich!
Deine verklemmte CmdrTaco kann mich auch mal am Arsch lecken, die dumme Dumpfbackenhure!
Aber die wird der Satan eines Tages persönlich wachficken bis ihr die Rosette platzt!
with the Marufuku Company (later Nintendo)
Geez.... I doubt they had any english people around when they chose that name
This post is brought to you by the letters T and A, and the number 69
Doesn't go as far back or forward, but much more detailed and better written.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Oops, that second link should have been this, sorry.
The biggest thing I noticed was the utter lack of focus on the PC Games. The only mention of them after the development of the consoles was a snippet about Half Life. For quite a while PC games have led the way in many parts of the market. How about some info on Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, and other famous titles? How about the best selling Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diable games that I have spent so mny countless hours on?
Oh, and the Turbo Graphix 16 was the shitnitz in its day if you could manage to get anything other than that damn Keith Courage game.
If someone actually liked that site, which was low on information, you'll absolutley love this site: http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/
The doteaters examines the history of arcade, home and computer games. Anyone remember Wampus?
By far the best feature of the site is the overall timelines: http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/timescape.htm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/02/27/225024 9&mode=thread
There was another detailed web presentation of the history of video games posted about two years ago..I want to say it was GameSpot, but can't remember..Does anyone know?thx
-jc
The article fails to note that the Atari Lynx color handheld accommodated left-handed users. Game buttons were placed on both sides of the unit and you could flip the screen.
It ran circles around the gray Nintendo Gameboy (256 colors, stereo sound, multiplayer option), but Atari knew squat about marketing. A single commercial on MTV once in a blue moon, while Nintendo smothered every nook and cranny of the market. It was like Atari was satisfied if it produced X units and sold those units, instead of being more ambitious.
If you have access to Windows there is a game called Game Derby which is a two player quiz game about the history of video games. And not just consoles either, it includes all computers, even the odd mainframe for those early games.
:)
Its much more interesting to learn about video games in game form.
url = http://www.bestvideogameever.com/
They glaze over the lackluster consumer reaction to the Atari ET game, but as far as I can tell it was a milestone in videogame theory in that it had an ending. There was a plot to be worked through rather than a hopeless infinity of struggle delimited by the abstract notion of points.
"1986 Nintendo Releases the NES Nationwide
Satisfied by the system's success in New York, Nintendo markets the NES nationwide. The system debuts with Super Mario Bros., an arcade conversion, which becomes an instant hit."
Ninitendo's nationwide relase came only with ROB, the 'robot operated buddy', Gyromite, a horrible game ROB could play, Duckhunt, and the lightgun. I was wasting my time on these for months before Super Mario Brothers was ever released, and then it was a while later that ROB was dropped and the NES was packaged with SMB.
They seem to have left out any real mention of the booming PC gaming industry, and the advances in the graphics cards. They also don't mention how many people participate in online gaming, and how many hours are "wasted" playing Anarchy Online and other online RPG's.
- ufcker.com -
I hate you for this link. You just ruined my lousy sunday evening bringing up long lost memories of the days, when computers wheres simple, games in 16 colors and girls just a thing you met in schools. I remember the first time i poked my C64 to get 255 Lifes in Fort Apocalypse. I'm repeating this experience in this moment.
I thought i have lost my childhood, but now i have it back. But sadly now that i'm an adult human being, i've got not enough time to play Pirates! for 8 hours straight. How should i cure this disease ?
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
Many games published by US or Japanese companies are developed in the UK, or by ex-pat british coders which pushes the ratio up. e.g. Goldeneye and the other Rare games, Star Fox (developed by british coders in Japan) etc.
For example one UK company, Probe (RIP) developed the highest percentage of units sold in one year (13%).
Now the uk developers are all owned by french publishers (because of their crazy bourse) but that's another story.
Of course the Australian experience is a superset of both the US and the UK systems, getting magazines from both traditions, as well as the addition of the local Dick Smith VZ200 so Melbourne based developers should be well-versed in history :-)
Just think that the VZ200 booted up to a command prompt in less than a second (faster than a c64 or spectrum) the next time you are logging onto a supposedly 1000 times faster modern machine!
is called Whakapapa. Wh is pronounced "f". :-)
But it's silly to snicker over words that just sound odd in english - I went to an actual school called "Urenui primary school". Nui means big. Ure means penis. Tradition states that the guy who named it was thinking about how the sky made love to the earth at that location, but you can draw your own conclusions.
since VIC sounds a lot like fich.
Okay, before I'm moderated as a troll, and this is in reference to the article... read:
* Spider-Man 2 for the PlayStation is delayed to remove a scene that had the superhero on top of a building that looked like the World Trade Center.
* Changes are made to Flight Simulator 2002 to remove the World Trade Center towers from the flying environment and a patch is released to remove them from Flight Simulator 2000.
Why the hell is the world trade center being removed from old movies, video games, advertisements and just about anything else. Isn't this rewriting history? Are we supposed to pretend that they never existed? I have a picture of myself as a child with the World Trade Center right behind me.... should I doctor that photo to reflect the newer, more post 9/11 NYC skyline? I'm sorry, but there used to be two giant buildings where the empty space is... and pretending that they never existed will not help this country whatsoever.
Heh, I don't know about everybody else. But I really enjoyed the Futurama episode where Fry wished life were more like a computer game.
Just in case any body was wondering, the little backwards speaking monster fellow said "Where can a guy get some pants around here".
this is addictive...
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making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
The best essay I've ever read on (narrative) game design theory is Crimes Against Mimesis by Roger Giner-Sorolla.
Superb stuff.
Okay, it's not like me to post one of these lame ass "mod up" articles, but I've been confounded about the issue just as much as the above poster.
Since there is a barely a response to the above article, please consider modding it up for more exposure.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
I agree - and someone should mod you up. I never even had a nintendo when they came out for the simple reason my Commodore 64 was good enough. And when the Amiga came out I remember everyone saying - "oh thats just a games machine" - and actually it played some of the best games at the time.
Commodore Amiga also had the A) first CD based game console CDTV (which they mention almost as a footnote - despite the fact that it was designed by the same guy who gave us pong) and B) the first 32 bit console the CD-32.
Its just like the "history of multimedia" in new media magazine a while back (which I think is defunct) despite the fact that Commodore used to advertise in their rag - they didn't mention Amiga at all. Yet when I was using the machine full time I couldn't imagine doing multimedia on anything else.
No reason to knock yourself out reading the works of ancient philosophers (unless you're taking Ancient Philosophers 230 and have an exam this week).
"I can teach Japanese to a monkey in 46 hours. It's just a matter of being able to relate to the material. You like pro-wrestling, right?"
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
For the same reason there's only what - 100+ titles for the PS2 in the US - no-one wants to translate titles released in Japan - I highly doubt it had anything to do with sega jumping the gun. There are thousands of good titles for the saturn, but you better know japanese first (and get some mods to play them). I have a friend who just returned from there and he says there are literally thousands of cool titles for the ps2 - we'll never see 99% of them though.
Why should the WTC towers be included in a game like Flight Simulator 2002? They no longer exist. This is not rewriting history at all. Pretending they never collapsed will not help this country whatsoever.
More nostalgia:
Killer List of Videogames is definately worth a visit. Over 3.500 videogames has been indexed. Nice screenshots, trivia and even cheats for some videogames.
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd
What happened to the Game Gear in this history. It's only mentioned once very vaguely that some company was going to sell a cheaper version of it and other Sega products. Game Gear was a great product, just had bad battery life which eventually killed it (and it not being marketed very well).
`Game Over' by David Sheff is a very good book on the history of Nintendo. It has also been recently updated with news of the impact of Sony.
Go read it. You will enjoy it!
Well i noticed that they DID say that Nintendo means "leave luck to heaven" but they omited another cool translation. In my first year of japanese class my teacher used a game called "atari" to teach us. It was a game she made up and she said she picked that name because of the translation. The translation for "atari" means "direct hit" or a longer way sort of is the "personal space" around your body. Your "atari" is basically the area that a samarai aims for.
BTW the atari game we played was like bingo where we matched kanji and shouted "ATARI!" when we got a line. So we were shouting "direct hit" or something to tell that we just won.
A cold night, New York, 1923. A giant trained gorilla renowned for its barrel tossing act escapes from the Barham & Bailey circus, climbing to the top of an unfinished wrought iron building. In the confusion, the girlfriend of a recently immigrated Italian plumber is taken hostage. And thus a legend is born.
Columbine Families Play the Blame Game
The families of several victims of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings file a $5 billion lawsuit against 25 video game publishers, including Nintendo, Sega, Sony, id Software, and GT Interactive.
Wow, I'd never even heard about this. Anyone know how it turned out? I wonder if I can sue these companies for causing me to waste my life away in front of a television...
The CD32 was left out of the list, (a cd based console version of the Amiga 1200 for those that dont remember) one of many consoles that failed due to lack of third party developer support and frankly naff marketing...just like the Jaguar, Indrema and the CDTV.
The CD32 had one bonus for consumers, through 3rd party add ons it could be turned into a 'real computer', that could be upgraded with a new processor, extra ram and even an external modem to get surfing...
"is it a games console, is it a PC, no we'll just hide the CDTV amongst the electronics section and hope someone buys it".. aah Commodore marketing at its best, on wonder noone bought one and the idiots took a similar approach to the CD32...
I know most of the stuff released for the CD32 it was shovelware, but that was more due to Commodore's legendary lack of marketing skill and their stupidity in trying to sell a console without first getting the backing of developers to make games exclusively for their console.
Witness the XBox, who would REALLY buy a stripped down PC if it wasn't for the exclusive XBOX only games ?
They missed the Interact computer, from Ann Arbor, from 1978. It was a video game machine with a keyboard, later more apps too advantage of its being a computer. I actually worked there...
Does anyone remember Interact?
I accidently read "Microsoft removes the veil" as "Microsoft reveals the evil."
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Actually, I got a great book for Cristmas. Tons of stuff from ancient philosophers in it, from a modern historian. In the last few days I have finally had time to start reading it. I could care less about playing card companies. The roots of western civilization, now that's recreation!
I can't help it - I'm a 19D.
Some of Nintendo's early products were, well, not quite in keeping with its current family-friendly image. Do some more searching around the web and you'll get the idea :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
1989
Tengen's Tetris.
Tetris Troubles
Tengen acquires the home rights to Tetris and begins selling the extremely popular game. However, it is quickly discovered that Tengen bought the rights from Mirrorsoft, which did not own the rights in the first place. Nintendo quietly acquires the legitimate home rights to Tetris and releases it under its own label. The Tengen version is removed from the marketplace
An article about the history of video games, without even a mention of the Amiga? This is a crime!
:) (Though in the end it only destroyed Commodore)
How can you not mention the most pirated gaming system ever released.. the one where only like 1 in 10 people owned a legal version of the game, nearly destroying the industry
As if that history isn't enough, it was a superb, powerful platform. Some of the best games released were on it. I bought one off Ebay recently for old time's sake. Good stuff!
I suppose it wasn't a "console" as such, which may be why they didn't mention it. But it spent all its time in front of a TV, which is close enough for me (especially the nice, small A600 that resembled a console better)
Try reading more carefully before you cut and paste.
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I didn't want to leave this space blank.
if you like this history how about looking at icwhen.com their history is even better.
1977
Pizza Time Theatre Atari opens the first Pizza Time Theatre, a new arcade-restaurant combination that features moving robotic animals, electronic games, and food. The mascot for the restaurant is a rat named Chuck E. Cheese. Bushnell thought up the concept three years earlier while standing in line at a pizza parlor.
I still have a Chuck E. Cheese token back from when I used to play games a lot. It's a 1984 token and it says "In pizza we trust" on it.
There is no way I would play it now. I just hold onto it as a memory of youth, and wonder if it will ever achieve spectacular collector value.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This site got me hooked on Sega.
Now Steve barely knew what a soldering iron was, but he did know a kid from high school who was brilliant in electronics. He told tke kid he'd give him $350 to design the game in four days.
Now the kid knew you couldn't design a circuit board that complex in four days, but he didn't have to. He used an early microprocessor board and wrote a program to implement the logic. It was genius; lateral thinking.
Steve pays the kid, brings the board to Atari, claims the board and programmable logic idea is his, and becomes a hero.
Oh, the kid's name? Steve Wozniak.
* I thought Space War was first implemented on the TX-O, not the PDP-1.
* Systems never mentioned: RCA Studio II (the only pre-2600 cartridge system not mentioned), Emerson Arcadia 2001 (with sound effects that must have been programmed by a tone-deaf person; you have to hear it to understand just how bad they are), APF M-1000, Atari Lynx.
More random stuff: :)
* When Atari finally released the 7800 in 1986, the units had been sitting in a warehouse, ready for sale for two years, since being cancelled in 1984 because "nobody wanted to buy video games any more". Sure, nobody wanted to buy crappy 2600 games any more... but Nintendo was foolish enough to release a system anyhow.
* I had one of those old Coleco Telstar units when I was a kid. One thing about it was that if you slid the game select switch to just the right position, you got a version of the "hockey" game where one side had three paddles instead of two.
* And FWIW, a few years back I found a (very thick) book by Tab Books which covers the design of TTL-based (as in no CPU) games. Very interesting what you can do without a CPU, but it really takes a Woz to get that kind of stuff right. (IIRC, Woz designed the coin-op Breakout machine.)
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
This site: http://www.geekcomix.com/vgh/first/index.shtml provides as much depth as you could want(I've been reading it for the last week and still haven't even gotten out of the 80's) It's got technical stuff, as well as non-technical.
Fear My Cow Shooting Crossbow
Are those plumbers at this show...?
Kiss my bass.
There's also a recently-published book on the history of video games called the Ultimate History of Video Games. I picked it up not too long ago, and from what I've read so far, it's got a lot of anecdotes and some interesting information.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
I love archaic technology. However, I think that you overestimate the case for microprocessors, though. Much of the hardware in early video games was either simple digital or even analog.
Consider the venerable "paddle." Take an RC-based timer, reset on the vertical retrace. Use the potentiometer on the console as the R part of the circuit. When the timer fires, have it trigger a one-shot timer for a short period of time. Feed the ouput of that time to the gun of the CRT. Voila, a horizontal bar that you can move up and down the screen with the knob.
Take another shorter RC timer, triggered by the horizontal retrace. Have a fixed timing, so that it fires when the beam is about an inch from the left of the screen. Have it fire another timer that will stay on for a few pixels' trace. Take this output and the ouput of the timer in the previous paragraph, run them through an AND gate, and you have a paddle for the left of the screen.
Of course, eventually you are going to have to have some counters in there, but it's amazing how much you can do with very simple circuitry.
nope