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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 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.
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).
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My particular favourite line was regarding "Death Race 2000" My favorite line was "You earn points by running over stick figures", because I just played Grand Theft Auto 3 for the first time a week ago and it's hilarious how little video games have changed in almost 30 years. Slightly Offtopic: I looked up the movie that Death Race 2000 was supposedly based on on IMDB. Tagline: "In The Year 2000 Hit And Run Driving Is No Longer A Felony. It's The National Sport!" Sigh, yet another prediction we've failed to live up to.