Slashdot Mirror
40th Anniversary of Video Games
CFN writes "According to this article in the New York Times (free registration...), this month marks the 40th anniversary of Spacewars, the very first video game ever created!
It's very interesting to consider how quickly the popularity of video games grew, because, essentially, Spacewars was spontaneously generated. I guess there is something about blinking lights, flashing colors, and tinny sound effects that just appeals to the soul." Unfortunately, there was no violence before 1952,
because we all know that violence is caused by video games.
Oh, and I had a great version of spacewars that I used
to play on a portable PC (Compaq with like a 5 inch green
screen and a wopping 4 mhz!) when I was short. I loved
that game.
...for small values of 1962...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Don't you mean 1962? I mean, if there's no violence before 40 years ago (1962), then it also holds that there's none before 50 years ago, but I still think you goofed there.
Arrr, it be the infamous pirate, No Beard Pete!
1952? Wouldn't that be 50 years?
I thought that was the first video game, created at Brookhaven Labs
Videogames were a novelty. Now-a-days it has become an essential part of every-day computing and has become a major infulence in harware design.
I remember telling my mom when I was a kid that videogames made me smarter... maybe she believes me now.
thelikesofwhich.com
* Unfortunately, there was no violence before 1952
* 40th Anniversary of Video Games
And I was thinking we live in the year 2002 right ?!
1952+40 != 2002 last time I check.
Or video games are 50 years old or even in 1962 there was no violence...
Unfortunately, there was no violence before 1952, because we all know that violence is caused by video games.
As opposed to fortunately?
Drink your coffee, Taco.
Good lord knows how many man hours have been spent in dimly lit rooms since video games hit the scene. WHat the hell did people usd to do? Work?
I guess there is something about blinking lights, flashing colors, and tinny sound effects that just appeals to the soul."
Pah, if this was true, we'd all be hanging around with our friends in dark places with blinking lights and beepy music, and eating pills.
There was a Java emulator of the PDP-1 around, where you could play a game which was exactly like the orginal spacewars except for a few lines of code. The KDE game KSpaceDuel is also an acceptable alternative.
Not a typewriter
If your want to download it, read the README carefully.
This is cool, I am the first generation out from this and remeber reading the articles and seeing the picture in wonder.
:)
My father wrote a computer Golf game, we belive the first, in 1965, he had a couple of national news stories on it and I have a tape of the last show (nice shirt dad, and hair, and suit...lol).
It was fairly sophisticated taking into account wind and other varibles, could be played on any termina, (paper out back then) I actually spent many hours 'online' clicking though the old paper tape to load and run it on a timeshare (what a waste of then limited resources
I still have the cards, paper tape, and somewhere I think the latter magnetic tape it was transferred to eventually, What should I do with all this stuff, pretty boring in itself. Should I donate it somewhere , where ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
...does anyone have a version that will run on a modern machine? I'd love to while away a day setting the one ship into a permanent orbit around the planet and zapping it with the other. :)
Woot w00t w007.
It blows my mind to imagine how far gaming will go in the next 40 years. I'd say I can't wait, but I'm sure there will be so many interesting steps along the way. Who thinks 3D is overrated and we're gonna see some totally unexpected forms of games come out that aren't entirely headed toward VR/HoloGaming? :)
this may seem blasphemous (sp?) to say here...don't get me wrong...i'm 22 and i personally love my PS2 & my PC...but when i was a kid growing up, i never had a console, and i think i was better off for it...sure i eventually had a game boy for a period of time, and i had the old apple IIc, but they weren't a nintendo, genesis, etc...and i think i turned out better off because of it...instead of being constantly inside trying to figure out how to get to world 8-1 of mario brothers, i was outside playing sports, riding my bike, building tree forts...kids today spend to much time playing video games, and not enough time experiencing interactions with real people...at a summer camp that i went to, they used to have enough kids interested in baseball, basketball, soccer, that they could field leagues with 10+ teams...now they're lucky if they get a half dozen kids interested in playing those sports....instead, everyone wants to spend their beautiful summer day inside playing on computers or something of that nature (i.e. Magic card games...)...kids need to be more active, and i know that when i eventually have kids, i am planning on strongly regulated the amount of time that they spend laying video games...it makes me upset to see the state of today's kids...it's leading to the "wussification" of our youth...when i head stories such as this one that talk about banning dodge ball, i think it's upsurd...
so, in conclusion, to those of you with kids, and those of you who plan to have them...don't let your them spend 24/7 trying to beat that the latest version of final fantasy...have them go outside...have them use their imagination...have them interact with others...
oh well...that was just my rant....
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Googling for Spacewars turns up several results that say the game is from 1961, not '62. Is The Times Wrong?
How to celebrate it more than to actually mass-play Spacewars?
"A DEC PDP1 emulator running the original version of Spacewar! is online Here"
2002 - 40 = 1952?
perlgolf: the only place where shorter is better
Willy: It's impossible for me to fire a pistol. If you'll check me medical records, you'll see I have a cripplin' arthritis in me index fingerrrs. Look at 'em! [holds them up] I got it from "Space Invaders" in 1977. Wiggum: Aw, yeah. That was a pretty addictive video game. Willy: [surprised] Video game?
doh
And I thought I was old-school cause the first game I ever played was Combat for the Atari 2600...stuff like this really puts your position as a gamer in perspective. Wow.
Let me ask you this...
Has the RPG really evolved beyond Ultima? Has the shooter really evolved beyond Galaxian? Has the puzzle really evolved beyond Tetris, or the simulation beyond SimCity?
Games may have changed in their outward appearance, but at their heart, they're all essentially the same.
-Evan
It's very interesting to consider how quickly the popularity of video games grew,
Wasn't it Pong, developed around 1973 that really launched the popularity of video games? The first 20 years seemed to be an expansion of a glacial sort.
Right here:w ww.nytimes.com/2002/02/28/technology/28SPAC.html
http://college.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://
I'm not karma-whoring, I've already hit the cap.
I thought Pong was the first video game ever created.
February 28, 2002 .
A Long Time Ago, in a Lab Far Away . .
By JOHN MARKOFF
STEVE RUSSELL sat in a darkened movie theater recently watching the army of credits roll by after a computer-animated Hollywood blockbuster.
There was a time, he recalls thinking, when a cutting-edge computer-generated fantasy could be conceived, written, tested and packaged for distribution in a few months, just through the part-time efforts of a small group of friends.
To be precise, that time was 40 years ago this month, with the result played out on a computer screen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two tiny spaceships were locked in mortal combat as they swung around a simulated sun. The duel was called Spacewar.
Designed by a small group of pioneering computer programmers led by Mr. Russell, it was the world's first video game. It was an early hint that a powerful new entertainment medium was on the horizon, one that would ultimately bond Silicon Valley to Hollywood. Perhaps most significantly, Spacewar demonstrated that sheer fun would become a driving force underlying progress in computing technology.
Over the years it played a crucial role in inspiring the creators of companies like Apple and Atari, said Henry Lowood, the curator of Stanford University's collections on the history of science and technology. "It set off a chain of events that created companies and led to a whole idea of what Silicon Valley would be," he said.
It certainly established at least one stereotype of the high-tech age: a few frenzied geeks in their 20's obsessively laboring after-hours in a computer lab on a creation that combined play and programming.
But the premise of Spacewar seemed to reflect the specific preoccupations of that time in the early 1960's. It was completed the same month that John Glenn made the nation's first manned orbital flight. And the cold war was at its most perilous stage: the Berlin Wall had just gone up, and the Cuban missile crisis would soon follow.
Now those 20-something geeks are near or past retirement age. Unlike more recent generations of computing and Internet pioneers, Spacewar's six programmers did not find fortune from their invention. Their achievement has made them legends only within the fraternity of the world's original computer hackers.
"The only money I made from Spacewar was as a consultant for lawsuits in the video game industry in the 1970's," said one of the game's creators, Alan Kotok. "I have all this fame, but it's in a very narrow circle."
Mr. Kotok and the other members of the original team all remained part of that circle, pursuing careers in computers. Several became hardware designers, several went on to write software, one became a professor and one joined the secretive National Security Agency.
Their early creation is now a museum piece -- literally -- reflecting the software principles and programming culture of its era.
Designed to take advantage of the Digital Equipment Corporation's brand-new PDP-1 minicomputer and the advent of a cathode- ray display screen, Spacewar was written before software was patented, and the original programmers' instructions were shared and freely modified by a small group of software designers.
Introduced some months later at Decus, which was then a Digital Equipment Corporation users' group, Spacewar immediately attracted a cult following. It became so addictive that at the M.I.T. laboratory where it was designed, play was soon banned except during lunchtime and after working hours.
Spacewar was the original "twitch" game, requiring lightning reflexes. Each player used keyboard controls or a joystick to maneuver a tiny ship capable of firing a stream of torpedoes as it slid across the screen. Before long a "hyperspace" option was added so that a player could make his ship vanish and reappear at a random place on the screen, avoiding certain death.
Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, saw the game played by young hackers at Stanford's computer center in the early 1960's. "They were absolutely out of their bodies, like they were in another world," he recalled. "Once you experienced this, nothing else would do. This was beyond psychedelics. It impressed the heck out of me."
In fact, though they came to be known for their hours in front of a computer screen, the game's creators initially met through M.I.T.'s hiking club. The group was led by Mr. Russell, known as Slug, and Martin Graetz, known as Shag, both devoted science fiction fans who wondered why better science fiction movies weren't being made.
Another contributor, Peter Samson, then a 21-year old undergraduate studying engineering at M.I.T., added a crucial component called "expensive planetarium," an accurate scrolling star field that portrayed the night sky over Cambridge.
Spacewar began in January 1962 as a simple object-in-motion program, Mr. Graetz said, and by February had become a rudimentary game, including two ships, a supply of fuel and a store of torpedoes.
Both Mr. Russell and Mr. Kotok said it was never their intent to create a new digital entertainment medium. After the new Digital Equipment computer with its display was installed in late 1961, the group simply began thinking about what might be the best way to demonstrate the power of the new machine and hit on the idea of a graphical simulation of a battle between two spaceships.
Spacewar was an obvious choice, but no one in the group sensed what impact the program would have over a decade and a half of popularity.
"One of the things that drew me to the project was that here you could do interaction and painless education and demonstration, and it was engaging," said Mr. Russell, who was 24 at the time.
After agreeing to be the project's lead programmer, Mr. Russell said he procrastinated until Mr. Kotok drove to Digital Equipment and returned with a paper tape containing necessary math subroutines. Mr. Russell set to work by entering code on a Flexowriter, a typewriter device that translated commands into holes punched in paper tape.
Perhaps the most impressive feat was that Spacewar worked at all. The processor for the PDP-1 minicomputer ran at about 100,000 instructions per second, snail-like in comparison with the speed of today's fastest microprocessors, which exceed two billion instructions per second.
Moreover, the computer, which was built from discrete transistors, had to make the most of about nine kilobytes of random access memory, unfathomably little compared with the RAM of today's desktop machines, which can boast as much as one gigabyte -- a million kilobytes.
"Each new game tends to push the state of the art," said Richard F. Rashid, who heads research at Microsoft. "They stretch the machine as far as you can stretch it."
Moreover, the Spacewar program became an integral part of a spreading hackers' culture as it was carried on punched paper tape to the dozen or so research centers and universities that had the early PDP minicomputer.
"What I was most pleased with was that a number of people saw Spacewar and went off and said, `I can do that' and then implemented their version on another system without looking at the source code," Mr. Russell said.
One of those inspired by the game was Nolan Bushnell, who went on to found the Atari Corporation. He was first seized by the idea of commercializing video game technology when he came across a version of Spacewar while a graduate student in engineering at the University of Utah.
In 1971 he introduced an arcade version of Spacewar called Computer Space, which was a commercial flop. Mr. Bushnell kept at it, though, and soon introduced the more successful Pong.
The game also made an impression on two other entrepreneurs-to-be, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer, who as teenagers would ride their bicycles to Stanford's artificial intelligence lab, where the game was frequently played.
But credit for the first commercial video game actually goes to Bill Pitts, a Stanford graduate who with a high school friend, Hugh Tuck, installed Galaxy Game, a coin- operated version of Spacewar, in Stanford's student union several months before Mr. Bushnell introduced Computer Space.
It became a huge hit and was played by students for more than six years, allowing Mr. Pitts to pay back the $60,000 he had invested in the project. Today his version of Spacewar is in the collection of the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View, Calif.
For his part, Mr. Russell, now 64, is only an occasional gamer. He visits arcades to keep up with video game technology and spends a couple of hours a month playing at his own PC. But his tastes, like the times, have changed. Now it is solitaire, not spaceships, that keeps him coming back.
--
NOTE: This article remains the property of the New York Times. I'm posting it here because forcing people to do a free-register to read your content is asinine.
--
Disclaimer: The above statement probably includes half-truths, because real truth is too complicated.
according to this article, the creator of spacewar also wrote pong in 1970.....there's got to be a million copies/versions of pong out there for every platform avalible. including shockwave.
;-)
i'm not sure if you'd even need shockwave to emulate this, but is there some sort of a shockwave/consolve version of this game "spacewar"? the article speaks of an arcade version, is there a MAME rom of this? this seems interesting enough to relive. i'd count spacewar as "abandonware"
moox. for a new generation.
"Oh, and I had a great version of spacewars that I used to play on a portable PC (Compaq with like a 5 inch green screen and a wopping 4 mhz!) when I was short. I loved that game.
"But can it run Linux?"
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.)
from my blog at kisrael.com
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
All very low rez, but very cool. The head to head face to face competition with your opponent was particularly addictive. someone should do a higher rez version of this.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The first video game, as in the first known usage of a computer and video to play a game, was actually built by Willy Higinbotham in 1958.
See the link for the whole (fascinating) story - this man gave people the IDEA and the implementation for video games - it's time that he got his due share in video game history.
http://www.pong-story.com/thefirst.htm
>Unfortunately, there was no violence
>before 1952, because we all know that
>violence is caused by video games.
I think that you are wrong about that. EC Comics was driven out of business because they were charged with having the very same effect on children with their science fiction and horror comics.
Basically, there has always been assholes out there trying to control what other people can read and do.
I remember when I was growing up (a long long time ago...) when the Atari 2600 was released, and later the original NES. If it had been up to me, I probably would have been sitting at the TV all day long playing games; however, my parents wouldn't go for that. (Maybe they knew I needed to get outside occasionally, or maybe they just wanted to get rid of me for a few hours)
Anyway, I feel that was the best thing they could have done. I'll be the first one to testify as to how addicting video games can be, which is why even now I can rarely play a game for more than an hour or so without forcing myself to get up and walk around for a bit to detach. There's nothing wrong with getting into a game, but getting so involved that you don't get out and do other things is not good for you.
-Space for rent
One of the main events IMO was when games like Zelda, Dragon Warrior, and Final Fantasy came out. Most of the games before these were mainly score breakers. You played and played for hours to see if you could get the highest score or get to the last level. Games like Final Fantasy added a broad story element to the game and when you beat the game it finished the story. Ahhh thank god for RPGS. :)
STEVE RUSSELL sat in a darkened movie theater recently watching the army of credits roll by after a computer-animated Hollywood blockbuster.
There was a time, he recalls thinking, when a cutting-edge computer-generated fantasy could be conceived, written, tested and packaged for distribution in a few months, just through the part-time efforts of a small group of friends.
To be precise, that time was 40 years ago this month, with the result played out on a computer screen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two tiny spaceships were locked in mortal combat as they swung around a simulated sun. The duel was called Spacewar.
Designed by a small group of pioneering computer programmers led by Mr. Russell, it was the world's first video game. It was an early hint that a powerful new entertainment medium was on the horizon, one that would ultimately bond Silicon Valley to Hollywood. Perhaps most significantly, Spacewar demonstrated that sheer fun would become a driving force underlying progress in computing technology.
Over the years it played a crucial role in inspiring the creators of companies like Apple and Atari, said Henry Lowood, the curator of Stanford University's collections on the history of science and technology. "It set off a chain of events that created companies and led to a whole idea of what Silicon Valley would be," he said.
It certainly established at least one stereotype of the high-tech age: a few frenzied geeks in their 20's obsessively laboring after-hours in a computer lab on a creation that combined play and programming.
But the premise of Spacewar seemed to reflect the specific preoccupations of that time in the early 1960's. It was completed the same month that John Glenn made the nation's first manned orbital flight. And the cold war was at its most perilous stage: the Berlin Wall had just gone up, and the Cuban missile crisis would soon follow.
Now those 20-something geeks are near or past retirement age. Unlike more recent generations of computing and Internet pioneers, Spacewar's six programmers did not find fortune from their invention. Their achievement has made them legends only within the fraternity of the world's original computer hackers.
"The only money I made from Spacewar was as a consultant for lawsuits in the video game industry in the 1970's," said one of the game's creators, Alan Kotok. "I have all this fame, but it's in a very narrow circle."
Mr. Kotok and the other members of the original team all remained part of that circle, pursuing careers in computers. Several became hardware designers, several went on to write software, one became a professor and one joined the secretive National Security Agency.
Their early creation is now a museum piece -- literally -- reflecting the software principles and programming culture of its era.
Designed to take advantage of the Digital Equipment Corporation's brand-new PDP-1 minicomputer and the advent of a cathode- ray display screen, Spacewar was written before software was patented, and the original programmers' instructions were shared and freely modified by a small group of software designers.
Introduced some months later at Decus, which was then a Digital Equipment Corporation users' group, Spacewar immediately attracted a cult following. It became so addictive that at the M.I.T. laboratory where it was designed, play was soon banned except during lunchtime and after working hours.
Spacewar was the original "twitch" game, requiring lightning reflexes. Each player used keyboard controls or a joystick to maneuver a tiny ship capable of firing a stream of torpedoes as it slid across the screen. Before long a "hyperspace" option was added so that a player could make his ship vanish and reappear at a random place on the screen, avoiding certain death.
Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, saw the game played by young hackers at Stanford's computer center in the early 1960's. "They were absolutely out of their bodies, like they were in another world," he recalled. "Once you experienced this, nothing else would do. This was beyond psychedelics. It impressed the heck out of me."
In fact, though they came to be known for their hours in front of a computer screen, the game's creators initially met through M.I.T.'s hiking club. The group was led by Mr. Russell, known as Slug, and Martin Graetz, known as Shag, both devoted science fiction fans who wondered why better science fiction movies weren't being made.
Another contributor, Peter Samson, then a 21-year old undergraduate studying engineering at M.I.T., added a crucial component called "expensive planetarium," an accurate scrolling star field that portrayed the night sky over Cambridge.
Spacewar began in January 1962 as a simple object-in-motion program, Mr. Graetz said, and by February had become a rudimentary game, including two ships, a supply of fuel and a store of torpedoes.
Both Mr. Russell and Mr. Kotok said it was never their intent to create a new digital entertainment medium. After the new Digital Equipment computer with its display was installed in late 1961, the group simply began thinking about what might be the best way to demonstrate the power of the new machine and hit on the idea of a graphical simulation of a battle between two spaceships.
Spacewar was an obvious choice, but no one in the group sensed what impact the program would have over a decade and a half of popularity.
"One of the things that drew me to the project was that here you could do interaction and painless education and demonstration, and it was engaging," said Mr. Russell, who was 24 at the time.
After agreeing to be the project's lead programmer, Mr. Russell said he procrastinated until Mr. Kotok drove to Digital Equipment and returned with a paper tape containing necessary math subroutines. Mr. Russell set to work by entering code on a Flexowriter, a typewriter device that translated commands into holes punched in paper tape.
Perhaps the most impressive feat was that Spacewar worked at all. The processor for the PDP-1 minicomputer ran at about 100,000 instructions per second, snail-like in comparison with the speed of today's fastest microprocessors, which exceed two billion instructions per second.
Moreover, the computer, which was built from discrete transistors, had to make the most of about nine kilobytes of random access memory, unfathomably little compared with the RAM of today's desktop machines, which can boast as much as one gigabyte -- a million kilobytes.
"Each new game tends to push the state of the art," said Richard F. Rashid, who heads research at Microsoft. "They stretch the machine as far as you can stretch it."
Moreover, the Spacewar program became an integral part of a spreading hackers' culture as it was carried on punched paper tape to the dozen or so research centers and universities that had the early PDP minicomputer.
"What I was most pleased with was that a number of people saw Spacewar and went off and said, `I can do that' and then implemented their version on another system without looking at the source code," Mr. Russell said.
One of those inspired by the game was Nolan Bushnell, who went on to found the Atari Corporation. He was first seized by the idea of commercializing video game technology when he came across a version of Spacewar while a graduate student in engineering at the University of Utah.
In 1971 he introduced an arcade version of Spacewar called Computer Space, which was a commercial flop. Mr. Bushnell kept at it, though, and soon introduced the more successful Pong.
The game also made an impression on two other entrepreneurs-to-be, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer, who as teenagers would ride their bicycles to Stanford's artificial intelligence lab, where the game was frequently played.
But credit for the first commercial video game actually goes to Bill Pitts, a Stanford graduate who with a high school friend, Hugh Tuck, installed Galaxy Game, a coin- operated version of Spacewar, in Stanford's student union several months before Mr. Bushnell introduced Computer Space.
It became a huge hit and was played by students for more than six years, allowing Mr. Pitts to pay back the $60,000 he had invested in the project. Today his version of Spacewar is in the collection of the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View, Calif.
For his part, Mr. Russell, now 64, is only an occasional gamer. He visits arcades to keep up with video game technology and spends a couple of hours a month playing at his own PC. But his tastes, like the times, have changed. Now it is solitaire, not spaceships, that keeps him coming back.
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WRONG! You forgot other Genres, and know little.
:
THERE ARE other unique fresh game concepts every year.
I will admit that on Sega Dreamcast and Sony PS2 you can place all games into a few crowded well defined categories.
Of the over 400 Dreamcast games and over 200 PS2 games many are
First Person Shooter (with or without plot)
Racing (car, boat, snowmobile, etc)
Puzzle oriented, 2d, scrollers, etc
RPG, Puzzle RPG
Fishing simulation (there are 4 fishing games for Dreamcast)
spectator sports simulations (countless)
Simulation: Skate parks (many)
Simulation: Billiards (some)
Simulation: Casinos and gambling (some)
Trivia Games
Video arcade games (with multiplayer online options sometimes)
(actually large numbers of Dreamcast games let not only 4 local players compete but link to internet gaming sites)
Thats about it for categories...
but here is where you are so wrong......
There are amazing new puzzle-action-music games that can not be categorized easily.
Rez is an example.
Dreamcast.ign.com has hundreds of reviews, alphabetized. I bet they reviewed it.
I had to play many games before I stumbled on Rez but basically you enhance musical dance mixes by your rapid movements through psychedelic space full of objects to touch or group, level to level.
Also there are life-pet-simulators that use human voice to teach a growing animal to communicate and thrive (Seaman) its hosted by Leonard Nimoy no less. Try to categorize THAT!
Or play "Wetrix+" A terraforming game that is actually a two person puzzle game mostly arcade leaning.
Geez... you are so wrong to stop imagining. You are just a tired aging man. I played all these hundreds of games. Did you! And I have been playing computer video games ever since my first apple in 1979, and Fairchild years before.
But I do admit that all 400 games on dreamcast can be rigidly categorized into well defined groups except a few fresh ideas. Its those fresh ideas that make gaming all worthwhile.
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/lumingl
Most recently, I've done a Linux port of it, though the windows version is currently much better.
Enjoy : )
-Luminescent
Voxels were used a few years ago in the game Outcast Rather funky looking for it's time it was too.
50 + 1 - 1 = 49
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Just to play devil's advocate for a minute....
I, too, grew up in what seems to be the last generation before video games became such a "staple item" of childhood.
I never did enjoy competitive sports though, and constantly fought pressure from both peers and teachers to play them. Until the end of high-school (and even in college, to an extent), I constantly witnessed favoritism towards those who were good at sports, and saw schools much more concerned with the quality of their sports teams than about the quality of their education.
While it doesn't hurt to tell your kids to "get outside" once in a while, when it's a nice day and they're wasting it all indoors, I also don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that you don't see "leagues of 10+ teams" like you used to.
Maybe kids are finally a little more free to choose their own interests, and to develop their minds outside of the classroom? Only a select few of those who excel at sports in school ever get to make a living from it later. By contrast, how many will find an interest in gaming (and by extension, computers) useful for a future career?
(Lots of idiotic assumptions below)
Sure, it's fine for you Americans to yell at your kids to get them to go outside... But have you ever tried making a Tree Fort in -25C? Admittedly, it's nice during summer, and if we're lucky, it's on a Saturday.
This was actually taken from Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I've forgotten which of the morally despicable collectivists says it, but it's not too far into it, at a party.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
i always thought pong was the first video game. i could be wrong of course.
I write code.
I was just going to post that URL and instead some AC-asshole did it... :(
Moderators, can you PLEASE give me some moderationpoints anyway?
Pretty pretty pretty please with sugar on the top?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
...was that it was a fantastic game before keyboards became commodity junk. On the old true-blue IBM PC or XT, you got a keyboard sturdy enough to dent a car if you swung it hard enough. Now they disintegrate from the wind resistance.
My point being, in those days each key on the keyboard could be pressed independently and the computer could discern EXACTLY which keys were down or let up. Spacewar for PC (and myriad multiplayer games that came later, using a single keyboard) demanded good quality keyboards. My buddies used to sit in the computer lab and play it for hours, until they 'upgraded' machines. They had 'new style' 101 keyboards (88 was enough for me then), and a new strategy came about: hold down as many keys as you could so your opponent couldn't thrust or shoot; when they get frustrated because they're falling toward the sun, spin around and shoot as fast as possible.
Most Spacewar games became shoving matches after that.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
They compare Space Wars of 1962 with Allegiance of 2002, both space games. I'm sorry, but despite Allegiance's colorful graphics and amazing hardware requirements, Space Wars just looks cooler to play!
stuff |
An interesting book I just finished reading was The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven Kent. It goes all the way back... actually beginning with the precursors to pinball in the 19th century, and telling the story of video games and similar amusements as a narrative up to the year 2001. I thought it was well-written, and contains tons of quotes from firsthand sources.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
I believe Pong was the first successful commercialized game (1972) (created by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell after his unsuccessful Computer Space in 1971). A home TV version of Pong appeared around 1976. MIT Space War, the game cited here, ran on "The" PDP-1 a decade earlier. It was the coolest.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
You CAN take that too far, you know. I agree, kids spending 24/7 on video games aren't building any memories, aren't learning a lot, aren't developing themselves as well as they could. But don't completely cut them out. They're just one variety of toy - and kids need toys, they need to play. Hell, adults do too. ^_^ Ask any educator, play is a very important part of education and mental (and social) development. Though the case can be made that computer games aren't teaching social development. =P
Give kids books and bikes and "Final Fantasy" and a Rubix Cube and Little League and Lego and a musical instrument and a foreign language or three and more books and movies and dodgeball and music and crayons, and turn 'em loose! The sky's the limit as long as they have sufficient opportunities to learn and grow. =)
Of course, I'm biased. My dad's a hacker, and rather than spending our time playing catch, we spent it tinkering with DOS. =P But the memories are nice, all the same, and I learned a lot. Computer games are also a way to get kids interested in computers, which in today's and the future economy will be helpful to them in their education and the job market. Just something to keep in mind.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Wasn't the first video game Tennis for two as created for some 'public fair' by some MIT guys or something?
Im not sure of all the details but I am sure that it predated SpaceWar.
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
mine was 13... :^)
I remember the sweat dripping off my nose it was so intense. Or maybe it was just hot.
It doesn't seem to work on my browser. Good luck!
Free unix account: freeshell.org
sigh. Let's have that lesson again.
mHz = 'millihertz', 1 cycle every 1000 seconds.
MHz = 'megahertz', 1000000 cycles per second.
mhz = wrong, but at best millihertz.
Acronyms and units of measurement shouldn't be case-sensitive anyway. Who the hell knows the difference between a calorie and a Calorie, anyway? (Besides me, of course.)
Since ADB (Apple Desktop Bus, this is from before the golden age of USB) can only recognize two keys being held at once on a keyboard as read through GetKeys() (keyboard polling function on the Mac), it was always deemed better to capture keyDown, and more importantly, keyUp events and keep a map in the program. I'm nut sure how it works with USB or in the Linux/Wintel/x86 world but even with the two-key limit of GetKeys() I can still see every key press and every key release, i can hold down 10 keys at once and release the 4th and it will register.
If there is a way to apply such a technique under other OSs/platforms it would be well worth trying, for the sake of not killing your friend.
Blame poor programmers, not poor hardware. (actually in this case they both seem to be lacking but hey)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
So, I am a PhD student and my work requires me to travel to Brookhaven Nat. Lab synchrotron occasionally. Anyway I went there with my boss, Dr. D, who appeared in Vogue for being one of the sexiest professional women ( ./ babe!).
Anyway the night watchman (guy there just in case the x-ray beam explodes), Bob or Bill was trying real hard to get in my boss's pants. So, he brought up the fact that his dad is Steve Russell. Then he proceeds to look up all these webpages dedicated to dad. Of course, now I have a tainted view of the situation, because he wouldn't leave from midnight to 8:00 am when the morning guy arrived.
It was interesting to here the story of the original game maker. Apparently the were just bored one day and had lots of CRT technology around.
Anyway that's my story. Sorry its not so cool.
-vossman
Mod this crybaby down.
I thought 'Pong' was the first video game...
To the folks replying and requesting a mod-down for parent:
/. moderator access this morning. I read this post, and thought about modding it down, but have chosen not to. Why? It's obviously provocative, but it represents a genuine view that exists out there. I don't agree with drsquare's attitude, but I think we benefit far more from the potential discussion than from the satisfaction of immediately squashing his post.
I woke up with
If I were at a party, in a group of people, and this fellow were making his point, I wouldn't punch him in the face (preventing others from hearing him out) -- I'd just walk away. Which is what I'm going to do right now.
I somehow doubt that any game made today really "stretches" the computer as far as it can be stretched... The last game I saw that "stretched" the hardware was a breakout game (with mouse support) written for the amiga.... entirely in the boot sector of a floppy disk.
...instead of being constantly inside trying to figure out how to get to world 8-1 of mario brothers, i was outside playing sports, riding my bike, building tree forts...
If kids don't know how to get to World 8-1 of Super Mario Brothers, then IMHO they need to spend more time playing video games because they are clearly out of practice. Really, all one needs to do is go to the hidden warp zone at the end of World 1-2, warp to World 4, then use the first warp zone in World 4-2 to warp directly to World 8. (Note: Do not confuse this with the warp zone at the end of World 4-2, which will only take you to World 5 and is virtually useless; you're looking for the vine hidden in the blocks near the first elevator.)
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I thought Pong was the first "video" game.
Two lines for "paddles" and a square "ball" and you were set! You want to talk cheesy graphics? I still remember people waiting in line to play it. Ahhh youth...
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I'm sure that NYT writers research their facts thoroughly (blah, blah), but according to Steven Levy's awesome Hackers , it was actually at the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) that everyone met.
We wouldn't want a reconstructionist history of hackerdom's finest moments, would we? (Is Eddie Bauer a sponsor of the Times?)
:wq
I was watching the History Channel a couple weeks back when on the show "History's Lost and Found" they showed the very first video game "Tennis for Two" developed at Brookhaven National Laboratories. I can't remember exactly what date the game was made but I'd trust History Channel to be correct over any news report, no matter how reputable the source.
Have we really gotten to the day where we are so reliant upon computers and other technology (Like calculators) that we can't do simple math in our heads??? Last I checked 2002 - 40 = 1962... C'mon people don't let the older generations be right about the lazy and dependant youth. DO THE MATH!
Looks like you missed out on punctuation lessons too. Make sure your kids go to school as well.
(Sarcastic comments aside, I do actually agree with you).
As for MAME, as arcade PONG can't be emulated, the best you can hope for is a simulation. This was included in MAME several (dozen) versions back, but removed by the project head, as he considered simulation not in tune with what MAME is about. I believe the code is still in there, and as MAME is open-sourced, you can just uncomment the relevant parts and compile it with PONG. There also are binaries floating around with this code still enabled. But as for 'officially'... sadly, it ain't there.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
yada yada COLOR yada stupid americans
yada COLOUR
yada yada stupider
Actually it was a tennis game designed by William Higinbotham in 1958.
And Ralph Baer suggested a similar idea to his company, Loral, in 1951.
Anyway, wasn't Space War invented in 1961?
Read, this. It's good.
muttley
Well - at least my Pong console from the seventies
was one of the first, if not the first, for home use!
Still have the box and the instructions too!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
I'm 23 to give you an idea of the era I grew up in - I was weaned on Atari and followed through with all of the Nintendo's up to the current Gamecube.
I played *all* the time with my friends when I was a kid and that was a great source of fun and comraderie. That *is* what got me interested in computers and the reason that I'm a programmer now.
At the same time though, I played basketball, baseball, swam, and ran track/cross country (even ran cross country in college).
Bottom line: there's plenty of time for social interaction, sports and intellectual stimulation in the life of a kid - there's just so much free time. I actually credit video games in some part to my athletic coordination - my parents weren't that athletic, so it must've been the hand-eye coordination from hours upon hours of Nintendo!
The Red Pill
Doesn't this sound like a lot of amateur game programmers today? A lot of programmers in general (if they have some time) will just sit down and make something because they can. (And it's kinda fun, too.)
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.