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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.
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........
Googling for Spacewars turns up several results that say the game is from 1961, not '62. Is The Times Wrong?
Myself, I spent a lot of time with my friends playing video games when I was younger. Since there were only 2 controllers (NES anyone?), you had to take turns and there was a lot of interaction with other kids when you didn't have a controller in your hands.
If you go back even further, I remember playing Warlords on the Atari 2600 with my family probably once a month and playing games on the good ol' C64 with my aunts and uncles at my Grandparents house every Sunday.
That's not to say I didn't go outside and play on my swing set with my friends (*nostalgia for the swing set*) but whether online or offline, practically my whole life with the exception of school has been one big game.
Now I'm much more mature and I play Live Action Roleplaying games. Wait...
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Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
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 think violence was invented around the same time as color. I wonder if there's a connection?
Of course there's a connection. Back then, all the good guys wore white and the bad guys wore black.
Rendered in black-and-white, shattering the Lone Ranger's cranium with a railgun would make it look like he was a bad guy. And chainsawing a bad guy, well, how could you tell the difference between the gibs soaking into his shirt and what he was already wearing?
In black and white, the gibs look like crude oil, or little globs of asphalt. Lame. There was no point to violence until we had color to see the gibs!
Back on topic, the thing I liked most about Cinematronics' arcade release of Spacewar was that you got gibs. Sure, they were just little bent vectors indicating damaged spaceships, but hey, it was all we had, and we liked it!
Come to think of it, the thing that amazed me about Williams' Defender wasn't just a control panel from hell (5 buttons and a joystick), but the beautiful explosions - when you blew up the bad guys, you got to see chunks of their ships flying all over the screen, with great "skizz-chungachungcasplorrzzzz" sound effects to go with it. Nothin' like smart-bombing four pods and huntin' down the stragglers...)
Final note on gibs and video games - Williams/Midway's 1990s-era homage to Defender and Stargate was called Strike Force. Awesome soundtrack and spectacular effects when blowing up the aliens. If you enjoyed Defender and can no longer find Strike Force in the arcades, you owe it to yourself to find it emulated.