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.

Comments

Cool, computer golf anniversery coming soon too

[CDWert]

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 ?

Re:1952?

[Tackhead]

> I can vouch for the no-violence before 1952 theory. I've watched several Fred Estaire/Ginger Rogers movies on AMC that date to the era, and apparently, no matter how extreme the difference between people, they always settled their problems through dance, not violence.
>
> 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.