The Birth of PC Gaming

jayintune writes "2old2play has an article up talking about the birth of PC gaming and how computers turned into entertainment. From the article, 'It's difficult to pin down what the first true PC game was. Broadly defined, early computer games date back to primitive missile simulators (circa 1947) and Tic-Tac-Toe games on very early computers with analog electronics. These computers were essentially glorified calculators with a bit of storage (in some cases, "storage" meant the position of a physical relay as big as your fist, or the on/off condition of a vacuum tube).'"

Comments

XYZZY

[happy_place]

Though no doubt there were plenty of games prior to it, for me, it was the original text adventure, and those magic words, "XYZZY". :) The very thought of creating a game absolutely captivated me, and enticed me to the point where now I'm willing to sit and stare at a screen all day long and go home and do the same... not exactly healthy, but ah... it's a happy place to be... :) --Ray

Hunt the Wumpus

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Hammurabi, Star Trek, the text only Lunar Lander, Those were the days!

Digital vs Analog Computers

[technoextreme]

Bleh... First of all the article is talking about digital computers and not analog. Technically speaking if you include analog computers then MIT wasn't the first. Brookhaven National Laboratory actually built a game called Tennis for Two using an analog computer. Essentially, it was Pong.
http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/videogame.html

Re:Digital vs Analog Computers

[grumbel]

### Brookhaven National Laboratory actually built a game called Tennis for Two using an analog computer. Essentially, it was Pong.

You are correct that Tennis for Two was probally the very first video game, however it was basically nothing like Pong, sure, both 'simulated' tennis, but thats where the similarities stop. Tennis for Two has a sideview, simulates gravity and allows the player to control the angle at which he reflects the ball, while Pong is top down and has a panel that you can move up and down. Tennis for Two looks really looks quite a bit more impressive and while Pong has been cloned thousands of times, I havn't yet seen a Tennis for Two clone.

Re:Digital vs Analog Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gamersquarter.com/tennisfortwo/ might be interesting to you.

Ports

[owlman17]

I had my first IBM-PC compatible back in 1986 so I am by no means an authority on what the really first PC games were. The first games that I saw were basically ports of existing classics. (They were mainstream at the time and weren't really 'classics' in that sense yet.) I played Dig-dug, Digger, Bluebush Chess, Q-bert, Pac-man, Tapper, Archon, Zork, Ancient Art of War, Bard's Tale, etc. Except for the last three I mentioned, many of them could fit on a double-sided 360Kb (Wow!) diskette. Since they were ports from Apple, Atari, C64, Vic-20, Amiga, etc, I sort of felt the IBM PC versions were poor copies. With 4 CGA colors, and just a squeaky speaker, it couldn't match up to the advanced sound and graphics capabilities of the other machines I mentioned. People developed mainly for the other platforms first before rewriting them for the PC. I had somewhat an inferiority complex to my friends who owned those machines. (Things changed in the early 90s with the advent of VGA, sound cards, etc, but that's another story.)

Off-hand, I'm hoping things work out the same way for Linux, (no not saying Linux games are inferior) that when it eventually reaches critical mass, people will develop games for Linux too no longer as an afterthought. (So I wouldn't keep resorting to WINE, trial and error, etc.)

Moments in history....

[Anonymous Coward]

Though the C64 was my first gaming PC at the age of 5, TFA really puts home that the first 'actual' gaming PC's, as in PERSONAL COMPUTER, were the AppleII, Commodore PET, and Radio Shack TRS-80 model 1. Before that how many people had 'mainframes' as PC's? (PERSONAL COMPUTER....)

I'd have to say TFA is inline with where the I'd put the 'PC gaming birth' at.

Anyone have a 5 1/4' drive, I have 700 floppies for the C64 that need to be backed up.... :-p

Shannon's analog Hex-playing computer

[dpbsmith]

I vote for Claude Shannon and E. F. Moore's 1953 analog Hex-playing computer.

Unlike tic-tac-toe, which is so trivial that a tic-tac-toe-playing computer is only entertaining because it is a computer doing it, the Shannon and Moore machine put up a genuine challenge to a human player, on a game that was not fully analyzed at the time, and that was interesting enough to human players to have been released as a commercial board game.

Of course, I have also wondered whether Link trainers, full-sized flight simulators of the 1930s, were ever "flown" simply for entertainment. Knowing human nature, I bet they were. In fact, speaking of bets, I'll bet pilots placed bets on the outcome of competitive Link-trainer contests. (That's entirely speculation on my part). The Link trainers probably qualify as analog computers, even though the computations were, I believe, performed by pneumatic bellows and other non-electronic devices.

Re:Shannon's analog Hex-playing computer

[Bloke down the pub]

The Link trainers probably qualify as analog computers, even though the computations were, I believe, performed by pneumatic bellows and other non-electronic devices.

I wasn't aware that electonics was necessary. I've heard people describe a slide rule as a simple analog computer. And didn't the UK government used to have a water driven economic simulator?

This article is full of errors

[b1t r0t]

The TI 99/4A had 15 colors, not 16, and pretty crappy ones at that. Zork was not a "re-incarnation" of Colossal Cave Adventure, it was a completely different game that just happened to be in the same genre. The TRS-80 Expansion Interface did not "include" the disk controller, it was an extra cost item. And when the hell did Franklin try to clone the Mac? Most glaring of all to me was saying that Radio Shack came out with the TRS-80 in 1971. It was 1977, get some bifocals already.

And they are clearly Commodore sympathizers, since they parenthetically refer to the TRS-80 as the "Trash-80" for no good reason, without giving the Commode-Door the same treatment.

Oh wait, this is 2old2play.com, where their definition of "old" is age 25-30.

Anyhow, as far as I'm concerned "PC gaming" didn't really happen until there were proper "Personal Computers" available commercially, which meant the second wave of micros in the late '70s (Radio Shack, Apple, Commodore), but I'll give some credit to the first micros (IMSAI, etc.) and the timesharing era. The best games before games became commercial were Super Star Trek (all you needed was 16K and a lot of time to type it in), and Adventure (which I got to play on 300 baud DecWriters using the timeshare that my high school had).

Re:This article is full of errors

[TommydCat]

And they are clearly Commodore sympathizers, since they parenthetically refer to the TRS-80 as the "Trash-80" for no good reason, without giving the Commode-Door the same treatment.

Dude... give it up... We BOTH lost! ;)

Re:This article is full of errors

[NickDngr]

And they are clearly Commodore sympathizers, since they parenthetically refer to the TRS-80 as the "Trash-80" for no good reason, without giving the Commode-Door the same treatment.

How can you call them Commodore sympathizers when they completely left the Amiga out of the article? The Amiga was dismissed by many to be nothing more than a game machine - clearly it should have been included.

Re:This article is full of errors

[Anonymous Coward]

Circa 1973-1974 in Natick, Mass, I would walk to the public library in the center of town and play a racing game that I would race a mail truck around a track that was plotted out on a 300 baud DecWriter.

You could sign up for an hour time slot, once a day. I was there every day during the summer until they changed it to once a week.

I might even have the rolls of paper that it printed out after all this time.

I do belive it dialed into MIT. Anybody know/remember any thing about this?

Nathan

Re:This article is full of errors

[sesshomaru]

Yes, a better article is here: The (abridged) story of Infocom

Specifically, about the origins of Zork here In the Beginning

Of course, it's very Infocom centric. Well, it is MIT, birthplace of Zork, after all.

Re:This article is full of errors

[Hockney Twang]

Franklin didn't clone the Mac, but they did clone the Apple II. http://oldcomputers.net/ace500.html
I own one of these.

Re:This article is full of errors

[Atario]

Right you are. And another, I would think, more glaring error: the paragraph about the TRS-80 has a picture of an Atari 800 XL.

Not to mention the fact that he pretty much glossed over the Atari 8-bits entirely. Bastard. (See my username...)

I remember modding the Star Trek game

[WillAffleckUW]

we used to print out on a plotter and use the LED readerboard to "scan" for ships, running on punchcards. I modded the game to give the Romulans cloaking ability (changing them from the K for Klingon to R for Romulan) and let photon torpedos light them up when they hit, with a trace afterimage.

That was on a Hewlett Packard. Way before I bought my Apple and started my own game business.

At least for me

[drinkypoo]

The birth of PC gaming was Kingdom of Kroz. It put apogee on the map and got me addicted to PC gaming forever. It was all about the keyboard... "Wait, you mean my atari controller has 5 switches, and my PC has 101?"

Storage

[fotbr]

(in some cases, "storage" meant ... the on/off condition of a vacuum tube)

As opposed to, say, the on/off condition of a transistor, or the charged/discharged condition of a capacitor?

OMGWTFTUBES! Its called history, get over it.

Re:Storage

[lgw]

But the internet *is* tubes! Did you think it was a truck?

Re:Storage

[ichigo 2.0]

I am a banana!

Photon torpedoes!

[rehtonAesoohC]

Ahhh EGATrek, I pine for you...

Re:Photon torpedoes!

[MrCopilot]

Here ya go

http://www.dosgamesonline.com/index/game/StarTrek/ 496

I highly recomend an update.

http://wcuniverse.sourceforge.net/vegatrek/index.h tml

Bartend

[szembek]

Hey, anybody else ever play that game in the mid eighties where you were a bartender and had to run back and forth bringing beers to the patrons? It was a badass game. If you went too slow they got mad and slid you down the bar. I would like to find an online version sometime but can't find one. I used to play it on the PC Jr.

Re:Bartend

[Cobralisk]

You seek Tapper.

Re:Bartend

[MadHatter2005]

I think you're referring to the game "Tapper", which had you sling Budweiser down lengthy bars in a variety of settings.

There was also a sanitized version called "Root Beer Tapper" which was made to pacify the angry parents who didn't want little Johnny getting pro-alcohol messages from his video games.

tapper ?

[bobamu]

no doubt available in flash / java versions

Space Quest

[Badfysh]

I remember when I first had my Amiga 500, I went to the only games shop I knew and they had a crowd gathered around "Space Quest" running on a PC. At the time it was incredible, stereo music blaring out and beautiful cut scenes scrolling across the screen. That was the day I knew I had to get a PC by hook or by crook, and for me anyway, "Space Quest" was the first proper, modern looking PC game.

One of my favourite game related quotes

[malf-uk]

"Right. In those days, children, we had to make our own entertainment (and if you owned a ZX81 you had to make your own keyboard, too). Breaking a new game was part of the fun (and often quite easy). Ah...those were the days when the cassette picture shows vast alien spaceships locked in combat, and the game itself probably involved firing up-arrows at flying letter As." Terry Pratchett on alt.fan.pratchett