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

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.

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).