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Videogames Turn 40
May 15th marks the 40 year anniversary of the first games hooked up to the television. An article on the 1up site tells the story of Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison, and Bill Rusch working at the Sanders Associates company on a little game called Pong. They go into a great deal of detail on the development of the console, going so far as to include a number of the group's original notes on the project. "Baer kept the tiny lab, a former company library in Sanders' early days, locked at all times. Only two men had keys: Baer and Harrison. The room would remain the base of operations for their controversial video experiments for years to come -- experiments that, had they been known about widely at the time, might have garnered intense ridicule from other employees of the prominent defense contractor. Pursuing them was an utterly audacious move."
We REALLY can't trust them now?
Wasn't spacewar the first action game...? Ok so there wasn't really a TV...
And now this article comes out.
Jeez, I'm old.
John
My buddy recently interviewed Ralph Baer at his home in NH. The interviews are online at http://blip.tv/file/158121/ and http://blip.tv/file/188528/. He's definitely an old school computer guy who would take designing circuits over programming any day.
A lot of people assume Nolan Bushnell started it all, if only because his work was the catalyst that caused the industry to explode in size and value. Both Bushnell and Baer's roles were absolutely essential to birthing the industry.
However painful it may seem, most industries are born of one or more men inventing something truly interesting. However, their first growth spurt comes when someone else copies that invention and popularizes it. This is, in effect, the respective roles of Baer and Bushnell.
I'd encourage people to read the whole article, including the sidebars. It's a great history lesson for a subject dear to us all.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
My Father bought us the Atari system and we would play the "Tennis" game. I would bet my allowance and I would win several games. Each time my Dad lost, he would say, "How about double or nothing?"
I would always respond with "Yes!"
All of a sudden, my Dad would become great at video tennis and win. I lost everything, but kept my original allowance. Eventually, I gave up gambling with him and to this day I don't like to gamble. Educated risks, yes, but no gambling.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I was just a little boy but there was a "Computer Space" arcade game at the Target my family went to in Oklahoma City. Most people just walked right past it but I was fascinated by it, even though I was barely tall enough to press the buttons.
:)
And here we are in 2007 and video games still catch my interest....
Because Jack Thompson decided that Video Games are a NEW threat for our beloved children.
So get you facts straight and don't argue with 40-something fantasy numbers you children-hating-son-of-the-devil!
Praise the lord! See you in court!
The first game anybody saw, other than in a lab, was PONG. And that was 1972 IIRC.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I have a personal connection to this story. My Dad worked at Sanders at the time and witnessed Ralph's work. I was born in 1966. It might explain why I am 41 and still a videogame addict.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
http://sourceforge.net/projects/o2em/ Well, there goes the afternoon...
...contacted. We know that the crystal in your palm has turned black, don't try to run Videogames!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Does anyone remember building the first digital home version out of Popular Electroncs? I remember ordering the circuit board and soldereing the parts that I bought out of electronic mail order catalogs (like DigiKey). We played it for hours at a time.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I got one of the first Atari systems in 1976 or so, but that was my Dad's doing, not mine. However, my life was irrevocably changed the first time I played Asteroids. What a game! And to this day, it maintains a grace and clarity, and complex challenge, that I don't find with any other game. I keep PC versions of the game on every PC I work on. Great stress reliever. That said, I still haven't overcome my bias against The Triangles....
I remember me and my brother spending hours typing code from a computer magazine into our Sinclair Spectrum. After several hours of coding, we were able to watch a ball bounce around the screen and change color when it hit a wall. That's it. But we were blown away! Then we would start again on the next page of coding. Kids these days get bored with several games in less time than it took us to code one screen.
I wonder what the first videogame would have been if humans had never invented tennis.
It is not mentioned in this article (that I could find), but one of the reasons the Odyssey failed to meet expectations was the device was given a marketing campaign that was centered around the Magnavox company and televisions. Magnavox was trying to imply that a Magnavox television was required. Not a smart thing to do when there was already similar devices on the market that were not "Magnavox" specific.
I pine for the days where game developers actually had imaginative and interesting new ideas. Look at any video game store today, or any list of the top selling games, and all you will see are sequels, expansion packs, and "brand extension" titles.
How many more fucking Tom Clancy Rainbow Sixes do we really need? Another Command And Conquer?? Final Fantasy XIXXI Super Mega Ultra Neon Advance? SimCity 50000?
Rule of thumb: If the video game's title has a number or a colon (:) in it, it's probably unimaginative pap.
First system I had back in 76 was a Odyssey 300 Pong system. Interesting thing at the time, the RF adapters back then were wholesale FCC fraud (something in common with Apple's first RF modulators). Basically, no FCC violations occured - until the consumer hooked them up. We were living south of St. Louis in St. Genevive MO at the time where to pull in TV - you had to have a very tall tv antenna. Once that system was hooked up - we were spraying PONG TV on channel 3 to the entire town - or a sizable portion of it from our 2 story high aerial.
I didn't discover this until kids were asking me in school "who was on the left". I replied that was my brother. "He was kicking your ASS last night dude". I replied "wait - you weren't around yesterday - hell I didn't even know you knew I had a system!". After he told me he was watching us on tv I rode after school on my bike - several miles from my house - to his and wached my Odyssey (which I left on) beaming in crystal-clear to his tv.
I have no idea what our ratings were, but given the state of mid 70s television - I wouldn't be surprised if our audience-share wasn't substantial.
Asteroids, on an original arcade machine, is still a great thing to play. I played one a few months ago at the Game On exhibition at London's Science Museum - the intensity of the glows and trails on the screen due to the vector hardware really changed the whole atmosphere.
I still love the raster updates and spent many happy hours on the various PC and Mac ports - Maelstrom in particular, but the original game running on vector hardware is still the version I prefer.
Cheers,
Ian
Your point is well taken. What do we do to those children, unthinkingly, and how does it affect the long term future.
I find it similar to the article/essay written by Neal Peart of Rush about their new album, Snakes and Arrows. (Rush is currently #3 on the charts - I never thought I'd see that again! Makes me happy as a big Rush fan!)
Snippet from A Prize Every Time
"...how children are usually imprinted with a particular faith, along with their other early blessings and scars. People who actively choose their faith are vanishingly few; most simply receive it, with their mother's milk, language, and customs. Thinking also of people being shaped by early abuse of one kind or another, I felt a connection with friends who had adopted rescue dogs as puppies, and given them unlimited love, care, and security. If those puppies had been "damaged" by their earlier treatment--made nervous, timid, or worse--they would always remain that way, no matter how smooth the rest of their life might be. It seemed the same for children.
To express that notion, I came up with, "The snakes and arrows a child is heir to/ Are enough to leave a thousand cuts." I thought I was only combining Hamlet's "slings and arrows" with the childhood game "Snakes and Ladders," to make something less clichéd. And indeed, when we were discussing Snakes and Arrows as a possible album title, Geddy remarked, "I like it because it sounds familiar, but isn't."
"An article on the 1up site tells the story of Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison, and Bill Rusch working at the Sanders Associates company on a little game called Pong."
Um, Baer & co didn't develop "Pong". They developed a generic tennis game that was similar to Pong, which was developed by Bushnell & co. Sure, they got the basic idea from Baer, but they made it their own (for example, more detailed graphics, on-screen scoring). If I remember the videos I've seen correctly, Baer's version allowed you to move your paddle towards and away from the net, unlike Pong.
FC Closer
You invented the Internet!
Here is one from 1958:
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/higinbotham.asp
PONG TV? Did that really happen? I'm not calling you a liar, I'm just wondering if this was a widespread thing? I don't ever remember mention of this anywhere...
I can see the birthplace of video games from my bedroom window.
I, for one, welcome our tennis-inventing overlords!
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that arcade games are a BIG waste of time. I would rather be PROGRAMMING a game than playing one. Same thing for lotto/kino video games. If I wanted to watch random numbers pop up on a screen, I would write a short script myself. I would rather think than mindlessly shoot 'em up. Is this a troll? Then mod me down.
Hello, world.
Nitpick: It was a PDP-1, one of which has been restored to working order, much to the delight of Spacewar's creators.
But everything else you said was essentially correct, including the homebuilt input device, which consists of five switches laid out in a pattern that anyone who played the coin-op versions of Spacewar and Asteroids will immediately recognize.
No, but they do still live in their parents' basement.
My earliest memory of playing video games is the Atari 2600. My parents bought it for us kids, so we had to have a good selection of multiplayer games. Warlords was probably the preferred game. My little sister had barely learned how to walk and we were shoving the paddle in her hand because we needed a 4th player.
When we moved to the new house, the Atari moved to my brother's room, hooked up to his brand-new 13" COLOR TV. Every other morning, I'd sneak into his room at 5AM to try to finish Indiana Jones or Tutankhamen. Most of the time I'd end up waking him up and he'd chase me out. I never did beat those games, though...
"ive come to the conclusion that we're desensitizing ourselves and our children to video game violence and vulgarity"
Fixed that for you.
"however, i do not believe that children are as capable of this advanced level of discernment."
You are wrong, at least according to the mountains of research that exists.
It saddens me that so many people modded you up, as that speaks directly to the type of ignorance that allows factually incorrect opinions such as yours to spread.
The human mind is much more complex than you can understand. I say this not to be an ass, but to emphasize that your laypersons assumptions are based on intuition that is not accurate and that fly in the face of all the research that exists. There are times when what you feel is true is not. This is one of those times.
What is harder to make? An invention or a business model? Since there are more working inventions than working business models, it is definately the latter. It is salesmen and entrepreneurs that change the world, not cranky inventors despite whatever mythology one believes. As nerds, we like to think our "intelligence" and "creativity" is the mover and shaker of things. It isn't. This is why I suspect Woz sees himself in Baer.
Bushnell was responsible for making the video-game arcade as well as popularizing the home console. Baer was not. In terms of the beginner of the video-game industry as a working, incredible profitable business, Bushnell is responsible. Bushnell's video-game products SOLD, Baer's video-game products did not. And Baer had the home video-game market completely to himself for many years and still couldn't make it work.
Baer has been suffering sour grapes for a long time. Baer should learn from Steve Russell, the inventor of Spacewar, when he said that, "If I didn't make Spacewar, someone else would. I just happened to get there first." Baer got there first but he (and his company) lacked the ability to sell the product.
The time the article spent trying to 'justify' Baer over Spacewar and Bushnell really indicates how weak Baer's importance is. If you have to base so much of the article on reasons of justification, then that justification probably doesn't exist. Movers and shakers are self-evident and need no lofty defense.
Speaking about beginning the game business, Bushnell could have easily started the PC business. It has to burn him up that Steve Jobs was his employee, that put Jobs underneath his wing, and could have been a major shareholder in Apple. Bushnell could have been Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
But Baer? No. History will remember Baer. But Baer's insistence that he is the fountainhead of video-games is as absurd as Steve Russell saying he is the fountainhead of game arcades. Russell has the humility to admit that he wasn't, that if he didn't make Spacewar than someone else would have. Baer lacks that humility (and while chastizing that Bushnell "stole" his tennis game, he sits the Simon proudly on his desk without telling us where he *really* got that from).
Take a look at this: http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/games/space/spacewa r.html
Long live DEC!
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT3728480
40 years is not very long for what has transpired between the early video games and modern video games. Video games are sort of the representative tip of the iceberg in computing technology . Aside from some super computer applications and the like, video games often represent computer hardware taken to the limits of simulation of some internally consistent model, from the bizarre (2D Mario worlds) to the more realistic (3D FPS with more accurately modeled physics). MMOGs (and MUDs before them) have traced the capabilities of networks, with Second Life, for all its wrinkles, probably best (or poorly, as the actual user experience may be) excercising the networking envelope because of it's just-in-time content streaming and server multiplexing.
Of course, that doesn't mean that modern video games are any more enjoyable than Pong and the earlier games, which almost have an advantage in that the only thing they could focus on was gameplay, but it does show an impressive advancement along the technical curve. With that curve tending upwards and advancement getting faster, it's fun to imagine what the next 40 years will bring.
I'll be down for dinner soon! I'm almost done with this level!
A couple of years back, I did an interview over the web with Ralph H. Baer. He was VERY clear that he didn't create PONG, but a similar game called Ping Pong. It consisted of a green field with two paddles that had changeable angles. It was also a great deal more difficult and faster moving than PONG.
May 15th is my birthday and I am 40 now. The only cool thing I have found about turning 40, ugh!!!
I was involved in the 1975 alternative to Atari's home Pong game, called TV Tennis by Executive Games. Executive Games was an entrepeneur who came to MIT's Innovation Center to find people to design a "home video game" like the coin operated Pong games. We did it with discrete analog and digital circuits; ball and paddle movement were analog, and thus game speed was controlled with a pot, from very slow to unbelievably fast. Much more challenging than Atari, in our opinion. There was also a practice wall which looked like a stack of paddles, so the ball would come off at seemingly random angles, and a robot paddle which came out of a debugging tool (see my book "Debugging" for this war story.) We also had our controllers at the end of a cable, allowing players to sit back and not crowd around the console like the Atari game. You could hold the controller and use it with one hand, leaving the other free to hold your beer. (Yes, I was still an undergrad, but the drinking age was 18 in those days.)
I remember not being taken seriously by National Semiconductor when I asked for quotes on counter and gate chips in 100,000 quantities -- there was no market for logic at those levels in that era, consumer electronics was all radio. But we did ship 67,000 games before Christmas 1975.
Building games out of discrete parts proved uncompetitive in the long run, and Executive Games dropped out after building a hockey game the next year. When I graduated (in 1976) I interviewed with a division of Fairchild in hopes of designing games on a chip. During the interview, one of the managers showed me a prototype game they had built, thinking it would be a good way to use up millions of TTL (the original very popular logic family, now obsolete due to high power consumption) chips they had in inventory. He showed me a 5" by 10" circuit board covered with TTL chips, and my immediate reaction was "That's all TTL? You must have had a power supply the size of a shoebox." He dropped the board on the table, and said "We worked on this for 9 months before we realized that, and it killed the project. When can you start?" I did take the job, but ended up designing clock radios, so I came back East after a short time.
The biggest success story out of our little game venture was Glen Dash, who was our RF guy, getting our TV modulator through the FCC. He understood the physics and electronics and laws, and was able to establish a relationship with the folks at the FCC. He parlayed this into an RFI/EMI compliance consulting business which paid his way through Harvard Law and Sloan (MIT) Business schools, and he eventually sold the company and retired. He now runs a gentleman's farm in Connecticut and goes on architectural digs to the Middle East with his own ground-penetrating radar gear.
Dave Agans
debuggingrules.com
"Debugging" by Dave Agans - the perfect gift for your favorite imperfect engineer.
Everything everyone has mentioned, between Pong, to Higinbotham, to oscilloscopes (raster vs. vector displays), to Spacewar was discussed in the article at 1UP. I highly recommend reading the entire article and all the sidebars before posting your idea of video game "history." The author really did some serious research on this. An excellent piece.