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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."
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.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/o2em/ Well, there goes the afternoon...
Spacewar! was the first action video game created in 1962. It was created to be a demo program and stayed in the lab for the most part, but it did have some of the crucial elements like a controller and competition that we come to know as gaming standards today. I think the Pong article counts console development as the first. Pong is certainly the most famous first video game. Congrats to all the pioneers in the field - quite a business now.
Make Demonade.
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.