Slashdot Mirror
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."
And now this article comes out.
Jeez, I'm old.
John
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!
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.
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."
I was just about say the same thing. Spacewar was created by students at MIT on a DEC PDP-5 mainframe. They even created a special input device with dials and switches just to control this game. Incidentally, Spacewar was one of my first and favourite games I played on my first computer, the Compaq Deskpro 8086 with 4.33MHz CPU and a 10MB hard drive. For more information on this and other big innovators at the birth of the computer age I cannot sufficiently recommend the fantastic book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy.
Here is one from 1958:
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/higinbotham.asp
I actually have an old issue of Analog (ca. 1965) with an article by John Campbell which discusses SPACEWAR. The blurb for the story talks about how it's a fascinating game, but ordinary people will never play it because the "gameboard" costs tens of thousands of dollars (back when that was a heckuva lot more money, too)! Even SF writers can fail to see the oncoming rush of progress.
Chris Mattern
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.