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."
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!
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
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
There was also a lot - and I mean a LOT of chaff. First there were a million space-shooters that were clones of Space Invaders, Galaxian and Galaga. Then there were Maze-Games galore. Each winning game had sequals - lots of them in the case of games like Asteroids. And oh yes - plenty of games that sucked. I collect games and the most rabid contingent is the Laser-Disc game group and 90 percent of those games were terrible.
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."
Here is one from 1958:
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/higinbotham.asp
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.
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).
Yes - RF adapters were pretty - um - leechy. The reason the signal spewed up the 3 story tower (2 stories over the height of the house) was because we screwed down the flat leads to the RF box on top of the flat leads coming in from the tower mating the two lines basically.
As a post-script, a similar thing happened with my Atari 7800 in college when I was throwing clear images of channel 3 to my neighbors - through cinderblock walls - clear as a bell. It didn't interfere with chanell 3 signals being piped from other student's VCRs but one reported seeing my game action when they were getting ready to watch a movie.
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.