Press Start: Video Games PDF

// 1 PRESS START: VIDEO GAMES GAME HISTORY // 2 TODAY’S TOPICS / PREHISTORIC GAMES / ATARI – ARCADE ERA...

// 1 PRESS START: VIDEO GAMES GAME HISTORY // 2 TODAY’S TOPICS / PREHISTORIC GAMES / ATARI – ARCADE ERA / HOME CONSOLES / ATARI – CONSOLE ERA Digital Arts and Entertainment GAME HISTORY // 3 PART 1 P R E HI ST OR I C G A ME S PRESS START: VIDEO GAMES Digital Arts and Entertainment GAME HISTORY // 4 CHESS AND CHECK E RS Alan Turing believed that the focus of computer theory should be on artificial intelligence, deciding that having a computer play chess to a level whereby it could defeat an average human player would be a milestone. The only problem was that ENIAC, the first machine that could be programmed, wasn’t powerful enough to run it. Then, in 1952, Turing was arrested and convicted of the then-crime of homosexuality, and two years later, isolated and ashamed, committed suicide. Turing’s work inspired fellow computer scientist Christopher Strachey to begin work on a checkers program which, after he contacted Turing, was completed in 1951. It featured an opponent artificial intelligence (AI), a visual representation of the board and text output. By far the most interesting quality of Checkers, however, is that Strachey imbued his creation with the illusion of personality. // 5 “In addition to showing a picture of the board with the men on it in a cathode ray tube, and to printing out moves on a teleprinter, the machine makes a sort of running commentary on the game. For instance, it starts by printing ‘Shall we toss for the first move? Will you spin a coin?’ It then calls, in a random manner, and asks ‘Have I won?’ There’s no cheating in this, at any rate as far as the machine is concerned. The player has then to feed his moves into the machine according to certain rules. If he makes a mistake the machine will point it out and ask him to repeat the move. If he makes too many mistakes of this kind, the remarks printed by the machine will get increasingly uncomplimentary, and finally it will refuse to waste any more time with him.” - C H R I S T O P H E R S T R A C H E Y // 6 NI M Often (erroneously) described as the first game that could be played on a computer, Nim was designed for the 1951 Festival of Britain. John Bennett designed a computer version of Nim, but the game was built by engineer Raymond Stuart-Williams, who constructed a custom machine nicknamed Nimrod. It enraptured audiences, who were much less interested in the genius of a responsive machine than the bank of flashing lights Nimrod used to represent matches. Nimrod proved so popular it went on tour to an industrial show in Berlin, where it defeated Germany’s chancellor Ludwig Erhard, but after these showings was dismantled and simply forgotten about. // 7 OXO At the UK’s University of Cambridge, meanwhile, PhD students and professors were getting to grips with a custom-built computer called the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC). Like ENIAC this was constructed from vacuum tubes and occupied a huge space, but it also had three CRT monitors that displayed dots in a 35 x 16 grid. This screen had just the right dimensions to display the board for Noughts and Crosses, and they called the program OXO. This is the first-ever game to display visuals. Whether Checkers, Nim and OXO should be considered the first video games is arguable. These games were transpositions of existing real-world games into a computer environment, intended to demonstrate the capabilities of their respective machines rather than represent the future of computers. With that said, the complexity of what these pioneers achieved cannot be overstated; if not the first video games, they are at least the very first steps towards the new medium. // 8 TENNI S FOR TWO Perhaps the first game created solely for entertainment rather than to demonstrate the power of some technology, train personnel, or aid in research was Tennis for Two, designed by William Higinbotham and built by Robert Dvorak at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958. There were no bats, and there was no way to keep score or ‘win’ the game, but this was all irrelevant: Tennis for Two was fun. Higinbotham made Tennis for Two as a demonstration and considered it a simple diversion – despite its huge popularity among the Brookhaven visitors. He never thought to patent his invention (a good thing for consumers as any patent would have belonged to the US government) and in later years preferred to discuss his work against nuclear proliferation rather than his role at the dawn of video games. TENNIS FOR TWO // 9 TECH MODEL RAILROAD CLUB / Founded in 1946, MIT's Tech Model Railroad / This game involved two ships, the Needle Club or "TMRC", was for students who, and Wedge, trying to blow each other up unsurprisingly, loved model trains, but on a while flying around a gravitational point. deeper level, what they were into was Although a fantastic achievement for its technology and figuring out how things time, Spacewar! was limited in exposure worked and that sort of curiosity was piqued because the PDP-1 was an enormously when computers started to appear expensive machine only found in places like MIT. / In 1961, TMRC member Steve Russell, also known as "Slug", set out to make a game. He / Slug graduated, got a job in computer combined his love of "B"-grade sci-fi with his security computer security, and never knowledge of the group's favorite computer patented Space War! because he thought on campus, the Programmable Data there would be no money in video games. He Processor 1, or "PDP-1", to create "Space was wrong. War!“. SPACEWAR! // 10 PART 2 A T A R I – A R C A D E E R A PRESS START: VIDEO GAMES Digital Arts and Entertainment GAME HISTORY // 11 DABNEY AND BUSHNE L L Spacewar! would become the basis of the first arcade game, created by Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell, both engineers. Bushnell had no shortage of ideas about the next step in entertainment but, much more importantly, had the salesman’s touch of being able to convince others to throw in with him. One idea was a pizza joint filled with arcade games and animatronic characters that played music. Another was using computers and TV sets – as both technologies became more common – to somehow deliver arcade games into the home. Bushnell and Dabney thought on the idea further, they realized that computers in the late 1960s were far too expensive for the idea to be feasible as a consumer product. But the pair’s imaginations were fired, and they began looking for other ways to create a new type of video game. Bushnell was convinced that a version of Spacewar!, which he had played while a student at Utah, would make a great arcade game. // 12 COMPUTE R SPACE Spacewar! was now known as Computer Space and, as a new type of entertainment in bars and restaurants, Bushnell knew it had to make a big impression. Bushnell designed a huge fiberglass cabinet that came in four different colours; sweeping curves enveloped the TV screen, the machine leaned towards its player, and the four buttons were set in an aviation inspired panel with individual labels. The game was released in November 1971 and, although Computer Space was popular with young people and tech-minded individuals, the fact it was a new kind of experience and complex to control at the same time meant that it died a death in bars. Regardless of this modest reception, Computer Space is the first commercially sold video game of any kind and became the model for the future of arcade games – dedicated cabinets that were built to play one title. // 13 A SMALL TEST Shortly after the release of Computer Space in November 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney decided to form their own company and used a term from Go that is roughly equivalent to ‘check’ in chess: Atari. One of Atari’s first employees was young engineer Al Alcorn. Alcorn’s first job, though he didn’t realize it, was more of a test. Bushnell described a simple ping-pong game with two bats, a ball and a score tracker. Alcorn started work on a prototype. Bushnell was inspired by the Magnavox Odyssey’s Tennis but thought of this more as a training exercise, believing the future of Atari lay in either selling a new variant of Computer Space or possibly a racing game. Within three months Alcorn had completed the unnamed game. He had mounted a $75 black-and-white television in a four-foot-high cabinet and hardwired everything inside. Alcorn hadn’t been content to merely follow the basic outline provided and made several significant improvements to how the game played. As soon as Bushnell and Dabney played it, they knew the young engineer had produced something special. // 14 P O NG The key to Alcorn’s design, and what set it apart from the Magnavox Odyssey Tennis game, is that the bat is invisibly divided into eight vertical segments. Depending on which one of these the ball hits, the angle of return will be different, creating an effective illusion of racquet physics. He also made the ball accelerate after a certain number of returns, meaning that rallies between good players would quickly get intense. Alcorn had also jury-rigged a ‘bloop’ sound effect when the ball was returned, and the overall impression the machine creates – particularly with regard to what had come before – is minimalist sophistication. Bushnell christened the game Pong and added an instruction card that continued this theme. Also, and so obvious it’s easy to underestimate, Pong is a two-player game that was placed in social settings. Although the game could be played against a respectable ‘AI’ opponent, Pong was and is at its best with friends, the kind of thing that can break up an evening and spark minor rivalries among patrons. PONG & ALLAN ALCORN // 15 SUCCESS AND COMPETITION / Atari’s success bred competition. Within a / So, in a move that some might see year of Pong’s release other major gaming unethical, he hired his neighbor to run a new companies in the US began making knock- company, Kee Games, which produced offs of it. Atari failed to apply for patents clones of Atari games with different before releasing the game, which allowed names. This allowed Bushnell to sell Atari competitors to enter the market with very game machines to one distributor and Kee similar games. games to another, increasing sales without violating his contracts. / In addition to stiff competition, Atari ran into trouble with distributors of coin- / Eventually this deception was found out, but operated games. At the time, the industry luckily, by that time Atari’s games were so was controlled only a handful of game popular, and generated so much money for distributors in each region of the country, distributors that they overlooked the and each of these distributors wanted an contract violations. This was the beginning exclusive contract to sell Atari products in of the end for the exclusive distribution their area. Bushnell wanted to sell games to contract, and it paved the way for Arcade all the distributors, but Atari had already games to become national hits, rather than signed a bunch of these contracts. regional phenomena. // 16 PART 3 HO ME C O N S O LES PRESS START: VIDEO GAMES Digital Arts and Entertainment GAME HISTORY // 17 WHAT I F… Ralph Baer, a television engineer, wondered how he could use the magical screen box at home for more interactive entertainment. ‘What I had in mind at the time was to develop a small “game box” that would do neat things and cost, perhaps, twenty-five dollars at retail.’ After an initial investment from the company he worked for, Ralph developed a prototype with two ‘light guns’ that used photo sensors to hit on-screen targets (which could be moved randomly by the hardware or by another player). After a well-received demonstration to his company’s board of investors, the management’s edict now became: “Build something we can sell or license.” The difference between a prototype and a commercial product is the difference between a skilled engineer building one item with no cost restrictions and a factory producing tens of thousands of items at minimal cost. The other problem was the games. Baer understood that what his team had produced so far was great for demonstrating potential, but a consumer product would need to offer a higher- quality experience. // 18 THE BROWN BOX ‘Ping-pong, tennis, hockey, soccer, and handball games were conceived in rapid succession, at least on paper,’ said Baer. ‘Unlike the two manually controlled spots we had been using, the third spot’s movement was to be machine-controlled. Bill Rusch, a teammate, came up with the idea of using that spot as a “ball” so that we could play some sort of ball game with it. We batted around ideas of how we could implement games such as ping-pong and other sports games.’ Over the next few months the team refined both the hardware and software around this concept and, with a further infusion of R&D cash, by early 1968 they had a machine playing Ping-Pong, Hockey, Target Shooting and various chase games – all of which were displayed with different background colours. Several iterations later they added two more games, Volleyball and Golf Game, two hand- controllers, a lightgun, a ‘golf joystick’ and switches on the machine’s body to move between the available games. Baer covered the machine’s aluminum chassis with brown, self- adhesive vinyl in a wood-grain pattern. At this point it became known as the Brown Box. // 19 MAGNA VO X In January 1968 the Brown Box was in a finished state, the first functional home games console. Although further minor improvements would be made, the next step was selling it. Magnavox, an electronics company, decided to take a chance with the Brown Box, and set its engineers onto working out how to minimize component cost. Over the next months Magnavox’s engineers, aided by Baer and his team, gradually converted the Brown Box design into what would become known as the Magnavox Odyssey. On 22 May 1972 Magnavox officially launched the Odyssey TV Game System. The system came with pack-in goodies, some of which made sense (transparent television overlays for certain games) and some of which were bizarre (playing cards and dice). // 20 MAGNA VO X PROBLEMS The system sold for a whopping $100 rather than Baer’s projected $50, with a rifle sold separately at $25 and additional games held back to be sold on two plug-in cartridges. The most counterproductive saving had been made by removing the Odyssey’s sound chip, meaning the games played in silence, which Baer recognized as a serious issue and tried to remedy with the addition of a sound accessory – this was released commercially but, incredibly, Magnavox’s own retail stores didn’t carry it. The A/C power adapter was also sold separately (although the Odyssey could be powered with batteries). This was bad enough, but Magnavox went out of its way to imply that the console would only work on Magnavox televisions (it would work with any television) and limited supplies to its own authorized dealerships. // 21 HOME GAMI NG Despite this, the Odyssey was original enough to sell over 100,000 units over Christmas and would go on to shift around 300,000 total. And from this vantage point the sales are the least interesting thing about it: the Odyssey was the first home games console, and the beginning of an entertainment industry that has never looked back. As part of Odyssey’s promotion Magnavox toured the machine around trade shows, and the machine was displayed in California on 24–5 May 1972. Among the names in the guestbook was one Nolan Bushnell, a man thinking about how he could follow up a project called Computer Space with something that would appeal to a broader audience. He’d found it. MAGNAVOX ODYSSEY // 22 PART 4 A T A R I – C O N S OLE E RA PRESS START: VIDEO GAMES Digital Arts and Entertainment GAME HISTORY // 23 CO NSO L E TIME Bushnell had also, somewhat inadvertently, pioneered a business model that is still widespread in the industry today: copying another game. Over the next few years the situation would reverse as every amusement manufacturer scrambled to produce a Pong clone. A small Japanese company, Taito, started making video games with Elepong, the first Japanese arcade game, and even Atari themselves produced several variants like Quadrapong. Faced with a flood of copycats, Bushnell, now in sole charge after Dabney’s departure in 1973, felt that Atari could stay ahead of the pack by – ironically enough – focusing on original ideas. In 1974 work had begun on a home Pong console. Although it was only an incremental improvement over the Magnavox Odyssey, and featured less variety, the simple name recognition factor of Pong saw greater success and – more importantly – awoke Bushnell to the potential of home gaming. // 24 WHAT'S NEXT? The success of Atari’s home Pong machine again saw a rush of imitators – this time, thanks to the fact that the integrated circuit’s design could be easily copied. Two years later there would be more than 60 ‘home Pong’ consoles on the market, and well over ten million machines sold in the US. But Atari was already thinking about what was next. The company’s key players knew that the future wasn’t in the integrated circuit, but in the new technology of the microprocessor. Where an integrated circuit could perform the single function for which it was programmed, a microprocessor was flexible – at the time, it was referred to as ‘a computer on a chip’. The importance of this for video games was obvious: you could sell a machine and then sell individual game cartridges that contained memory chips. Plug and play. The only problem was that, as Atari desperately sought the funding to bring the concept to market, someone else had got there first. // 25 VES In 1974, company Fairchild Semiconductor announced the impending release of the Fairchild F8, an 8-bit microprocessor that was at the bleeding edge of CPU technology and would soon become the bestselling computer chip in the world. The recent popularity of home video games led the company to try its hand at designing a console that could use this technology and take over the marketplace. What was paramount to the system was to have cartridges, and another unusual part of the design was the two controllers: the main bulk was a large vertical hand grip, with a triangular eight-way joystick on top that could also be pushed down or pulled up as a fire button. The most visionary was a ‘hold’ button that allowed players, for the first time, to ‘pause’ the game (as well as change the speed). Despite initial success the VES was ultimately a failure for two reasons. The first was that the games, even by the standards of the day, were nothing special. The second reason was that the VES had scared and awoken Atari. // 26 VCS The prototype known as ‘Stella’, named after an engineer’s bicycle, had been in development at Atari for years before the VES shocked the company out of its slumber. Bushnell instantly realized that the console would have to hit the market soon before a flood of competitors ruined Atari’s chances. The Atari Video Computer System (VCS), named specifically to invite comparisons to the VES, was launched on 11 September 1977 at $199. The VCS came with two joysticks, two paddle controllers and a single cartridge: Combat. A multiplayer-only game, Combat was a top-down 2D shooter that offered twenty-seven different arenas and three different vehicles for players to blast each other with. The VCS quickly sold more than any other console in history, 250,000 by the end of 1977. Fairchild’s VES simply couldn’t compete at this level and quickly withdrew from the market, leaving it entirely to Atari. ATARI VCS REMAKE // 27 PRESS START: VIDEO GAMES CONCLUSION: ATARI DOMINANCE In the early 1980s Atari was the king of an industry it had created. There was no arguing with the sales of its VCS, and it seemed like the gravy train wasn’t slowing down. But the company’s business practices were increasingly questionable and counterproductive – for example, its refusal to credit designers led to disgruntled employees leaving to form their own companies (including Activision, now the world’s largest third-party publisher). Atari also had several internal divisions that were competing with one another, and the gradual loss of much of its talent was leading to a lack of quality control over software. This hadn’t affected sales – yet. But the company, and the industry, would soon be scrambling to survive. ATARI VCS INFLUENCE Digital Arts and Entertainment GAME HISTORY // 28 REFERENCES / Stanton, R. 2015. A Brief History Of Video Games. / Brinks, M. 2020. Little Book Of Video Games. / Blake J., H. 2015. Console Wars. / Mcgonigal, J. 2012. Reality Is Broken. / Crash Course. Crash Course Games. Digital Arts and Entertainment GAME HISTORY