CHVG: 1973 - Attack of the clones

Chronological History of Video Games:
Begun, the clone wars has... (1973)
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One of many
pong clones

The arcade video game industry floruishes under the PONG breakthrough... and various companies begin producing video games, including Chicago Coin, Midway, Ramtek, Taito, Allied Leisure, and Kee Games (which at this time was secretly owned by Atari).  It was a bit of a wild wild west, with only a few companies actually paying Atari a licensing fee before creating their own version of "Pong".  

There were a few other experiments going on in the arcade's at this time... like "Space Race" and the infamous "Gotcha" chase game by Atari that featured these incredible controllers (see below)

But otherwise, it was mostly a new phenomenon of Pong variants being synonymous with "Arcade Videogames" or Tele-Video Games or other such weird names.  After all, the idea of playing a game on a video screen is still in such infancy, they hadn't even settled on a standard name yet. 

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COMPUTERS:

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Plato system

Believe it or not, there was this pretty amazing, graphically-driven PLATO system back in 1973.  It had a mainframe core, dummy remote terminals, networked multi-user environment and on-screen graphics & typing.  Way ahead of its time it seems, and of course primary used in a few institutes of higher education. Departments were allocated space to create their own "lessons" (and unused modules were often co-opted by students and turned into games).  It was only available in a few places, but those that had access to PLATO at their university were lucky indeed!

It's been shown how these early systems sparked the imagination of many game developers and early programmers. A lot of people tried to duplicate what they saw on PLATO or other mainframes for years to come as the nascent home-computing market slowly became a more viable gaming platform.

EMPIRE

  - Way back in 1973, Empire on the Plato is a networked, multiplayer, arena shooter.  Sure, it's mostly text-based and nothing like what we consider to be arena shooters... but the concept is there.  It's surprising how far back gaming goes!

MAZE WAR

  - A real trail-blazer with a lot of firsts, or early examples.  First-person shooter, multi-player concurrently, in-game avatars, 3D realized maze, etc.  This was obviously only available on limited mainframe systems, but I think this would be a solid contender for the best game of the year!

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CONSOLES:

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The Odyssey is slowing down a little in sales, however, and the price was dropped to $75 to try to kickstart sales.

Four new add-on games are released for the Odyssey, though, in spite of slow sales.  I believe they are quite rare today.  I haven't seen examples or playthroughs on any of these:

 - Basketball, Brain Wave, Interplanetary Voyage, W.I.N.

 - I actually saw a set of all four of these 1973 games go for over $4,000 on ebay!!

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ARCADES:

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ASTEROID - a clone of Space Race... I mention it because the name is similar to the 1979 HUGE hit.  But it will be awhile still before we get the actual Asteroids machine you're thinking of.  The real blockbuster Atari success.  This game wasn't nearly as good.

CHAMPION PING PONG - pong variant

COMPUTER SPACE BALL - pong variant

DAVIS CUP - pong variant

DOCTOR PONG -  Atari Pong in a cocktail version for Dr.'s office... didn't do well?  duh.

ELEPONG - pong variant

ELIMINATION - 2-4 player pong variant

QUADRAPONG - pong variant

PONG DOUBLES - pong variant

PONG TRON

 - Holy Frak!  Were there no copyrights in 1973?  Was there nobody who knew how to program anything but a pong variation?  I know, I shouldn't be so hard on the fledgling industry, but my goodness what a boring state the arcades must've been in during 1973.  Hey Look, "ELEPONG".. wonder if that plays like PONG?  Guess what?  Yes... yes it does.  

I'm tempted to say Atari screwed up by not patenting PONG, but copyright laws weren't really established for video gaming at this time.  And even if they could have received a copyright, it likely would've taken a year or so, and then they'd have to have a legal team going after the cloners.  Instead they tried to just stay ahead of the curve, create new games as well as make as many pong machines as they could.  And, the market grew by everybody jumping in and copying... so there was some collateral benefits.

What to do with old wine barrels?

* PONG IN A BARREL!  - Well at least THIS is a cool-looking game.  The only clone worth looking up, what a great story.  Nolan Bushnell really was a drunken bastard (j/k Nolan, love ya man!)... even hiding his drinking by building games into his old barrels.  Not to be confused with Barrel-Pong - the small barrel on a platform... the ultra-rare Pong-in-a-Barrel is too cool.  

Wait a second, I just now discovered SNOOPY PONG!  How cool is that cabinet?

DUCK HUNT!

Oh yeah... way before Nintendo packaged this into their system we had an electro-mechanical version of duck hunt.  I don't even know how these things work, but wish i could try it out.  Please can you shoot the dumb dog?

GOTCHA

This looked like it might be fun.  This is the first commercial maze game... and even better, the original version looked like a cabinet controlled by two "boobs" as controllers.  Yup, the boob game... an attempt to make a female videogame, since most games had a joystick that resembled male anatomy!  The controversy over video games begins here - but not for content -- because of the female controllers.  It did spawn one of the greatest arcade flyers ever.  hee hee

MISSILE RADAR

  - Another new type of game from Atari.  Shoot missiles to detonate on-coming warheads.  1973 seems like a scary time.

SPACE RACE

 - Atari's second game... at least this was gameplay other than ball & paddle.  You have to run your spaceship from the bottom of the screen up to the top of the screen, avoiding the little streaky white dots floating on by.  Asteroids?  Atari really loved its Asteroids, eh?

WATERGATE CAPER

 - Ahaha....  Watergate was still big news!  "Caper"... too funny.  Try to get away with it?  Actually it's more like some kind of code cracking game which used the de-facto standard analog wheel to spin the dials.

WINNER, THE VIDEO GAME

  - First game by Midway, and graciously they were only 1 of 3 companies that actually paid Atari to license their PONG game. 

MORE NOTES:

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- Midway enters video arcade games with their licensed Pong clone, "Winner".  They go on to out-manufacture Atari.

- Konami also born in 1973, but no games yet.

- SEGA also gets into video game market (vs. mechanical games) with its Pong clone.

Atari is topping $1 million / month.  And still steadily growing.

- LEMONADE STAND - comes out on some mainframe.  precursor to popular genre

- BASIC Computer Games - book written by David H. Ahl.  This collection of type-in programs is the first of many in this format... goes on to becomes a staple on many early computer platforms.

- XEROC Park has the amazing ALTO machine!  So ahead of its time… just expensive!