CHVG: 1971

Chronological History of Video Games:

Early History of Video Games (1971)

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Look at that... cabinet!

Computer Space:
The "arcade video game" got its first actual commercial game in 1971... Computer Space. Nolan Bushnell was an engineer/entrepreneur who experienced Spacewar! while attending college, and was now involved with the arcade scene. He thought it'd be a hit if he could make Spacewar! playable in the arcades, alongside the other electro-mechanical games, pinball machines and more. The only problem was that it was still prohibitively expensive to setup a PDP microcomputer... it would never enough money to pay for the equipment.

The solution he came up with was a more simplistic version of Spacewar! that could run on dedicated transistors. (how this actually works is beyond me, since it has nothing to do with programming, and everything to do with engineering). Nolan called his game Computer Space (ironically, since he had just ditched the actual computer part of the design entirely). He made a deal with his employer, Nutting Associates, to produce and sell the game. They made about 1500 cabinets total, and it was such a futuristic and cool looking design they've become collector items, and have even made cameo movie appearances. (see links at end of article).

As a commercial endeavor, it wasn't a huge hit. The usual reason you'll hear a lot of videogame history books is that the game was "too complicated." Well, I'll have more to say on that front after we first take a look at the OTHER big arcade development of 1971.

Resides in the Computer History Museum - Mtn. View, CA

Galaxy Game:
Remember how Nolan decided it was too expensive to run Spacewar! commercially on that expensive PDP11? Well we actually have a glimpse into the road not taken with Galaxy Game. This was a version of Spacewar! modified for coin-operation at 10 cents a game, or 25 cents for 3 plays. It was installed at the Tresidder Union at Stanford University in September, 1971, beating Nolan's Computer Space into customer usage by a month or two.

But, this was not a commercial product. It was only a prototype... a test market game if you will. Programmed by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck, it ran on a single PDP11. Eventually it had two separate vector displays... two games running, and each one you could have 2 players competing head-to-head.

Th estimated hardware cost was around $20,000 in 1971 money. At 10 cents a play, you'd make your money back after just 200,000 games... well, you'd also have to earn money for the rent, power, cleaning, maintenance and repairs. So basically never.

In June 1972 the hardware was updated... allowing four to eight consoles to run at the same time. It was actually well-received on campus, much like Spacewar! had many fans in its time. Galaxy Game remained on campus until May of 1979, with reported wait times of as much as an hour during its peak popularity.

Was it really too complex?

Too Complicated?
We'll see the first mega-hit of arcade games in 1972, Pong (it' really not a secret). And that game was very simple... just a single analog knob for each player. Thus the reasoning is always that Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space failed commercially because it was just too complicated. But I don't think so. I think it was just a boring game. Have you watched game footage?

Example:


If it was so complicated, why was Spacewar! so popular? Why was Galaxy Game so popular and remained so for years? I've even seen Galaxy Game described as an instant hit. How can you have an instant hit if the controls were so complicated!?

No, I don't think the reason for its failure was simply its level of complexity. I believe Computer Space just didn't hold enough interest for players to WANT to learn it. This is proven again and again as games got more complex. Look at Defender (1980)! It was a game with a myriad of buttons, an up/down joystick, and also incredible difficulty. But because it had some whiz-bang action, a story and really fun gameplay, people learned it. By far the most complex thing of its day, yet it was a HUGE success.

So, to me anyway, I think saying "too complicated" is just a cop-out. Time to admit the game looked cool, was certainly a pioneer, but the gameplay lacked staying power. And that's okay. It's part of a rich history now.

Unfortunately it's hard to play either of these games today. You have to visit a museum to play Galaxy Game, and Computer Space is also more of a museum display than video game even in retro arcades. Still.. I really like the cabinet for Computer Space, very slick! Wish there were more out there, and would love to try the authentic experience.

MOVIE:
A Computer Space unit appears in the 1973 movie 'Soylent Green', starring Charlton Heston. It appears briefly on screen being played by a woman while policeman Heston is visiting the apartment's owner.

MOVIE:

A yellow Computer Space unit appears in the 1975 movie 'Jaws', during the arcade/beach scene (approximately 40 minutes from the beginning).

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COMPUTER GAMING:
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Ralph Baer's Brown Box (prototype) is picked up by Magnavox for exclusive manufacturing and distribution. We are going to look at the very first home video game console coming soon.

OREGON TRAIL
- Yes, this venerable game actually got its start in 1971, where you'd play by entering some commands into a terminal, and then a printer/teletype would print out some results, and you'd play on. This really isn't anything like the classroom classic which was a school staple in the late 80's. Text-only... printed out. Imagine the trees destroyed by typing BANG! to hunt for food as the paper spooled ever onward.

I remember playing what I thought was Oregon Trail in 6th grade. My school had a Commodore lab, though... and looking into it I believe it was actually a knock-off from a type-in magazine listing called Westward Ho. But yes, I love the constant evolution of Edutainment and hope to cover a lot more of it in the future.


CIVILIZATION / a.k.a. Empire
- This was an early version of a management/economy simulation, written for the PDP 11/45 platform. Naturally, as all "unpurposeful" data in the early computing days - it was deleted.

And finally...
The first emails were sent over ARPANET - and established the @ sign in email addresses.

CHVG: 1951 - 1971

Chronological History of Video Games:

Early History of Video Games (1951-1971)

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IBM Model 7030, also known as "Stretch."

Various types of graphics displays from many manufacturers were introduced in the mid-1960s, opening the door to new video effects. Thus, we find a video pool game developed at RCA (1967), a ball-and-paddle game by Ralph Baer at Sanders Associates (1967, later to become the Magnavox Odyssey home video game in 1972), a rocket car simulation by Judah Schwartz at MIT (1968), a graphic flight simulation by the computer firm Evans & Sutherland (1969), a lunar lander game at DEC (1969), and a device to permit computer output and standard television video on the same display at Stanford (1968).

Costing only a nickel a play, pinball games flourished as a source of cheap entertainment during the Depression and the Second World War, and they were popular enough that their prices rose to a quarter (today some even charge 50 cents or more). Other arcade games that were even closer to video games were electromechanical games like Sega’s first game, Periscope (1968), and Chicago Coin Machine Company’s Apollo Moon Shot Rifle (1969), which featured upright cabinets and game controls under a screen (but no video monitors). These games were coin-operated and relied on mechanical figures staged inside the game’s cabinet, some with mechanical sound effects as well. These games, perhaps more than any others, helped to pave the way for video games, which were, for arcade players, yet another technological development in the world of arcade coin-operated gaming.

Also in the late 1960s, both DEC and Hewlett-Packard started major marketing efforts to sell computers to secondary and elementary schools. As a result, both companies sponsored a number of small-scale projects to write computer games and simulations in various fields, many of which were released in the early 1970s. In DEC’s King game (later called Hammurabi), for example, players must decide how much land to buy, sell, and cultivate each year, how much to feed the people, etc., while dealing with problems of industrial development, pollution, and tourism.

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It's hard to pinpoint any true "firsts" when researching videogame history. It seems like you can just keep going back and back, forever finding new items that "influenced" in some way the development of videogames. And honestly, this period is the least exciting to me, if only because the games themselves were still just demo's and ideas mostly. But, I think it's good to point out some of the influential and important milestones through the decades:

The "Nimrod" Computer

1951 - The "Nimrod" machine was on display at the World's Fair, challenging anybody to beat it at a game of NIM. Really trippy sci-fi stuff here. Dismantled for other things after the Fair, what a shame.

1952 - "Naughts and Crosses" (or "OXO") written by a Cambridge University student - Alexander S. Douglas. Shortly after was cast aside, thinking of it as a simple program merely to prove a point.

- Early Military simulation games programmed by Bob Chapman and others. That same year some formula games (like NIM) and dictionary look-up games (Tic-Tac-Toe, etc.) were programmed for early computers

1953 - Arthur Samuel demonstrates Checkers on an IBM 701 computer.

1954 - 1st computer game of Blackjack for the IBM 701, and a crude game of pool was written at University of Michigan.

1955 - Hutspiel - The first theater-level war game (NATO vs. USSR) was programmed

1956 - The first version of computer chess was actually programmed by James Kister, Paul Stein, Stanislaw Ulam, William Walden, and Mark Wells on the MANIAC-1 at the Los Alamos Atomic Energy Laboratory. The game was played on a simplified 6 x 6 board and examined all possible moves two levels deep at the rate of 12 moves per minute.

1957 - Alex Bernstein writes the first complete computer chess program on an IBM-704 computer—a program advanced enough to evaluate four half-moves ahead.

Higginbotham's Tennis for Two

1958 - William Higginbotham's Tennis for Two  experiment shown at Brookhaven Laboratory. This was a game played on an oscilloscope display, and was actually the first game to allow two players simultaneous control of the direction and motion of the objects. Gravity, bounce, and even wind speed were calculated into game play... the earliest PONG! Though many today do not consider this to have been a real video game, others consider it to be the FIRST actual video game (2-player).

1959 - The Management Game - an early simulation game with simulated competition between three companies in the detergent industry and integrated modules on marketing, production, finance, and research. Pretty sweet! I'd want to play that today, although it would be so out of touch with current markets. Actually, this game has been updated and revised and is still in use in schools of business today - making it quite possibly the longest-running game ever created.

Spacewar! (1962)

1962 - The finished version of the mainframe computer game SPACEWAR! is written at MIT by Steve Russell. 1962 IBM catalog even lists it for purchase. Spacewar! is probably the best known game that came from the mainframe era. This was a time when computers were still giant machines that were available at large corporations and college campuses. Games were quite limited, as space was limited and expensive.

Although Spacewar! had a version for the Atari 2600, it wasn't the same game. Basically consisting of a "needle" and a "wedge" you flew around space trying to shoot each other. There was a sun in the middle with gravity that sucked you in, and you could hit the hyperspace button to disappear and reappear somewhere else. Spacewar! was created in part as a demonstration of the new (DEC) PDP-l!

1966 - Ralph Baer writes a four-page paper describing his ideas for playing interactive games on ordinary television sets. The TRUE father of video games. In 1967 he even has a light gun prototype and a working "ping-pong" game. He applies for his patents in 1968... is displaying a DEMO unit by 1969!

- Eliza is programmed into mainframe computers. It was a primitive natural language simulator, and it had modes like Doctor - which tried to simulate a typical psychoanalysts response to your statements.

For example:
"My Mother Doesn't Love Me" might get a response -
"Who else in your family doesn't love you?"

Some wisdom from Eliza... or not!

I remember a similar game that I played early on with my Commodore 64. It was "Dr. Sbaitso" and showcased the Creative Labs Sound Blaster. Very similar in structure to Eliza. Anyway, it was this attempt to create a human response that was so inventive, and indeed influenced the natural language parsers of early games like "Adventure" and "DND".

Ralph Baer's video game system in development

1967 - Baer has a light gun prototype and working "ping-pong" type game. Three dials (vertical, horizontal and "English") - NOTE: this is the stupidest use of the word "English" which generally means to put a spin on a ball to affect it's path. I say this because the "English" dial here just moves the ball itself in either direction - as much as you turn the dial. So the dial should've just been "ball control"

1968 - Baer applies for a patent for his TV video game system. And then he starts to shop the concept around to a number of less than enthusiastic companies. Video games are just not a thing. Hard to convince sales when they don't even know what to do with it.

1969 - Baer's brown box demo for his concepts. Also, the game Hamurabi is released... one of the very earliest strategy/resource management games.

The moon landing movie set  *wink

Also in 1969 was the Moon landing! What a year. The Lunar Lander game comes out on PDP-8... and a long tradition begins. And the ARPANET delivers the first message sent from one school to another. Although there is some debate about it.. the first microprocessor might have been created for the military.

Jan 1, 1970 - UNIX time begins. It's the official clock of many computers, monitoring unix time down to the very second since this inception. Also, it seems there are precious few games in 1970. Like the calm before the proverbial storm. Stay tuned.