CHVG: 1974 - Tank you very much

Chronological History of Video Games:
Kee Games wants to tank you... (1974)
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Here we are, 1974... the year I was born!  Certainly it had to be a magnificent year in gaming, yes?  Nope.  No it wasn't.  While there were some new innovations that did push different genre's forward into the arcade scene, nothing "big" occurred in 1974.  Was more of a development year... a time for ideas to matriculate and formulate.

Atari couldn't make 'em fast enough

I read that only about 8,000 Pong Arcade cabinets had been fulfilled by Atari by end of year.  Although this was still quite a bit more than your average pinball table, for comparison the Odyssey console sold almost 100,000 in its first two years.  (Possibly more, but exact sales figures don't seem to exist... and all the "sold" consoles didn't necessary move to consumers right off.  But this clearly shows why the console market was desired, and groundwork was being laid for a home version of pong and possibly other games.

It was near the end of 1974 that Atari President Nolan Bushnell gave the go-ahead for creating a "Home Pong" unit, thinking it could be a great success for Christmas sales in
1975.

During this year, Atari was trying to out-innovate "The Jackals" (as Nolan Bushnell dubbed the competition)… by coming out with a new game every month.  At first they reiterated with a number of different Pong clones, but eventually they also came up with some new creative ideas that were also hits in their own right:

• Gotcha (first maze game)
• Trak 10 (first racing game)
• Tank (yeah! the first tank game).

Kee Games’s Tank is the first game to store graphics data on a ROM chip. It's also a company that was secretly owned by Atari.  The idea of Kee Games was to get around markets where only 1 distributor could operate.  So Nolan setup another company with his neighbor, Joe Keenan, as the CEO. All the Atari games basically had an identical game with a different name -- distributed by Kee Games.  But after Tank became a huge hit, Atari actually went on to merge Kee Games back into the mothership.

Midway’s TV Basketball is the first arcade game to use human figures as avatars, instead of blocks or vehicles.  But the vast majority of games were variants of Pong.  Still, fairly boring times if you ask me.

Play Meter magazine publishes its first issue - the first magazine dedicated to covering the video arcade market.  There's a smattering of issues on the archive.org website, but this would be a treasure trove of interesting information if we could get the entire library available someday!

Play Meter Magazine - One of the earliest issues I found

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COMPUTERS:

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The PLATO system is still one of the few systems that have any games on it that are still preserved - and even playable today on various emulators, or the Cyber-1 platform.

SPASIM (PLATO)
  - Here we have the first documented, first-person mainframe game.  Wireframe graphics... a space shooter... very mathematical and definitely more like a sim than anything else.  It's best to watch a video tutorial, you'll get a feel for it without having to learn the tricky controls.

MAZE WAR  (Xerox - Alto)
  - I've now seen this game listed in both 1973 and 1974... so I'm not sure which one specifically to place it in.  But it was an important early game that introduced some of the concepts which become the first-person shooter.  A level editor was even created, and there was network play for player-vs-player action. 

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CONSOLES:

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  - The Odyssey dropped its price again to $50... but no new games were released.  But that's because this system did not really have programmable cartridges. The "carts" they sold simply had jumpers which would select an internal built-in game.  So by 1974, all the games ever designed were released and purchasable.  Odyssey continued to sell in 1974.. but it wasn't long before the system was dead. 

The game card, which isn't quite a cartridge.

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ARCADES:

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ASTROHOCKEY  - (pong variant)
 - It did have 4 variations of gameplay, including player vs. machine.  That's a nice addition.

ATTACK UFO
  - Uh... its a black & white game with UFO's.  That says a lot. Why are we so violent to tourists from other planets? 

BALL PARK
  - Midway releases in America, this Taito (of Japan) baseball game.  Looks pretty decent.  The sports-focus in video games is  a bit pervasive these days isn't it?

BASKETBALL
  - It's a basketball game from Taito, but no way to see it run unfortunately... but is deemed a "Landmark" title, being the first video game to use sprites, and the first to represent human characters.

Arcade flyers can be way better than the games!

CHALLENGE
 - Another Pong clone... by Micro Games.  Also looks like a "micro cabinet"... the thing is tiny.

"Honey, have you seen the Micro Game?"

COUNTDOWN
 - Pong clone, but you start with 5 points and can't let any goals or you lose a point at a time.  

ELIMINATION / QUADRA-PONG
 - 4-player pong clone... which also debuts in the first ever "cocktail" style arcade cabinet.  That's pretty cool. I did like how Atari was innovating from the beginning with game types as well as cabinet variations. Looking at the playing field, you can see the early groundwork for 4-player paddle games like Warlords later on.

FORMULA K
 - This is the Kee Games release of Gran Trak 10.  Same exact innards as...

GRAN TRAK 10 (GRAN TRAK 20 for 2-player)
 - Atari makes the first racing game... (and of course guys wearing helmets show up to play, with hot girls on their shoulder - see exhibit A)  

Safety First!

Gran Trak 10 was not only another hit game, and a growing genre.. but Atari also incorporated some anti-piracy methods.  Inside was a custom-designed ROM for the game, but Atari gave it the same part# as a Texas Instruments Arithmetic Logic Unit.  This mean that when pirates tried to build their own version, they'd order the wrong part and their clones wouldn't work.  Smart Atari!  Especially after all those frickin' pong clones!

But then, an accounting error in the game's production meant that every Gran Trak 10 machine sold at a loss for Atari.  Dumb Atari! It nearly helped bankrupt the company.  They thought, "Sure. we're losing money on each unit - but we'll make up for it in volume."  (okay, I obviously made that up.  Classic joke.)

PIN PONG
 - A black & white pinball simulation game by Atari.  Uhm...  cool... that is if want to take everything that's fun about pinball, remove it, and then sell the sizzle.

PUPPY PONG
 - Cool story behind this... basically a free-play version of Pong, but packaged in a cute yellow dog house. This particular setup had its début at Chuck E. Cheese.  It was a neat attempt at giving kids something fun to play without having to feed it tokens. Only a few survive today, as it never saw a wide release, due to Charles Shultz's complaints about its similarities to Snoopy.  (See Snoopy Pong, 1973).

QWAK!
  - An early light gun game where you shoot ducks out of the sky. And, it sounds like you have your ever-trusty hunting dog to go retrieve the blasted birds.  Aw, those poor ducks - they were so abused by early gamers.  It wasn't until much later when Deer became the big targets for virtual hunters that ducks could breathe a sigh of relief.  

REBOUND
  - Pong you say?  NAY I say! So much different... you see, the ball bounces up & down across the screen instead of side-to-side   Oh my? Gravity is involved!?  Your little paddles (er, psuedo-people) hit the ball over the net and to the other side.  Yeah, I'm a bit sick of all these pong-like games myself, but at least it's a welcome variation.  Was also a very realistic sales flyer:

What even is going on here?

SMATCH
 - WTF? Another great name for some sport game, hah! (I think this was another pong-like game, but was distributed overseas?)

SPEED RACE
  - A Taito release, also known as Racer or Wheels.  This was a ground breaking game, innovating with such concepts as vertical scrolling, sprites with collision detection and a driving wheel for a controller.  One of the first driving games.

Go Speed Racer!

SUPER PONG
 - Even Atari is enamoured with Pong, and puts out this 4th title in the series.  Three paddles per player and better ball physics... increased speed, serve from anywhere - Viola!  Another easy buck from a proven concept, yes?  

TANK
 - Ah yes... the Combat cartridge that first shipped with the Atari 2600 game was based on this original arcade game (albeit with a ton of crazy added variations).  The idea was cool, though.. control a tank and shoot the other guy before they shoot you.  It combined maze games with tank control games... both fun genres IMO.

The original "Tank" was an instant hit. So Kee Games (Atari), quickly devised a plan to launch a whole series of Tank games. They designed a boardset that could be easily modified to change the game. This would allow them to come out with a new Tank game whenever they wanted, with no real extra work needed.  And to think how many variations were included even on the simple Atari 2600 - "Combat" or "Video Olympics" is just staggering progress.

Tank was Kee Games biggest hit

TOUCH ME
 - Okay...  have to mention this game, simply for it's awesome title!  Technically it's not a video game - it's just Atari's version of the vastly more popular Simon.  Atari also released a hand-held Touch Me as well (a year or so later) so you could play with yourself anywhere - "No mom, I'm just playing Touch me!"  Oh, Atari...  trail blazers, yes... but man could they  make some boner decisions.  Oh sorry.. bad choice of words.  

But the real ironic twist is Ralph Baer (remember the original Odyssey?) sees Touch Me, copies it, and creates Simon. Remember, Nolan Bushnell copied the Odyssey (Ralph's machine) and got in trouble.  But Ralph Baer copies Atari, gets away with it... and Simon somehow goes on to become so popular that it actually has the impression of being the original, and Touch Me feeling like the clone.  Nice one... you sly devil Ralph!

You wanna play Touch Me?
(is not a good pickup line)

TV BASKETBALL
 - kinda cool... at least they got a BBall hoop on the screen... or at least the flyer says so.

WHAM BAM
 - No seriously, I'm not making this stuff up.  And here I thought, "Wham Bam, Thank You Ma'am!" was a recent saying, but one look at this flyer, and I think you can guess where this game got its name from!  Holy moly...

WILD GUNMAN:
 - WOW!  Now that I see this, I vaguely remember watching somebody at a pizza parlor playing around with this game.  It was so intriguing.  It could've been a clone, but I had totally forgotten about that memory.  This was really a technological stretch. Long long before Dragon's Lair, they were trying to interact with live-motion here.  

I swear I saw this once (or at least something like it)

Wild Gunman was Nintendo's first 16mm film projector games and becomes Nintendo's first big export product, in Europe and USA, because the effects of Japan's oil shortage that occurred in 1973 began showing : Japan's economy went into a tailspin and people couldn't afford using their money on Nintendo's Shooting Ranges anymore.

An updated version of the game was released in the arcades and in the Nintendo NES, ten years later in 1984, replacing photographic images with cartoon-style video game sprites. In this version the player also waited for the opponent's eyes to flash (accompanied by a speech bubble reading 'FIRE!!').  On October 4, 1997, Gunpei Yokoi, the creator of this game was tragically killed in an automobile accident, at the age of 56.

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CULTURE:

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Angering an entire generation of kids...

The Rubik's cube invented

The MRI invented.

CP/M was created by Gary Kildall, founding Digital Research
  - which gave lots of ideas and future fodder for people like Bill Gates, yeah?

Dungeons & Dragons was released!  (and all the future nerds rejoice...)

Pepsi was first American company to sell a consumer product in USSR… 

PLATO games really are leaders… Spacesim, M199H, pedit5, Empire, etc. 

Taito started making games… like "Basketball" and Speed Race (like Monaco GP)

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GAME OF THE YEAR:
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TANK (Kee Games + Atari  = Kataree?)

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.

GALAXY GAME

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

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.  

TOO COMPLICATED?

Was it really too complex?

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.