CHVG: 1973 - Attack of the clones

Chronological History of Video Games:
Begun, the clone wars has... (1973)
___________________

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. 

============

COMPUTERS:

============

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!

============

CONSOLES:

============

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!!

============

ARCADES:

============

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:

============

- 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!

CHVG: 1972 - Pong

Chronological History of Video Games:
Pong becomes the first smash hit (1972)
___________________

The original Wii Sports!

The first really big year in the history of video arcade games was 1972.  This was because one game went what today we might call "viral"... an action-sports title, the original Wii Sports, a head-to-head competitive bout to the death... Pong!  Basically two paddles, one on each side of the screen, roughly simulating a paddle sports game like ping-pong.  (Oh? So that's where they got the title?)  

But Pong didn't come out until November of 1972, so let's backup a bit and talk about events leading up to its debut.  First, in May of 1972, the Magnavox TV company was debuting in various shows its new TV video sports game they dubbed Odyssey!

The Magnavox Odyssey...  not Homer's.

The Magnavox Odyssey was a creation of Ralph Baer's, but marketed by Magnavox.  It was the first video game console.  It wasn't programmable, but had a finite number of games stored in its circuitry.  These included ball & paddle games, chase the spot type games, and a few light gun games where you shoot at a blip on the screen. To switch between games, you inserted a little card into the system (almost like a cartridge) that changed the jumpers to the game you wanted to play.

Nolan Bushnell founded Atari in July, a name he took from the traditional strategy game of Go.  Originally he liked the word "Syzygy" for his company, but that was already taken.  Because "Atari" was something similar to a check in Chess, Nolan thought it had a good strong feel to it.  I think he picked well.

So being in the video game industry, Nolan obviously attended trade shows and conventions, and was able to view the Magnavox Odyssey on display in Burlingame, CA.  He says he wasn't all that impressed with it, honestly.  Looking at the games on the Odyssey, seems like a fair assessment.  It basically just had some paddle games and the ability to shoot a video blip with the light gun.  But at some point Nolan thought the concept of a ping-pong game (similar to what he saw on the Odyssey) could make a decent video arcade game.

Nolan turned to a new engineer Atari had hired, one smart, enterprising Al Alcorn.  The concept of a ping-pong game was shared with Al, and given to him to complete to get some experience in creating games.  There were other, more difficult games in the concept phase like driving games and such, but this was a good, easy starting point.

The story has been told many times elsewhere, but although Nolan Bushnell signed the guestbook, and did see the Odyssey's ping-pong game, what Al Alcorn created was a far superior game for a few reasons:

Nolan to the right of Pong, and Al Alcorn far right.



1. SOUND.  Al found sounds that already existed in the different transistors, and basically added those to various gaming events.  The ping-pong sound of the blips helped name the game, and I think sound added to the experience without a doubt.
   
   
2. Only VERTICAL movement.  The simplicity of two paddles that could only move on the vertical plane was a limiting factor that I believe aided gameplay.  Magnavox had vertical and horizontal movement, and even a ball control knob... it was just unwieldy.  Was almost like playing a game that didn't have rules.
   
   
3. NO "english"... but different bounce angles.  Again, that ball control know which they called "English" on Odyssey was silly.  Pong made a far superior game by changing the angle of the ball return based on where it hit the paddle.  Closer to the center - more direct return.  Closer to the edges - a much steeper angle of return.  So now you had some control over the direction and angle of return if you could fine-tune where the ball hit the paddle.  Excellent!
   
   
4. SCORE.  Pong actually put the score on the screen, and let you play to a score of 11 to win the game. Seems rudimentary, but the Odyssey did not have on-screen scoring.  Had to do all that manually.
   
   
5. SPEED UP gameplay.  If the rally continued, and the angles of the return were steep a few times... the game actually got faster.  This was necessary to test the limits of players skills, and make the game more exciting.  Without this speeding up, the game would've been far less entertaining.

So there you go.. not enough credit given to Al Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell for these innovations.  Magnavox eventually sued Atari for patent infringement... and I feel there were enough changes with Pong to win the lawsuit.  But then again -- there was very little established yet around what was and wasn't protected by law.  Atari settled out of court and kept on making Pong.

About 2500 PONG units are produced before the end of the year, making as much as $40/day in their locations, an extremely high coin-drop.  It's success spreads quickly! 

For a game this rudimentary and basic, it's importance is justified.  Pong launched the video game industry by being the first big success in commercial arcade games.  Pong accompanies Dragon's Lair and Pac-Man as one of the three Video games on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., U.S.A.

MOVIE:  A Pong unit appears in the 1974 movie 'The Parallax View' and in the 1975 movie 'Rancho Deluxe'.

________

STAR TREK

What?  There was supposedly a Star Trek game way back in 1972?  Ah, but wait... it isn't really a "Star Trek" game, it appears it's just a bootleg clone of Computer Space (see 1971 article).  Apparently the Borg have already begun trying to assimilate the arcade world, making a homogenous mess.

I need to point out that this must be where Star Trek's long-standing tradition of sucking at video games begins.  It's a long streak, unbroken for many years.  Great times.   

It appears there was another STAR TREK game sort of coming into its own in 1972.  This one is a strategy/tactics game written for the computer mainframe systems of the day and mostly accessible only by college students at these universities.  The text version actually becomes quite popular, being re-created on many systems and home computers over the years.  The Borg Star Trek game... not so much.

============

COMPUTER GAMING:

============

HUNT THE WUMPUS (Basic)

One of the earliest text-adventure games ever created, written in basic for mainframe computers like the DEC PDP-1.  You are put into a maze of interconnected tunnels, with bats, pits, and the Wumpus beast.  You have to shoot arrows to kill the Wumpus before you die in a pit, or are eaten alive.  This simple game becomes a mainstay of early microcomputers, and gets printed in type-in listings of computer magazines.  It's a long, rich history, with many many variants and ports.

HAMMURABI: 
Another classic game that is hard to pinpoint its exact beginnings.  But certainly its worth noting here for one of the earliest versions, again pre-dating the home computer revolution.  Try your hand at managing a small kingdom for 10 years, buying & selling acreage and feeding those hungry peasants. It's a resource-management game, and will get re-imagined, and re-created on just about every platform to come for the next 20 years easily.  

============

CONSOLE GAMING:

============

Odyssey is commercially released in August of 1972.  Sales are struggling.  Supposedly 100,000 units are sold in that first year, but I believe its more like 100,000 units were distributed to dealers around the country, because its well-documented that sales were sluggish.  

In an ironic twist, it's the popularity of Pong that actually helps sell Odyssey systems, as people find out its the closest thing to being able to play Pong in your home.  But, since Atari didn't start shipping their production units of Pong until Nov. 29, 1972... I can't see how Pong got really popular until at least early 1973.  And that would mean Odyssey didn't start moving units faster until 1973.  Furthermore, sales figures for Odyssey were supposedly much lower in 1973, which to me indicates the dealers had to move all those initial 100,000 units before even starting to order more... and that took time.

The Magnavox Odyssey is an interesting system because it is the first console gaming system ever. I find the idea of little cartridges to trigger the right jumpers, and the fact that it even had a light gun is pretty remarkable. Unfortunately... without a CPU, there was no such thing as artificial intelligence.  Every single Odyssey game requires a 2nd person.  Whether it's moving a target, or a pong paddle pusher - nothing gets done without that 2nd player.  

Playing any 1st generation console is a challenge, as they are tough to find and can be quite expensive.  Mainly they only hold interest for a collector, a real classic game nut (who has to have them all) or a game reviewer wanting to review the oldest of all the videogames.  You can look up some pretty fun reviews of the "Odyssey 1" as its referred to on YouTube.