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What a shame
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What a shame
==Interactive visual games==
[[File:EDSAC (19).jpg|thumb|The [[Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator]] in 1948, which ran ''[[OXO]]'']]
In 1952, [[Sandy Douglas|Alexander S. Douglas]] created ''[[OXO]]'', a software program for the [[Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator]] (EDSAC) computer, which simulates a game of [[tic-tac-toe]]. The EDSAC was one of the first [[stored-program computers]], with memory that could be [[random-access memory|read from or written to]], and filled an entire room; it included three 35×16 dot matrix cathode ray tubes to graphically display the state of the computer's memory.<ref name="Replay50s"/><ref name="OXO"/> As a part of a thesis on [[human–computer interaction]], Douglas used one of these screens to portray other information to the user; he chose to do so via displaying the current state of a game.<ref name="HCIAS"/> The player entered input using a [[rotary dial|rotary telephone]] controller, selecting which of the nine squares on the board they wished to move next. Their move would appear on the screen, and then the computer's move would follow.<ref>''The Computing Universe'', p. 174</ref> The game was not available to the general public, and was only available to be played in the University of Cambridge's Mathematical Laboratory, by special permission, as the EDSAC could not be moved.<ref name="OXOabout"/> Like other early video games, after serving Douglas's purpose, the game was discarded.<ref name="Replay50s"/> Around the same time, Strachey expanded his draughts program for another mainframe computer, the [[Manchester Mark 1]], culminating in a version for the Ferranti Mark 1 in 1952, which had a CRT display.<ref name="Draughts52"/> Like ''OXO'', the display was mostly static, updating only when a move was made.<ref name="52Checkers"/> ''OXO'' and Strachey's draughts program are the earliest known games to display [[video game graphics|visuals]] on an electronic screen.<ref name="Priest"/>

The first known game incorporating graphics that updated in real time, rather than only when the player made a move, was a pool game programmed by William Brown and Ted Lewis specifically for a demonstration of the [[University of Michigan]]-developed MIDSAC computer at the University of Michigan in 1954. The game, developed over six months by the pair, featured a pool stick controlled by a joystick and a knob, and a full rack of 15 balls on a table seen in an overhead view.<ref name="Priest"/> The computer calculated the movements of the balls as they collided and moved around the table, disappearing when they reached a pocket, and updated the graphics continuously, forty times a second, so as to show real-time motion.<ref name="MIDSAC"/> Like previous video games, the pool game was intended primarily to showcase the computing power of the MIDSAC computer.<ref name="Priest"/>

[[File:Tennis For Two in 1959.jpg|thumb|left|The set-up for ''Tennis for Two'' as exhibited in 1959]]
While further games like checkers and chess were developed on research computers, the next milestone in video games came in 1958 with ''[[Tennis for Two]]''. Perhaps the first game created solely for entertainment rather than as a technology demonstration or a research tool, the program simulated a game of [[tennis]]. Created by American physicist [[William Higinbotham]] for visitors at the [[Brookhaven National Laboratory]] to be more entertaining for visitors on their public day than the usual static exhibits about nuclear power, the game ran on a Donner Model 30 [[analog computer]] and displayed a side view of a tennis court on an oscilloscope.<ref name="Replay50s"/><ref name="begin@brookhaven"/><ref name="1stcomputergame"/> The players controlled the angle of their shots with attached controllers, and the game calculated and simulated the trajectory of the ball, including the possibility of hitting the net.<ref name="anatomy"/> The game was first shown on October 18, 1958. Hundreds of visitors lined up to play the new game during its debut.<ref name="anatomy" /> Due to the game's popularity, an upgraded version was shown the following year, with enhancements including a larger screen and different levels of simulated gravity.<ref name="pioneer"/> Afterwards, having served its purpose, the game was dismantled for its component parts.<ref name="Replay50s"/> While the game had no innovations in game design or technological development, its status as an entertainment-focused game, rather than an academic project or technological showpiece, has led it to be considered one of the first "real" video games as they are generally thought of today.<ref name="Priest"/>

Over the next few years, during 1957–61, various computer games continued to be created in the context of academic computer and programming research, particularly as computer technology improved to include smaller, transistor-based computers on which programs could be created and run in real time, rather than operations run in batches. A few programs, however, while used to showcase the power of the computer they ran on were also intended as entertainment products; these were generally created by undergraduate students, such as at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] where they were allowed on occasion to develop programs for the [[TX-0]] experimental computer.<ref name="Mouse"/> These interactive graphical games were created by a community of programmers, many of them students affiliated with the [[Tech Model Railroad Club]] (TMRC) led by [[Alan Kotok]], [[Peter Samson]], and Bob Saunders. The games included ''Tic-Tac-Toe'', which used a [[light pen]] to play a simple game of noughts and crosses against the computer, and ''Mouse in the Maze''.<ref name="cc"/><ref name="TCMR-V08"/> ''Mouse in the Maze'' allowed users to use a light pen to set up a maze of walls on the monitor, and spots that represented bits of cheese or glasses of martini. A virtual mouse was then released and would traverse the maze to find the objects.<ref name="Mouse"/> Additionally, the wargame simulations from the early 1950s by the RAND Corporation had expanded into more complicated simulations which required little human intervention, and had also sparked the creation of business management simulation games such as ''The Management Game'', which was used in business schools such as at [[Carnegie Mellon University]] by 1958.<ref name="Priest"/> By 1961, there were over 89 different business simulation games in use, with various graphical capabilities.<ref>''Business simulation in industrial and university education''</ref> As the decade ended, despite several video games having been developed, there was no such thing as a commercial [[video game industry]]; almost all games had been developed on or as a single machine for specific purposes, and the few simulation games were neither commercial nor for entertainment.<ref name="Replay50s"/>


==The spread of games==
==The spread of games==

Revision as of 17:13, 30 September 2016

What a shame

What a shame

What a shame

What a shame

The spread of games

See also: Early mainframe games
Spacewar! running on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1

By 1961, MIT had acquired the DEC PDP-1 minicomputer, the successor to the TX-0, which also used a vector display system. The system's comparatively small size and processing speed meant that, like with the TX-0, the university allowed its undergraduate students and employees to write programs for the computer which were not directly academically related whenever it was not in use. In 1961-62, Harvard and MIT employees Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen created the game Spacewar! on the PDP-1, inspired by science fiction books such as the Lensman series.[1][2] The game was copied to several of the early minicomputer installations in American academic institutions, making it potentially the first video game to be available outside a single research institute.[3]

The two-player game has the players engaged in a dogfight between two spaceships set against the backdrop of a randomly generated background starfield.[4][2] The game was developed to meet three precepts: to use as much of the computer's resources as possible, to be consistently interesting and therefore have every run be different, and to be entertaining and therefore a game.[5] The game was a multiplayer game because the computer had no resources left over to handle controlling the other ship. After the game's initial development, members of the TMRC worked to improve the game, adding an accurate starfield and a gravitational body, and spread it to the couple dozen other institutions with a PDP-1, a process which continued over the next few years. As the computer was uncomfortable to use for extended periods of time, Kotok and Saunders created a detached control device, essentially an early gamepad.[6] Spacewar was reportedly used as a smoke test by DEC technicians on new PDP-1 systems before shipping, since it was the only available program that exercised every aspect of the hardware.[7] Although the game was widespread for the era, it was still very limited in its direct reach: the PDP-1 was priced at US$120,000 and only 55 were ever sold, many without a monitor, which prohibited Spacewar or any game of the time from reaching beyond a narrow, academic audience.[2][6] Russell has been quoted as saying that the aspect of the game that he was most pleased with was the number of other programmers it inspired to write their own games.[8]

The development of Space Travel in 1969 in part led to the development of the Unix operating system

Although the market for commercial games—and software in general—was small, due to the cost of computers limiting their spread to research institutions and large corporations, several were still created by programmers and distributed by the computer manufacturers. A number of games could be found in an April 1962 IBM program catalog. These included board games, "BBC Vik The Baseball Demonstrator", and "Three Dimensional Tic-Tack-Toe".[9] Following the spread of Spacewar, further computer games developed by programmers at universities were also developed and distributed over the next few years. These included the Socratic System, a question and answer game designed to teach medical students how to diagnose patients by Wallace Feurzeig in 1962,[10] and a dice game by Edward Steinberger in 1965.[11]

The creation of general programming languages like BASIC, which could be run on different hardware types, allowed for programs to be written for more than one specific computer, in turn letting games written in them to spread to more end players in the programming community than before. These games included a baseball simulation game written in BASIC by John Kemeny in 1965;[12] a BASIC bingo game by Larry Bethurum in 1966;[13] a basketball simulation game written in BASIC by Charles R. Bacheller in May 1967;[14] another baseball game that simulates the 1967 World Series written in BASIC by Jacob Bergmann in August 1967;[15] Space Travel, written by Ken Thompson for a Multics system in 1969 and which led in part to the development of the Unix operating system;[16] and Hamurabi, a text-based FOCAL game written by Doug Dyment in 1968 and converted to BASIC by David H. Ahl in 1969, and one of the first strategy video games ever made. Hamurabi and Space Travel were among several early mainframe games that were written during the time, and spread beyond their initial mainframe computers to general-purpose languages like BASIC.[17]

A new industry

See also: History of video games § A new industry, Arcade game, and First generation of video game consoles
Galaxy Game was one of the first arcade video games.

At the beginning of the 1970s, video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers, primarily at research institutions and large companies. The history of video games transitioned into a new era early in the decade, however, with the rise of the commercial video game industry. In 1971, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck developed a coin-operated computer game, Galaxy Game, at Stanford University using a DEC PDP-11 computer with vector displays.[18] The pair was inspired to make the game by Spacewar; Tuck had remarked in 1966 while playing the game that a coin-operated version of the game would be very successful. Such a device was unfeasible in 1966 due to the cost of computers, but in 1969 DEC released the PDP-11 for US$20,000; while this was still too high for a commercially viable product, as most games in arcades cost around US$1,000 at the time, the pair felt it was low enough to build a prototype to determine interest and optimal per-game pricing.[19] Only prototype units were ever built, though the second prototype was adapted to run up to eight games at once; after its initial installation at Stanford in September 1971, the pair met with Nolan Bushnell, who informed them of his own game he was making for a much lower price.[18][19]

That game was Computer Space, developed by Bushnell and Ted Dabney. They had found the Data General Nova, a US$4,000 computer that they thought would be powerful enough to run four games of Spacewar at once; the computer turned out to not actually be powerful enough for the project. While investigating the concept of replacing some of the computer with purpose-built hardware, however, the pair discovered that making a system explicitly for running such a game, rather than general programs, would be much less expensive: as low as $100.[19][20] By 1971 when Bushnell met with Pitts and Tuck, a prototype version had been successfully displayed for a short time in August 1971 in a local bar, the design was nearly finished, and the pair had founded a company around it called Syzygy.[21] Bushnell had also found a manufacturer for the game, Nutting Associates, who would make the final game cabinets and sell them to distributors. Bushnell felt that Galaxy Game was not a real competitor to Computer Space, due to its high price. Pitts and Tuck believed, however, that despite the economic argument their game was superior, as they felt that Galaxy Game was a true expansion of Spacewar, while Computer Space just a pale imitation.[19] Some players at the time, however, believed Galaxy Game to actually be just a version of Spacewar!.[22] Galaxy Game's prototype installation was very popular, though at a low price-per-game, and the pair developed a second version to display at the same location; they were never able to enter production, though, as they eventually had to abandon the idea after spending US$65,000 developing it due to the high cost and lack of business plan.[19]

Pong helped usher in a new chapter of video game history.

Two months after Galaxy Game's installation, Computer Space was released. It was the first coin-operated video game to be commercially sold (and the first widely available video game of any kind).[23] While it did well in its initial locations near college campuses, it performed very poorly in bars and arcades where pinball and other arcade games were typically placed; while it was commercially successful and made over US$1,000,000, it did not meet the high expectations of Nutting, who had expected to sell more than 1,500 units.[19][21] Bushnell and Dabney immediately started work on another game, using the same television set design as Computer Space, as well as founding their own company Atari, Inc. to back their projects.[23] While initially this game was to be a driving game that Bushnell planned to design, their first employee, Allan Alcorn, took a prototype ping-pong game suggestion of Bushnell's and expanded on it to create a game the company immediately seized on. They were unable to find a manufacturer, but on the evidence of the success of their prototype installation, decided to produce the game cabinets themselves.[19] Pong was released in 1972, a year after Computer Space. It was immensely commercially successful, selling over 8,000 units. It inspired copycat games to be sold in America, Europe, and Japan, and led to the popularization of the medium.[19][23]

That same year saw the release of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console which could be connected to a television set. The inventor, Ralph H. Baer, had initially had the idea in 1951 to make an interactive game on a television set. Unable to do so with the technological constraints at the time, he began work on a device that would attach to a television set and display games in 1966, and the "Brown Box", the last prototype of seven, was licensed to Magnavox to adapt and produce. They announced the console in May 1972, and it went on sale that September. The console and its games featured numerous innovations beyond being the first video game device for home consumers: it was the first game to use a raster-scan video display, or television set, directly displayed via modification of a video signal; it was also the first video gaming device to be displayed in a television commercial.[24] It sold for US$100 and shipped with several games, including "Table tennis", which Bushnell had seen a demo of and which Pong had been based on.[19] The Odyssey sold over 100,000 units in 1972, and more than 350,000 by the end of 1975, buoyed by the popularity of the table tennis game, in turn driven by the success of Pong.[19][25] Pong and the Odyssey kicked off a new era of video gaming, with numerous other competitors starting up in the video game industry as it grew in popularity.[19]

References

  1. ^ Introduction to Game Development
  2. ^ a b c Smith, Alexander (2014-08-07). "One, Two, Three, Four I Declare a Space War". They Create Worlds. Archived from the original on 2015-12-22. Retrieved 2015-12-18. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  3. ^ Understanding Digital Games, p. 22
  4. ^ Graetz, J. M. (August 1981). "The origin of Spacewar". Creative Computing. 6 (8). ISSN 0097-8140.
  5. ^ High Score, p. 12
  6. ^ a b Replay, pp. 10–13
  7. ^ Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
  8. ^ Markoff, John (2002-02-28). "A Long Time Ago, in a Lab Far Away..." The New York Times. p. G9. Retrieved 2015-12-18.
  9. ^ "Catalog of Programs for IBM Data Processing Systems" (PDF). IBM. April 1962. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-04-22. Retrieved 2015-12-18. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  10. ^ "1963 Papers and Proceedings of the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society" (PDF). Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. 1964. pp. 205–213. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-08-29. Retrieved 2015-12-18. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  11. ^ "Dice Game" (PDF). Decuscope. 3 (2). Digital Equipment Computer Users Society: 46. 1964.
  12. ^ Kemeny, John (1965-01-13). "basbal.dem". Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. Archived from the original on 2015-12-22. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  13. ^ Bethurum, Larry (1966-01-23). "bingo.gam". Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. Archived from the original on 2015-12-22. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  14. ^ Bacheller, Charles (May 1967). "bskbal.gam". Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. Archived from the original on 2015-12-22. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  15. ^ Bergmann, Jacob (August 1967). "baseba.gam". Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. Archived from the original on 2015-12-22. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  16. ^ Fiedler, David (August 1983). "The History of Unix". Byte. 8 (8). McGraw-Hill: 188. ISSN 0360-5280.
  17. ^ BASIC Computer Games, p. 78
  18. ^ a b "Galaxy-Game machine". Infolab.stanford.edu. Stanford University. Archived from the original on 2015-12-22. Retrieved 2013-04-04. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  19. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Replay, pp. 14–26
  20. ^ High Score, p. 16
  21. ^ a b Atari, Inc., pp. 40–44
  22. ^ High Score, p. 13
  23. ^ a b c The Ultimate History of Video Games, pp. 38–39
  24. ^ Edwards, Benj (2007-05-15). "Videogames Turn 40 Years Old". 1UP.com. Ziff Davis. Retrieved 2015-01-26.
  25. ^ Baer, Ralph. "Genesis: How the Home Video Games Industry Began". Ralph H. Baer Consultants. Archived from the original on 2015-10-16. Retrieved 2015-01-26. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)

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Sources

Research
Game simulation
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