The History of Video Gaming

ACRADE !!!

The arcade video games are presented in choronological order. This is by no means a complete list. I have selected the most commercially successful games and games which had some technical innovations or new game idea or some other important reason to deserve to be mentioned here.

Computer Space, Nutting Associates, 1971

Computer Space was the first commercial arcade video game released to the public. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell. It had many technological innovations, but the gameplay was confusing and it didn't become a commercial success. Using the profits from the game Nolan Bushnell left Nutting Associates and formed Atari Inc.

Pong, Atari Inc., 1972

Pong was the first succesful arcade video game. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Alan Alcorn. The game play was extremely simple. It has two players, both which controlled a vertical bar which could bounce back a moving dot which moving between the vertical bars. Nolan placed the first game machine in a local gas station. When he became back the machine ceased to operate which it was full of money. Pong became an instant success and it created the arcade video game industry. Several home versions were also made of the Pong game and it also created the home video game industry as well.

[Pong: The Revolutionary Game]

Tank, Kee Games/Atari Inc., 1974

Tank was the first video game which used ROM chips to store graphic data. It had on-screen characters that actually looked like recognizable objects. Before that video games used simple block graphics like in Pong, or collections of dots as in Computer Space.

Gunfight, Taito/Midway, 1975

Gunfight was a two-player game in style of Western movies. It was the first Japanese title to be licensed for release in America. Midway redesigned it to allow more varied game play. The redesigned version was the first video arcade game to utilize a microprocessor.

Night Driver, Atari Inc., 1976

Night Driver was the first racing game with "first person" perspective, showing the road as if actually seen from the car. Before Night Driver there had been many racing games with bird perspective (seen from above), e.g. the popular Atari game called "Sprint 2" from 1976. The night theme was chosen to hide the limitation of the hardware to create more complicated images. For many years, most 3D games built on the basic concept of Night Driver, using computer hardware to "scale" flat images called "sprites" in order to simulate movement in the 3D.

Breakout, Atari Inc., 1976

Breakout was designed by Atari's fortieth employee Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak. A year later these two persons founded Apple Computer.

Space Invaders, Taito/Bally/Midway, 1978

Space Invaders was the first blockbuster videogame. It brought the video games out of arcades and bars into restaurants, corner stores an brought video games into the public conciousness. It was translated to Atari 2600 video home game system and the home versio was also a huge commercial hit.

[Space Invaders Manual]

Football, Atari Inc., 1978

Football was the first true video sports game. It was created by Dave Stubben. Its development originally began as a game called "X's and O's" by Steve Bristow in late 1973. The project was shelved for years until the Atari figured out a way to break out from the limits of the single-screen game displays of the time. Football introduced "scrolling" video game displays to the world, allowing games to take place on playfields larger than the monitor on which they were displayed. Later-on Atari has made a lot of money for its patent for scrolling video game displays that rose from Football. Football was also the first game to feature the track ball.

Asteroids, Atari Inc., 1979

Asteroids was Atari's answer to Space Invaders. The game was designed by Ed Logg and it utilized a monochrome vector graphics display, which was capable of fast moving objects made of very sharp lines (compared to crude pixel graphics of its time). Combined with great game play it became the biggest selling of game of its time.

Asteroids and Lunar Lander (Atari, 1980) were the predecessors Gravitar (Atari) and many modern rotating ship shoot'em'up games e.g. Xpilot.

Warrior, Vectorbeam/Cinematronics, 1979.

Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting game. It was a two-player overhead sword-fighting contest. It had a brillian vector graphics display for its time, but unfortunately it was less reliable than the Atari one. It was a very rare game.

Battlezone, Atari Inc., 1980

Battlezone was the the first video game to feature truly interactive 3-D environment. It had 2-color vector display. The United States Armed Forces were so impressed by the game that they commissioned Atari to build specially modified and upgraded versions for use in tank training.

Defender, Williams Electronics, 1980

Defender was designed by Eugene Jarvis. It was the first video game to feature artificial "world" in which game events could occur outside on-screen view presented to the player.

[Defender Information]

Pac-Man, Bally/Midway, 1980

Pac-Man designed by Toru Iwatani and it was licensed from Namco. It was based on an ancient Japanese folk-tale. The idea of the game was to control the pac-man character which was moving inside a maze eating dots and to avoid ghosts which tried to kill pac-man. The was a huge hit around the world. It appeared in magazines covers, spawned a cartoon and hit song.

Pac-Man has spawned more sequels than perhaps any other video game: Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Mr & Mrs. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Professor Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac- Attack, Pac-Man 2, Pac-In-Time, Pac-Man VR, Pac-Man Ghost Zone...

[First Church of Pac-Man]

Donkey Kong, Nintendo Ltd., 1981

Donkey Kong was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It used the same hardware as an older video game called 'Radarscope'. The idea of the game was to control a jumpman character which tried to rescue a girl from a giant ape. Later-on the jumpman was named Mario, the most famous and succesful game-character ever invented.

Centipede, Atari Inc., 1981

Centipede was designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey. It was the first arcade game to be co-designed by a woman. Its colorful graphics and good game play made Centipede the first video game to be more popular with women than with men.

Tempest, Atari Inc., 1981

Tempest was designed by Dave Theurer. It was the first Atari game to utilize a multicolor vector display. It had beautiful 3D wireframe graphics and it became an instant hit.

[Tempest Operation Information] [Tempest 2000]

Pole Position, Namco/Atari, 1982

Pole Position started the trend for foto-realistics graphics in video games. It was a driving game with persceptive from the car view point, just like Night Driver. In addition to great graphics, it had great game play and it was a huge success, dominated game charts for almost about 2 years. Modern driving games are still more or less based on Pole Position, only graphics have improved.

Robotron: 2084, Williams Electronics, 1982

Robotron was designed by the same people who created Defender. It had excellent gameplay and two joysticks were used for input.

[Robotron page]

Tron, Bally/Midway, 1982

Tron was designed in conjunction with the Disney's film of the same name. The game became an important part of the movie. Tron video game produced more profit than the movie.

[Tron Manual]

Zaxxon, Sega Ltd., 1982

Zaxxon introduced an 3D-lookalike isometric perspective to video games. It had brilliant graphics for its time and it became a big hit.

Star Wars, Atari Inc., 1983.

Star Wars was based on the Star Wars movie by George Lucas. It was designed by Mike Hally and it was programmed and developed by Greg Rivera, Norm Avellar, Eric Durfey, Jed Margolin and Earl Vickers. It was great multi-color vector graphics, 12 channel music and sound effects with speech. In 1985 released a sequel for the game, called The Empire Strikes Back.

Star Wars is the most successful movie of all time and more games have been made of it than any other movie.

[Star Wars: The New Republic]

Dragon's Lair, Starcom/Cinematronics, 1983

Dragon's Lair was created by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth. It was an interactive animated film and it was the first video games utilize laserdisc. Its graphics were much better than any of games of its time - of movie quality - and it had great stereo sound, but the gameplay wasn't good (player had only few choices to select from). Its incredible graphics created a huge media hype. Journalists predicted that laser video games would the soon dominate video games. But laserdisc players were very expensive in that time and laservideo games machines were very unreliable.

In 1984 Magicom/Cinematronics released another laser disc animation-movie-game, called Space Ace which was designed by the same team. The success of laser video games was short and it started to fade in the middle of 1984. About a decade later interactive movie type games re-apperad in CD-ROM format for home computers and are now one of the most popular PC game genres.

[picture of Dragon's Lair arcade game] [screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [yet another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [The Dragon's Lair Project]

I, Robot, Atari Inc., 1984

I, Robot was the first game to feature 3-D polygon graphics. Only a thousand I, Robots were ever produced.

Xevious, Namco/Atari Inc., 1985

Xevious had scrolling terrain background with both ground and air targets. Xevious became the basis of new generation of scrolling shoot'em'up games.

[Xevious Emulator Page (well worth to check!)]

Gauntlet, Atari Games, 1985

Gauntlet was designed by Ed Logg. It had good graphics and great game-play with up to 4 simultaneous players.

[Gauntlet I/II Hackers Page]

Space Harrier, Sega, 1986

Space Harrier had fast scaling sprite based 3D graphics with stereo diginal sound. It marked the beginning of transformation of established genres toward three-dimensionality and more high-powered arcade hardware.

The game was designed by Sega's legendary game designer Yu Suzuki, who is also responsible for Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Hang-On and Shen-Mue.

Street Fighter II, Capcom, 1991

Cinematronics Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting video game and Data East's Karate Champ (1984) had already introduced the "side view" perspective, the genre of fighting game practically didn't exist until Capcom released Street Fighter II. It had many truly different charachters to choose from and good game play. SFII started the new "golden age" of arcades. SFII was also converted to many home systems and the Super Nintendo version alone sold more than 15 million copies.

The success of SFII procudes many competitors e.g. the Mortal Kombat, Killing Instinct and Virtua Fighter series. SFII has numerous sequels and even a movie was made out of it. Fighting games started the new golden age of arcade games.

Virtua Racing, Sega, 1992

Virtua Racing started the new age of fast polygon racing games and high-powered multi-player simulators. Virtua Racing had good gameplay and force-feedback steering with the most realistic graphics up to its date.

Virtua Fighter, Sega, 1993

Virtua Fighter brought fast 3D polygon graphics to fighting games and changed the fighting game industry. Nowadays practically all fighting games have 3D graphics.

Daytona, Sega, 1994

Daytona was one of the first racing games to feature fast texture mapped and shaded 3D polygon graphics. Its great graphics, game-play and team-play option made it a huge hit.

Future

Nowadays most of the arcade games are either fighting games, racing games, sport games or shoot'em'ups, with some rare innovative titles. The lack of diversity leaves the arcade business into vulnerable position. The current trend is for more photo-realistics graphics and more processing power, with very little, or no, new ideas at all. The big question is, will the players remaing interested with current game genres or do they want something new?

Most arcade video games have custem designed hardware, but the increasing developing costs and fast development of PC 3D accelerator chips, will most likely make many companies to use more standard PC hardware instead custom solutions.

Nowadays most of the arcade games still have the program, graphics and sound data in ROM chips, but hard disks are coming more popular and popular and will probably replace ROMs.

Standard hardware and harddisks will make it easier to include many games to single video game machine or use the same hardware for different games.

Many current arcade video games had a local network option, enabling 2-16 machines to be connected to single multi-player game in the same arcade. In future arcade video games will probably be connected external network, enabling players to play against players from other cities or even countries.

# posted by Tazace @ 3:47 AM