The History of Video Gaming

The First Computer Game

The first computers were very big in size, very limited in processing power, had no real-time-graphics and only few people had access to them. In 1961, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) donated their latest computer to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1). It sold for $120,000. Compared to the many computers of its time, the PDP-1 was comparatively modest in size - about as big as a large automobile.

Like most universities, MIT had several campus organizations. One of them was the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). It appealed to students who liked to build systems and see how things worked. TMRC had access to PDP-1 and creating new programs and improving older ones was considered an impressive hack among them. They programmed for the fun of it, not for the money, and program source code was public domain, for anybody to use and improve.

Steve Russell, nicknamed "Slug", was a typical nerd with affection to Science Fiction and a member of TMRC. He decided to make the ultimate hack, an interactive game. It took Russell nearly six months and 200 man-hours to complete the first version of the game, a simple two-player game between rocket ships. Using toggle switches built into the PDP-1, players controlled the speed and direction of both ships and fired torpedoes at each other. Russell called his game, "Spacewar". In true hacker spirits the TMRC revised Spacewar and added several elements to it, including an accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with an accurate gravitational field in the foreground, hyperspace button, unpredictable torpedoes (for more realism) and built remote controllers to replace PDP-1's native controls (the forerunners of joystick). Spacewar was the predecessor of Asteroids (Atari) and Gravitar (Atari).

Although Russell's amazing hack created a sensation throughout MIT, he never made a penny from it. PDP computers cost too much to adapt the game for the consumer market, even as an arcade machine.

The First Video Game

The first video game was created by the engineers at Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire-based defense contractor. Ralph Baer was working Sanders Associates as manager of equipment design division. In August 1966 he came up with an idea building sometimes for $19.95 in the usa, a game for TV set. He allocated few of his employees, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, to the project. In 1967, Rusch suggested a new game in which a hardwired logic circuit projected a spot flying across the screen. Originally, the object of the game was for players to catch the spot with manually controlled dots. Over time, the players' dots evolved into paddles, and the game became ping pong.

Sanders Associates had a rough time in the late sixties, down-sizing from 11,000 to 4,000 employees. As a military contractor, Sanders couldn't suddenly go into the toy business, so Baer had to find a customer for his invention. Baer tried to sell his invention to many parties, and finally in 1971 he made a deal with Magnavox. The product was called Magnavox Odyssey and it was first products were sold in 1972. Unfortunately Magnavox did a bad job - they over-engineered the machine and upped the price so that the system was sold for $100 and the advertisement campaign was poor. Ralph Baer's dream of $20 dollar game became a fiasco and his name was forgotten by most people.

# posted by Tazace @ 3:52 AM