This is my first video game article ever (I'm not a very good writer). Please critique it, and let me know if making the entire series would be a worthwhile endevour (would you read them). As my plan stands now I intend to cover all the way up to and including the playsation/N64 generation. This article is lacking abit in content due in part to how niche video gaming was in the 50's and 60's. I plan to include a considerable amount of video and playable games in future articles.
The ongoing history of gaming: A brief episodic look into the history of our hobby.
Definition of a video game: a game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a display.
Preliminary article list:
1. Conception
2. Birth
3. The baby fell down the stairs
4. Learning to walk
5. Reflection #1
6. A visit to the emergency room
7. Awakened
8. My child is an honour student
9. A shiny new toy
10. Reflection #2
11. TBA
Conception:
*** Due to the relative obscurity of the first twenty years of video gaming some facts and dates are disputable.
On January 25th, 1947 a patent application was filed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Man. The content of that patent was the description of the very first video game. The game consisted of a dot (that represented a missile), and a screen overlay upon which one would draw a target. The player would turn a number of knobs to adjust the curve and speed of the moving dot in an attempt to hit the target on the overlay. (Further details such as an image of the game in action are unavailable).
Jumping forward five years we arrive at the next iteration of video gaming, and the first graphical computer game known to exist. In 1952 A.S. Douglas wrote a simple tic tac toe game for the EDSAC vacuum tube computer. He used the game as the basis for his thesis on the human-computer interaction. The game was played against the computer which used simple mathematical algorithms to win whenever possible. The following is a representation of what the game looked like as displayed on the computers 35 x 16 pixel display.
If you would like to experience this piece of gaming history an EDSAC computer emulator is available here http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/ (use at your own risk as I have not tested or verified it)
In 1958 a select few people were treated to the first multiplayer game ever created. The game was made by Willy Higginbotham ( a physicist that participated in the manhattan project) while working for the Brookhaven national laboratory. This game would come to be known as Tennis for Two the predessecor of pong. The game was displayed during two open houses at the laboratory over the course of two years, and then dismantled in order to salvage the very valuable components it was made of. A video of a replica of the original system does a much better job of explaining the game than I ever could.
A video of the Tennis for Two remake in action.
An image of the original Tennis for Two. The display is the tiny ocilliscope in the middle of the photograph.
In the year 1961 three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen) created a simple game running on a DEC PDP-1 computer in which two ships battled each other. While using a debugging program on their creation they noticed that it randomly generated lit pixels on the screen (stars). This inspiration lead to the final product known as Spacewar in which the ships battled over a star filled background in the presence of a sun that attracted both ships.
Play the java remake of the original here. http://spacewar.oversigma.com/
Controls are located here http://spacewar.oversigma.com/readme.html
A look forward to the next episode: Birth
A couple playable web based pong clones:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/170420
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/300492
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/286725
LEAGUE
