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History of Early Gaming
Digital Computers (1959-1972)
1959
Demos on the Tixo
Products of the first hackers
The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo, was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic core memory. The TX-0 was used from 1955 into the 1960s at MIT. The TX-0 and its direct descendant, the original PDP-1, were platforms for pioneering computer research and the development of what would later be called computer "hacker" culture. 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. 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.
1961
Gaming on the IBM 1620 Mainframe
First games available for purchase (from the IBM catalogue)
BBC Vik: The Baseball Demonstrator allows the player to "play" baseball against the computer and was created to demonstrate the IBM 1620 computer. Both the player and the computer pick players from a database to form a team and those teams will play against each other. The results of the matches are based on random numbers and batting averages from the database. Each event during the match is printed by the computer, letting the player know who hit the ball, when a base is stolen, a ball is caught, the pitcher hit the batter, etc. The only commands available to the player are cheats to force a hit or miss, or to request a position of all the runners. A game lasted around 7 to 11 minutes.
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A 3D Tic-Tack-Toe conversion which ran on the IBM 1620 had a 3x4x4 grid and allowed the player to play against the computer. Various versions of the game exist both written in FORTRAN and Assembly. The game was later reverse engineered and appeared on various other computer systems.
1962
Spacewar!
The first widely distributed influential video game
Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell, in collaboration with Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen, and programmed by Russell with assistance from others including Bob Saunders and Steve Piner. It was written for the newly installed DEC PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After its initial creation, Spacewar! was expanded further by other students and employees of universities in the area, including Dan Edwards and Peter Samson. It was also spread to many of the few dozen, primarily academic, installations of the PDP-1 computer, making Spacewar! the first known video game to be played at multiple computer installations.
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The game features two spaceships, "the needle" and "the wedge", engaged in a dogfight while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. Both ships are controlled by human players. Each ship has limited fuel for maneuvering and a limited number of torpedoes, and the ships follow Newtonian physics, remaining in motion even when the player is not accelerating. Flying near the star to provide a gravity assist was a common tactic. Ships are destroyed when hit with a torpedo or colliding with the star. At any time, the player can engage a hyperspace feature to move to a new, random location on the screen, though each use has an increasing chance of destroying the ship instead. The game was initially controlled with switches on the PDP-1, though Alan Kotok and Bob Saunders built an early gamepad to reduce the difficulty and awkwardness of controlling the game.
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Spacewar is one of the most important and influential games in the early history of video games. It was extremely popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and was widely ported to other computer systems at the time. It has also been recreated in more modern programming languages for PDP-1 emulators. It directly inspired many other electronic games, such as the first commercial arcade games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space (1971), and later games such as Asteroids (1979). In 2007, Spacewar was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, which formed the start of the game canon at the Library of Congress.
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This entry is from Wikipedia
1965
The "Project 2841" Experiment
(Final Report can be found here)
From October 1965 to March 1965, twenty-six sixth-grade students from the Mohansic School in Yorktown Heights, New York, played two games, The Sumerian Game and The Sierra Leone Game, on three terminals at the Center for Educational Services and Research of the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in Northern Westchester County, New York. The purpose of the experiment was to produce and evaluate computer-based economics games as a method of individualizing instruction for sixth-grade pupils. During the course of Project 2841 three games were developed: The Sumerian Game, The Sierra Leone Game, and The Free Enterprise Game (which was never used in the experiment). The equipment used for the games originally was a time-shared IBM 7090 connected by telephone line to three 1050 terminals. The games were then reprogrammed for a 1401 computer at Johns Hopkins University.
The Sumerian Game by William McKay
In the Sumerian Game the student takes the role of a priest-king in a Sumerian town about 3500 B.C. Through an introductory slide and tape presentation the pupil is given an orientation to the scene. Then, seated at the typewriter terminal of a computer system, he is presented with a series of economic problems, such as how much grain he should plant, store, or distribute to the population, how much manpower to assign to development of new crafts, whether to accept certain technological innovations, and how to cope with disasters which are introduced randomly throughout the game. Information is presented by means of printout, and the setting is illustrated with slides.
The Sierra Leone Game by Walter Goodman
In the Sierra Leone game the pupil plays the part of an officer from the Agency of Internal Development in modern Sierra Leone. After taking a simulated tour of the country, he is assigned to each of the three provinces of Sierra Leone, one after another, and gives advice to the local administrators about their economic problems, such as land reclamation, price control, and even gross national product allocations. If he is successful in advising the country on these problems, he is promoted within the A.I.D.
Free Enterprise by Jimmer Leonard
The 'third game, Free Enterprise, puts the student in charge of a toy store and later a toy factory to give him simulated experience with economic problems which occur in these occupations.
BASIC Beginnings
IF BASIC THEN make game ELSE use FOCAL
John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC language at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. They wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. Versions of BASIC became widespread on microcomputers in the mid-1970s and 1980s. Microcomputers usually shipped with BASIC, often in the machine's firmware.
PDP-10 Timesharing World Series (1965)
The PDP-10 Timesharing World Series, programmed by John Kemeny, is one of the first games ever made for the BASIC programming language. The game allows the user to simulate a game of baseball on the computer. The player's input is limited to picking a random number between 1 and 1000 after which the game is played out. The two teams (Dodgers and Yankees) will bat it out. Based purely on chance the baseball players will hit singles, doubles or home runs, steal a base, be safe or out. Each event is printed to the screen and at the end a winner is announced.
Bingo (1966)
Bingo was written by Larry Bethurum. The player receives a randomized printed bingo card for both himself and the computer. The computer will then call numbers which the player can cross off the cards. The computer will tell when the player or computer has bingo or when the game ends in a tie.
Baseball (1967 World Series)
Baseball is a BASIC game written by Jacob Bergmann that plays out the 1967 world series between the Red Sox and Cardinals. All the players are present and probabilities for their actions can be requested when asked to make a move. The game itself is mostly played by answering yes or no questions, or a base to perform an action with. Questions include whether to steal a base, or which base to throw a ball to.
1966
Development of Ralph Baer's "Brown Box"
Channel LP (TV Game #1)
In 1951, while working for military contractor Loral Electronics, engineer Ralph H. Baer was assigned to build a television set; while doing so, Baer claims he had the idea to build something into a television set that the owner could control. Baer did not pursue the idea, but it returned to him in August 1966 while waiting for a bus. Baer, then the head of the Equipment Design Division at military contractor Sanders Associates, came up with the concept of using a television to play games, and the next morning wrote up a four-page proposal for a US$20 "game box" that would plug into a television screen and play games on it. In the proposal, Baer began by referring to the project using military terminology, but by the time he finished it he was referring to it as Channel LP, short for "let's play". The proposed device would transmit a signal that the television set could tune into as if it were a television channel, and Baer described several games that could be played on it. By December 1966 an initial prototype later christened "TV Game #1" was completed using an Heathkit IG-62 Alignment Generator, which could display and move a vertical line on a television screen. Baer demonstrated the prototype to the Sanders director of research and development, Herbert Campman, who hesitantly agreed to fund it for US$2,000 of labor and US$500 for materials, making it an official project.
The Pump Unit (TV Game #2)
In February, 1967, Baer assigned technician Bill Harrison to begin building the project. Harrison spent the next few months in between other projects building out successive modifications to the prototype. Baer, meanwhile, collaborated with engineer Bill Rusch on the design of the console, including developing the basis of many games for the system. The first game was developed by May, a two-player game where the players repeatedly press a button in competition to fill or empty a bucket of water. By June multiple games were completed for what was then a second prototype box, the TV Game Unit #2.
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Games demoed on the TV Game #2:
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“Chess,” which was actually a chase game in which each player moved a dot one space at a time around a chess board overlay trying to trap his opponent,
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“Steeple Chase,” a free-form chase game,
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“Fox and Hounds,” a chase game making use of the random dot hardware to place multiple pursuers on the screen,
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“Target Shooting” with the light gun,
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“Color Wheel Game,” a guessing game in which the dot cycles through a series of colors and the players must guess which color will appear,
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and 2 pumping games named “Bucket Filling Game” and “Pumping Game”, which used a handle connected to the unit to pump "water", later leading to the unit being rechristened The Pump Unit.
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“TV Game #3”
By August 1967, Baer and Harrison had completed a third prototype, but Baer's initial aim of a US$20 console would require so much to be excluded that the console would not be enjoyable. Baer, unsuccessful at designing fun games for the system, added Bill Rusch to the project, who helped him come up with the initial games for the console. Though the pair found Rusch difficult to work with, he soon proved his value to the team by coming up with a way to display three spots on the screen at once rather than the previous two, and proposing the development of a ping pong game.
“TV Game #4”
By November the team, now on their fourth prototype machine, had a ping pong game, a chasing game, a light gun game, and three types of controllers: joysticks for the chase game, a rifle for the light gun game, and a three dial controller for the ping pong game. Management at Sanders Associates felt that the system was advanced enough to begin trying to find a manufacturer to buy it; they had decided to aim for selling the rights to produce the console, as Sanders was not in the business of making and selling commercial electronics.
“TV Game #5”
In December 1967, Harrison continued to work on improving the TV game, incorporating some of the velocity circuitry designed by Rusch and re-implementing the light pen quiz game with a new light gun peripheral that would allow answers to be chosen from a distance. Two new ball-and-paddle variants were created during this time period as well, handball and volleyball. In handball, the “net” was moved to one side of the screen and served as the wall of a handball court, while in volleyball, the centerline was modified to serve as a net. Otherwise, the gameplay remained the same as in the ping-pong game. Work on TV Game #5 ceased at the end of January when funding ran out.
“TV Game #6”
In September 1968, Baer secured additional funding and brought back Bill Harrison to create another prototype, TV Game #6. The switches used to select different game modes in previous versions were replaced with a rotary dial, while the game also sported an improved light gun.
“The Brown Box” (TV Game #7)
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Still feeling they could do a little better, Baer and Harrison developed one final prototype in January 1969, TV Game #7, which they also called the “Brown Box” because Harrison wrapped the casing in self-adhesive woodgrain to make it more attractive. This version also included an expanded set of games.
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Games included:
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Ping-Pong,
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Handball,
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Volleyball,
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Target Shooting,
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Checker (the chase game),
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Hockey,
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Soccer,
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Football,
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and a golf putting game with a new peripheral: a golf ball mounted on a joystick. The player would place the joystick on the floor and tap the ball with a putter, after which the spot representing the ball would move based on the contact with the joystick. If the ball hit the dot representing the hole, they both disappeared.
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Magnavox Skill-O-Vision
After a long period of trying to find a company to produce and market The Brown Box, Sanders Associates finally signed an agreement with Magnavox in January, 1971. While in development as the Skill-O-Vision, Magnavox redesigned the exterior, re-engineered the internals from integrated circuits to discrete components, and also changed the dial to select games to separate game cards. They also decided to make it black and white instead of colour because it was cheaper. Magnavox added paper money, playing cards, and poker chips to the console, to go along with the plastic overlays for the games that enhanced the primitive visuals, which Baer felt were pointless. A launch date of September, 1972 was announced, and the world received the first home gaming console, the Magnavox Odyssey,
"TV Game Unit #8"
While preparing their video game system prototype, the “Brown Box” to be presented to potential investors, Ralph Baer and his colleague Bill Harrison created TV Game Unit #8. They wanted to demonstrate a more advanced technology that would allow the user’s paddle to determine, in the direction and speed of the game ball, when the two would collide. This would allow for games such as baseball and more realistic hockey game play. This TV Game Unit #8 interfaced with the "Brown Box," but proved too expensive to pursue in these early stages. A few years later, this technology was key when Baer and his colleagues started to design and build arcade games.
1968
Hamurabi series
Text-based strategy game builds its empire
Likely influenced by The Sumerian Game of 1965, the Sumer Game was written in 1968 in the FOCAL programming language for the DEC PDP-8 by Doug Dyment. It was later converted to BASIC by David H. Ahl and spread to a variety of systems, spawning a number of different implementations.
In the game the player plays a king that must feed his subjects for a number of years. Each year the player must buy land, sow grain and distribute it to the subjects.
The BASIC version is better known as Hammurabi (or Hamurabi as it's often known as due to file name limits), and the name most associated with this game and its many iterations during the late 60s and early 70s.
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The Sumer Game was written in FOCAL by Doug Dyment on a DEC PDP-8.
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Hamurabi (1971) was written in Basic by David H. Ahl on the DEC PDP-8.
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French-language version (1973) by Belgians J. F. Champarnaud and F. H. Bostem in FOCAL-69.
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Kingdom (1974) by Lee Schneider and Todd Voros.
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Dukedom (1976) by Lee Schneider and Todd Voros.
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Kingdom (1977) for the Commodore PET/CBM.
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Ruben (1978) by James R. B. Howard II and Jimmie B. Fletcher.
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King (1978) by James A. Storer.
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Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio (1978) by George Blank.
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Kingdom Picture (1981) for the Commodore PET/CBM; has very simple graphics.
1969
Space Travel
UNIX was discovered in space
Space Travel was a game developed by Ken Thompson which simulates travel in the solar system. The player flies their ship around a two-dimensional scale model of the solar system with no objectives other than to attempt to land on various planets and moons. The player can move and turn the ship, and adjust the overall speed by adjusting the scale of the simulation. The ship is affected by the single strongest gravitational pull of the astronomical bodies. The game was developed at Bell Labs and as a part of porting the game to the PDP-7, Thompson developed his own operating system, which later formed the core of the Unix operating system.
Lunar Lander series (text based)
The latest craze in computer games has landed... on the moon!​
Lunar Lander is the name of several video games built on the same concept. In all variations of the game, the player controls a spaceship as it falls towards the surface of the Moon or other astronomical bodies, and must maneuver the ship's thrusters so as to land safely before exhausting the available fuel. In many versions of the game, the player must adjust the ship's orientation, as well as its horizontal and vertical velocities. The initial version of the game was a text-based game named Lunar, or alternately the Lunar Landing Game, written in the FOCAL programming language for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 minicomputer by Jim Storer while a high school student in the fall of 1969. Two other versions were written soon after by other programmers in BASIC. Lunar was converted to BASIC by David H. Ahl, who included all three versions in his 1973 101 BASIC Computer Games; by the end of the decade, the type of game was collectively known as a "lunar lander" game.
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Lunar, or Lunar Landing Game written in FOCAL by Jim Storer on the DEC PDP-8.
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Rocket was written in BASIC by Eric Peters at DEC.
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LEM was written in BASIC by William Labaree II.
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Lunar (1970) written in BASIC by David H. Ahl on the DEC PDP-8.
In 1973, DEC commissioned the creation of a real-time, graphical version of Lunar Lander, which was intended to showcase the capabilities of their new DEC GT40 graphics terminals. The game, which was written by Jack Burness and named Moonlander, was distributed with DEC computers and displayed at trade shows. An arcade game version of the game concept was released as Lunar Lander in 1979 by Atari, which featured a fuel-for-money system allowing the player to purchase more fuel to continue their current game.
1971
Star Trek (text based)
To boldly go where no computer has gone before
Star Trek is a text-based computer game that puts the player in command of the Starship Enterprise on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of Klingon warships. Unlike the other text-based games, however, it did not use written responses to player input, but instead had character-based graphics, with different characters used as graphical symbols to represent objects. It was initially developed by Mike Mayfield in 1971 on an SDS Sigma 7 mainframe. Written in BASIC, it was widely distributed and ported for many minicomputer and mainframe systems. This was aided with the publication of 101 BASIC Computer Games by David Ahl in 1973, which included the most widely played version, Super Star Trek. This version was relatively easy to port to Microsoft BASIC, and appeared on many of the early microcomputers throughout the 1970s.
The Oregon Trail
You Died of Dysentery!!
The original, non-graphical BASIC version of The Oregon Trail was first developed in 1971 by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger and meant to be played on a Teletype. This first version was played exclusively by Don Rawitsch's history class, taught at Carleton College. A subsequent version was re-typed from paper records into MECC computer systems in 1974, and made available to school systems across the entire state. It would be revised in 1976 and again in 1978 based on new research. In 1979-1980, MECC released Elementary Volume 6 for the Apple II microcomputer, a bundle of educational software including "Oregon" with music, rudimentary, non-animated graphics, and action-based shooting sequences. Subsequent versions for Atari, Commodore 64, and Radio Shack computers followed.
Baseball
Programming a better baseball game
Baseball was created on a PDP-10 minicomputer at Pomona College in 1971 by English major Don Daglow. Baseball was the first baseball video game that allowed players to manage the game as it unfolded, rather than just picking players at the beginning of a game. The program is documented at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Baseball was continually updated through 1974, and distributed to other PDP-10 installations.. The text-based game had each player control the pitcher or the batter; they would enter their intention to, for example, pitch to or walk the batter, or switch hitters. The batting player could direct on-base players to steal, and the batter to hit. The results of the play would be printed out onto paper as a verbose description, like a radio description of the game. Daglow went on to develop more sophisticated baseball games in 1983 with Intellivision World Series Baseball, and 1987 with Earl Weaver Baseball.
Galaxy Game
Galaxy Game was one of the first arcade video games
see Arcade
Computer Space
Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney... BEFORE Atari
see Arcade
1972
Hunt the Wumpus
Hunt the Wumpus was originally written by Gregory Yob in BASIC while attending the Dartmouth campus of the University of Massachusetts in 1972. The original text-based version uses a command line text interface and was based on a simple hide and seek format featuring a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) that lurks deep inside a network of rooms. A player of the game enters commands to move through the rooms or to shoot "crooked arrows" along a tunnel into one of the adjoining rooms. There are twenty rooms, each connecting to three others, arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron. Hazards include bottomless pits, super bats, and the Wumpus itself. When the player has deduced from hints which chamber the Wumpus is in without entering the chamber, he fires an arrow into the Wumpus's chamber to kill it. The player wins the game if he kills the Wumpus. However, firing the arrow into the wrong chamber startles the Wumpus, which may cause it to move to an adjacent room. The player loses if he or she is in the same room as the Wumpus (which then eats him or her) or a bottomless pit.
Empire
Empire is a 4X wargame created in 1972 by Peter Langston in BASIC on an HP2000 minicomputer at Evergreen State College. When the host computer was retired, the source code to the game was lost. Subsequently, two other authors each independently wrote a new version of the game, both named Empire. In the decades since, numerous other versions of Empire have been developed for a wide variety of platforms. The game is turn-based, with players giving orders at their convenience, and in some versions then executed simultaneously by the game server at set intervals ranging from a few hours to once per day. The game world consists of "sectors", which may be designated as agricultural, industrial, etc. There are dozens of unit types requiring a variety of raw and manufactured materials for their creation. "Blitz" games may last a few hours, typical games a few months, and some larger games up to a year.
Magnavox Odyssey
The first home video gaming console
see Home Consoles
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Pong
Ushering in a new age: The Golden Era of Arcade
see Arcade
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...and the rest, as they say, is video gaming history.
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