Video games are known today by a variety of titles: "Escape", "Fun", "Art", "Waste of Time", and numerous others. Not one of these titles can possibly convey all of the aspects of the video game media, and yet they all have value (yes, even "Waste of Time").
They have been around in one form or another for decades, and show no signs of ever slowing down. As they rival the film and television industries (at least in America), it seems appropriate to begin to reflect on how the still-fledgling media has reached this point, what the present state of gaming is, and what is to come in the industry.
However, before any modern analysis can be made, one must know the history and background behind the source of this entire class. This brings us to our opening lecture:
*Cue huge movie announcer voice*The History of Video Games (1889-1972)*Two points to make first...depending on the section, I will try to remain objective. I won't lie to you, but my opinions will definitely seep through...not necessarily in the history, but when I reach individual profiles, I may be slightly subjective. Also, my main source (I feel that I should cite them, as my English teacher has tried to bash into my head) is Wikipedia, with supplementary research from numerous other pages. I will cite another page if a large section of text owes much to that website.*
"Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle." - Toad, Super Mario Bros.
I always tend to begin my lectures with a quote, and, since there are not many quotes surrounding the media itself, I have decided to lift quotes from the notable games of the period/company/series/platform/other that I am discussing. For this opening lecture, I have taken a quote from the most well-known video games ever created: Super Mario Bros. (sorry Pac-Man). But Mario is nowhere near the beginning of video games. In fact, the company that created Mario was born nearly a century earlier...
The company now known as Nintendo was founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi as a Japanese playing card company named Marufuku. They made cards for a Japanese game known as
Hanafuda, and grew in stature as the game grew in popularity. Yamauchi's son-in-law, Sekiryo Yamauchi (nee Kaneda), took control of the company in 1933 and renamed it Yamauchi Nintendo & Company. The word "Nintendo" roughly translates as “entrust luck to the heavens” and “do what is humanly possible and leave the rest to fate". In 1949 the grandson of Sekiryo Yamauchi, 21-year-old Hiroshi Yamauchi, took office as the president of Nintendo.
I will assuredly return to the full history of Nintendo at a later date, but, chronologically, now is a good time to reenter the general history of video games.
"The earliest known electronic game was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube in 1947" (Direct quote from Wikipedia). This game simulated missile flight and was similar to World War II radar systems. It used analog circuits to move a dot around the screen, and...that was about it. Overlays had to be used for targets, as graphics were a bit too advanced for that time. A version of tic-tac-toe called "OXO" or "Noughts and Crosses" was created for the EDSAC computer in 1952.
However, what is "widely" known as the first true video game is "Tennis for Two", created on an oscilloscope for the Brookhaven National Laboratory's annual visitor's day and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (to demonstrate atomic power). This creation took place in 1958.
In 1961, the game "Spacewar!" was created by three MIT students as a way to test their new DEC PDP-1 computer. "Spacewar!" most definitely deserves its own mini-lecture and will be receiving one in the near future. For now, know that after it was discovered by the creators of the DEC computer, they decided to bundle it with all DECs sent nationwide, thereby making "Spacewar!" a college phenomenon. Numerous "Spacewar!" clones popped up, the most notable being "Computer Space", created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney (who, in the near future, will co-found Atari).
"While Nolan Bushnell was still in school, Ralph Baer, the head of the Equipment and Design Division of defense contractor Sanders Associates was able to pursue an idea he came up with during the early 1950s—the idea of playing a game on a television set. In 1966 he assembled a small team to make his concept a reality, and in 1967 they came up with a chase game in which a player represented by a dot chases another player represented by a dot through a maze. Next, a light gun was designed to shoot at a dot on the screen, and then paddles were added to manipulate the dot to create a tennis game. The final prototype was soon created that could play several games by using a series of switches to change the screen output and demonstrations were held for all the major television companies." (Wikipedia)
Nolan Bushnell told his first engineer, Al Alcorn, that General Electric had given him a contract to make a ping-pong game. Though there really was no contract, Bushnell thought that it would serve as good practice for Alcorn. Around the same time, Magnavox began to seriously develop interest in the "Brown Box" of Ralph Baer and his team, and, in 1972, it was released as the first video game system: the Magnavox Odyssey. However, even more important than the Odyssey was the other notable game release of 1972: a little game called "Pong"...
Alright class, that's enough for today. We'll pick up at 1972 later, and I will relay to you the tale of the meteoric growth of the video game industry...and the 1983-1984 crash that nearly buried it forever.
Feel free to comment on this first lecture.
Good night, and remember..."It's dangerous to go alone..."
