‘Pong’ to ‘WoW’ — the history of the video game
By Alex Emslie and Ellen Silk
STAFF WRITER AND NEWS EDITOR
The invention of video games represented a renaissance in the field of entertainment. Games were no longer hindered by the imagination of their players but instead by the artistry of their creators.
The first video game was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1947. It used analog circuitry to control a cathode ray tube beam to position a dot on the screen. The game, patented as the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device in 1948, was inspired by radar displays from World War II.
Brookhaven National Laboratory introduced “Tennis for Two” in 1958. William Higinbotham, the game’s creator and a nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project , wrote, “It might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society.”
“Tennis for Two” was a tennis court on an oscilloscope screen. The ball, a moving dot, left trails as it bounced to alternating sides of the net. Players served and volleyed using remotes with buttons and rotating dials.
In 1967 Ralph Baer, chief engineer at the defense contractor Sanders Associates, and his team created a game as part of a top secret Brown Box project to use as a U.S. military training tool. The game consisted of two dots chasing each other around the screen. Baer’s team continued improving the technology and also created the very first video game “controller” — a light-gun that would work with the TV system.
Six years later the top secret status was dropped and Sanders Associates licensed the Brown Box to electronics company Magnavox. The box was renamed, redesigned and released as the very first home gaming system — the Magnavox Odyssey.
Steve Russell, while attending MIT in 1961, developed an interactive video game on a mini-computer. Russell’s “Spacewar” inspired two separate breakthroughs in the following decades.
“Galaxy” was one of the first commercial video games. It was built and installed at the Stanford Tresidder student union in September 1971 by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck.
The gameplay in “Galaxy” was based on “Spacewar” and involved two armed spaceships — “the needle” and “the wedge” — shooting at one another. The ships had limited fuel, missiles and a last-ditch hyperspace option that would place the ship at a random location on the screen.
That same year, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created a coin-operated arcade version of “Spacewar” and called it “Computer Space.” Nutting Associates bought the game and manufactured 1,500 “Computer Space” machines in November 1971. Although the game was unsuccessful because of its long learning-curve, it is recognized as the first mass-produced video game offered for commercial sale.
Bushnell and Dabney went on to found Atari and released their first major success, “Pong,” in 1972. Atari and Magnavox went on to survive a slump in the video game market in the late 1970s. In 1977 Atari released a cartridge-based console called the Video Computer System, better known as the Atari 2600. The VCS had an arsenal of nine games and quickly became a very popular console.
The 1980s also saw the rise of the home computer, the most popular of which were IBM and Apple Macintosh. Both of these offered new possibilities for video games with better graphics, sound and higher quality resolution.
“The first game I ever played was probably ‘Missile Command’,” said City College computer science major William Eagleton of the Atari 2600. “My dad worked for Atari, so we would get test cartridges.”
On Dec. 7, 1982, Warner Communications’ — Atari’s parent company — stock dropped 32 percent after it was announced that VCS sales did not meet predictions. The following year, many companies who only made games — often called third-party companies — declared bankruptcy, and Atari split into two separate companies. In 1983 it was discovered that Ray Kassar, then head of Atari, was guilty of insider trading. He immediately resigned.
Masayuki Uemura, working for Nintendo, revived the video game in 1985 with the Nintendo Entertainment System. The cartridge system had two controllers with multiple buttons that allowed the player to jump, run and do more with the character on the screen. Two very popular Nintendo games were “Super Mario Brothers” and “Duck Hunt.”
Sega’s Master System, while graphically superior to the NES, failed to make any kind of lasting impression in the U.S. market. When Sega introduced Genisis, the company began an aggressive marketing campaign, not only to customers, but also to developers. Genesis quickly grew popular thanks to their line-up of quality arcade conversions, sports games, and the help of game developer Electronic Arts.
Competition between Nintendo and Sega colored the video game market through the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Sony released Playstation in 1994. The company had grown from a radio repair shop in post WWII Tokyo to a powerful electronics corporation. As of 2008, Sony had sold 140 million Playstation 2 units.
In the ‘90s parents demonstrated they were willing to spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade systems and the home console was here to stay.
“I like a lot of the classic games. My favorite game is probably ‘Doom,’” Eagleton said. “Between ‘93 and ‘98 was the golden age of games for me.”
Today’s innovations in video game technology are quantified in generations.
The three major competitors of today’s gaming market — Nintendo’s Wii, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3 — challenge each other to create an evermore immersive gaming experience measured by realism of graphics and plots. Gone are the simple days of games like “Pong” and “PacMan,” but the virtual 3D worlds of today wouldn’t be possible without the 2D screens of the past.