ColdFusion - Early Video Game History (1948 – 1972)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are watching Cold Fusion TV. Hi, welcome to another Cold Fusion video. Starting out as a curious experiment of sorts, video games have come a long way over the past half century. Today we have all sorts of games ranging from detailed storylines to multiplayer chaos. The graphics of our games today aren't far off the CGI films from a decade ago. And moreover, the gaming industry brought in $23 billion of revenue last year. But where did it all come from? and what are the very origins of what we call video games today?

Starting point is 00:00:40 In this video, we'll travel back in time a little bit and find out. When most people think of the origin of video games, their mind wanders to the classic arcade game, Pong. But Pong and the corresponding arcade era was actually the end stage of pioneering video games and not the beginning. To find the first piece of video game code ever written, we have to start three years after World War II in 1948. Alan Turing, who was actually the father of AI, and David Champ-Nown, wrote a theoretical chess simulation called TurroChamp.

Starting point is 00:01:17 This was the first game code ever written. Unfortunately, it would never run on a computer as the code was too complicated to actually run on machines of the time. The early 1950s saw the first video games to run on a machine. Of course, the computers back then were large glorified calculators that took up an entire room. But there was an issue though. For a second, put yourself in the shoes of an engineer in 1950. If you wanted to demonstrate a computer's usefulness to someone who didn't even know what

Starting point is 00:01:46 a computer was, how would you do it in an interesting and engaging way? The answer? With tech demos, of course. Created in 1950, Bertie the Brain was one of the first of such demo games. It was basically Nauts and Crossers, which used light bulbs as a display. In 1952, Alexander Douglas created another Nauts. and cross his game, but took it a step further. He used a video display instead of light bulbs. Although this was a step forward, the game featured no interactive moving graphics,

Starting point is 00:02:17 so some historians do not view this as the first to video game. Possibly the first real video game and the first created simply for entertainment purposes was tennis for two in 1958. It featured moving graphics on an oscilloscope. American physicist William Higginbotham designed the game to be shown at a public exhibition. Here's how we discovered how to make the game. While reading the instruction manual for a Donner Model 30 computer, which was an analog computer used by the US government, William learned that the computer could calculate basic missile trajectories or a bouncing ball with wind resistance. He decided to use these abilities to form the foundation of a game. This was actually the very first interactive computer game. The game was a smash hit

Starting point is 00:03:05 during the three-day exhibition, with players lining up to see the game. High school students were especially enthralled. Although this was an iconic moment in video game history, it was yet to break out as a media form. As the years passed, there was still no such thing as a video game industry. Almost all games had been developed on a single machine for a specific purpose. A software game that could run on multiple machines was not yet realized. This all changed in 1961 when MIT acquired the DEC PDP1 mini-computer which used a vector display system. Although it had no CPU, the transistors still managed a 5 megahertz processing speed, which is about 500 times slower than the clock speed in a modern smartphone, actually very powerful

Starting point is 00:03:53 for 1961. Because of the computer's small size and speed, students and employees of MIT loved writing non-academic programs whenever it wasn't being used. In 1962, three MIT employees, Martin Greats, Steve Russell and Wayne Wittenen, created the game Space War on the PDP 1. The two-player game involved a dogfight between two spaceships set against the backdrop of a starfield. Interestingly, one of the aims of the game's design was to use up all of the computer's resources

Starting point is 00:04:25 and utilize every part of the machine. So in essence, what you're looking at is the maximum performance of 1961 technology. I think it was actually pretty impressive for what they had. Space War was copied to other mini computers in other American universities, making it the first video game to be available outside a single research institute. Despite this, the game wasn't widespread as the PDP1 cost $120,000 or almost a million dollars in today's currency, and only 55 were ever sold. As a side point, if you think Space War looks familiar, the game actually inspired asteroids by Atari in 1979, but more on Atari later on in the video. Following the spread

Starting point is 00:05:05 of Space War, further computer games were developed by programmers at other universities, The 1970s saw an uptick in the number of video games being created, but there was still no commercial games, yet alone a smash hit title, to start a gaming revolution. Until 1972, that is. Here's how it happened. Inspired by the MIT game Space War, two guys, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, decided to create a coin-operated version of the game in 1971. It was called Computer Space and went on to be the first arcade video game as well as the

Starting point is 00:05:39 first commercially available video game. It was a moderate success and was profitable, but the pair thought that they could do better. They immediately started work on another game and decided to found their own company called Atari Incorporated. Initially, this next game was to be a driving game, but Atari's first employee, Alan Alcorn, was given the project of making a simple ping pong game as training. While Alan was working on the training project, Bushnell saw the progress and already thought that the game was pretty fun, so much so that Atari should just actually release it. This training project ping pong game became the first video game smash hit that would go down forever in history.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Its name became Pong. Pong was unleashed in 1972 and it was immensely successful, selling over 8,000 cabinet arcades across America. The secret to Pong's success was the use of a low-cost TV monitor. As an example, a vector monitor in those days cost $15,000 and whereas you could use a TV set for a hundred. And that was kind of one of the metaphors that allowed it to be everywhere instead of a few specialized computer centers.

Starting point is 00:06:52 It was a great social experience that was going on. The number of people that have told me in the last 25 years, that they met their husband or wife playing Pong. It's been in the hundreds. 1972 also saw the release of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. ...to create a closed-circuit electronic playground. Odyssey is tennis. Now video games had come out of the arcades and straight into the home.

Starting point is 00:07:35 The Odyssey was the first video gaming device to be in a television commercial. It sold for about $570 in today's currency and shipped with several games. Even though the Odyssey was extremely primitive, it was still a brand new medium of entertainment for the household. And because of this, it was immensely successful, selling over 100,000 units in 1972 alone. Pong and the Odyssey had kicked off a new era in video gaming. From this time, numerous competitors began to pop up to create a new video game industry. Over the years, the computing power and graphics would improve and despite the video game

Starting point is 00:08:13 crash of 1983, the industry came rebounding with new strength. In the 1990s, storylines would become a bigger part of the gaming experience and soon, vast imaginative worlds became a possibility. The 2000s saw photo-realistic graphics become feasible, and now, in the 2010s, we're on the verge of the next revolutionary stage in gaming. Virtual reality. So as I said at the beginning of this video, and as I said at the beginning of this video, you can now see, we've come a long way.

Starting point is 00:08:41 Alright guys, that's the end of the video, so thanks for watching the whole way through. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up if you liked it, share it with someone who would be interested, and leave a comment stating the first video game that you ever play. Thanks for watching guys, this has been Duggo, you've been watching Cold Fusion, and I'll catch you again soon for the next video. Cheers guys, enjoy yourself and have a good one. Cold Fusion, it's new thinking.

ColdFusion - Early Video Game History (1948 – 1972)

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