Dan Snow's History Hit - History of Gaming

Episode Date: January 2, 2021

Tristan Donovan joined me on the podcast to talk about the history of gaming.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got the history of gaming on the

show. Gaming's a thing. Gaming's a thing now. For those of you who are here for Henry VIII and the defeat of the Roman legions in the Teutoburg forest, gaming has got as much of an illustrious history as anything else on this podcast. Gaming is a global phenomenon. Gaming is what we're all going to be doing in the future. It's what all our kids and grandkids are going to be doing, probably more than any other form of entertainment that we know of today. And Tristan Donovan is the man to guide us through this. We need to understand what gaming is, where it came from. He is an author and journalist. He's written a couple of books on the history of video games. It was a bit of a nostalgic trip for me,

this, because I remember, I'm not a gamer anymore, but I kind of realised that I was. I was an early adopter. I was a 5, 6, 7 year old playing the earliest video games and I should have kept going, I could have made something of my life I had a head start it's like I dropped out around the year 2000 when I became addicted to civilisation and almost died of starvation and dehydrated surrounded by my own uneaten food

waste and unanswered letters. So that was a wake-up call, and I stopped gaming. But I'm regretting it now, because this is a fascinating conversation. If you want some digital entertainment that's going to blow your mind, head over to historyhit.tv. It's a digital history channel. It's like Netflix, but for history, available in all territories in the world. I just received a tweet from someone in an island in the Indian Ocean. They're watching History Hit TV. No problem at all. Smooth as anything. No buffering. So there you go. What a wonder the modern world is. If you head over to historyhit.tv, if you use the code January, you get our extraordinary January sale. And you get a

month for free, and then your next three months for 80% off. Frankly, it's craziness offer, and I look forward to being over. But take advantage while you can. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy Tristan Donovan. Tristan, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me.

How old is gaming? It dates all the way back to the 40s. The very earliest things you could call video games start in the late 40s when people first invented computers and people like Alan Turing are inventing chess games to play on them for artificial intelligence research. Wow, so before the personal computer there were games? Yeah yeah games existed long before personal computers so the first one that you could really call a video

game in the sense we know it now came in 1962 on MIT they built this game called Space War a little kind of shoot them up kind of game and that was built on a huge kind of one of these giant computers that filled up an entire room at a university really and so the first game was a shoot space war i mean that had does that tells you a lot about where the direction the industry would go in doesn't it isn't that amazing yeah i mean it had everything you could think of that would find sort of games in the early 80s when they came along it was like two sort of rocket ships flying around the galaxy shooting each other and it's a template that's lasted exactly okay so you've got kind of artificial intelligence demonstrations cheering playing all that kind of stuff but and you've got space war in the early 60s what about an industry when is it a consumer-led

marketable proposition would you say right So this starts with two people, Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell. So we'll start with Nolan Bushnell. So he was into starting a business around arcade machines. And he played Space War at Stanford University. And he thought, if I could get that in an arcade, that would be fantastic. But of course, computers were enormous and you couldn't really fit them into an arcade and they cost a fortune. So he basically worked out how to build a kind of replica of a computer game out of just old circuits. So it was like resistors and transistors and basic electronics that you could buy in those days at somewhere like Tandy or Maplins and basically built a machine that made a game a little bit like Space War and put it in an arcade. He was the sort of first person to bring video games to the wider world. Then at the same

time a guy called Ralph Baer was working for a military research company in New England, and he came up with the idea of we should make a game machine so people can do something with their TVs other than watch TV. So he built this little kind of machine that you plug into your TV set, and it played a little kind of bat and ball game where you kind of knocked the ball from one end of the screen to the other so it took years for him to get someone to make this game a tv set manufacturer called Magnavox released it but it wasn't very popular but then and neither was Nolan Bushnell's game Computer Space but then Nolan Bushnell noticed Ralph Baer's console and thought that kind of basic bat and ball game would make kind of an okay arcade game let's give that a try and that became Pong and that's when video games

suddenly went massive suddenly spread all across the world everyone wanted to play Pong so these that little game of kind of two bats at either end of the screen bouncing things back and forth. But Pong was made by Atari, right? Yeah, so Nolan had founded Atari at that point. Okay, and so Atari becomes what I always thought was the first name in gaming. Yeah, no, it was the second, well, third really. So you had Nutting Associates, which published Nolan Bushnell's first game, Computer Space, and brought that into the arcades. And then Magnavox, which was an American TV manufacturer,

brought out the first game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. And then Nolan left to found Atari and pretty much started the industry. And Atari did pretty much define the industry from that point on for a good 10 years. Wow and so the dream of gaming was established at that point. Pong. Everyone in the world was playing Pong. Yeah and now it seems ridiculous because it was literally like six years of people played Pong or things that were variations of Pong for a good six years. That's all there was you know. It's like more arcade machines machines maybe it's a four-player game of pong maybe it's pong but it's vertical oh it's pong for your home um it's pong for your home in color i mean this went on for years and there wasn't really that much else happening in

games people love pong this was 1972 pong came out in the arcades. And you were still getting Pong machines by 1980. So they were still a viable business then. So, I mean, this was going on for pretty much the whole 70s. When do we see the next generation after Pong? Well, that really begins when people start getting microprocessors. So before then, games are made just out of basic hardware. Suddenly you get cheap microprocessors and games become like computers. So is it fair to say Pong is in some ways not a computer game?

Pong is not a computer game at all. There's no computer in it. So it's one of those weird things that kind of computer games didn't really exist until the late 70s when the first home computers came along. The tech is key here. The microprocessor comes in the late 70s. Yeah. So what that change meant is in the Pong era, you had to basically solder and wire together a game. That's how you made a game. You made it out of electronic circuits and you had to build that. Microprocessors meant you didn't have to do that you wrote it in computer code and that suddenly sort of opened up the opportunity to do all kinds of things these circuits were getting really complicated you know it's really hard to get do much beyond pong so you get microprocessors and then you start

getting things like space invaders and pac-man and all those kind of early 80s games that really kind of take games from being the simple pong kind of pastime thing to something much more exciting so you know space invaders it's like suddenly they're kind of armies of aliens coming down the screen shooting at you and it's pac-man you've got these kind of cute characters for the first time and it really kind of explodes off the back of that. I remember both of those so well. And just the Space Invaders, as he went on,

they just got more scary and sort of bigger and had more jagged shapes. It was so exciting. Yeah, and sound. I mean, there wasn't much sound in the early Pong days. I mean, it was just one tone. But Space Invaders, it had that kind of death march of doom, doom, doom, doom, doom. And it would speed up as the game carried on. It was almost like Jaws. And am I right in thinking that I had a tape? Now, young listeners might add an audio tape with a ribbon on it. Younger

listeners will have to go and watch an 80s film to understand what that is but is that how I loaded up my games yeah that was how it was so in late 70s early 80s and for Europe most of the 80s games came on cassette tapes and you would load in the cassette and it would spend five minutes kind of transferring what is now just the same amount of memory as an email and sometimes it would just crash at the end i mean it was pretty wonky the technology then oh yeah i remember the i remember that getting caught up shouting for my mum and dad from the attic and they'd have to come up and kind of they were presented with this tape that all the ribbon had just got absolutely deeply entrenched into the little turner bits and they'd have to sort of tear the whole thing out with me complaining all the time oh gaming in the 80s kids it was wild it was wild in fact it was so wild it kind of put me off

weirdly because i was quite a gamer when i was a kid and i'm not a gamer now i think i think of my careers that weren't really around but then everything changes right because i remember that from that year on there was a different kind of home computer like the the kind of the hockey stick phase had begun at that point right yeah so essentially it come established and you had consoles on one hand which were kind of easy plug and play you know pure entertainment get a cartridge put it in and you get pac-man at home or whatever but then you had computers at the other side. And essentially both of these became fixtures of people's homes. So there was a kind of market that just kept on growing. And the thing about computers was anyone could program on them.

A games console you can't make a game for unless you're a professional. But home computers, anyone could. So this is where you get things like in Britain and France, you just had these kind of amateur programmers often teenagers just going oh well I've got a computer I'm going to write a game and I'm going to sell it mail order or I'm going to phone this game publisher and they're going to sell it and that's where the industry really sort of starts to come through and kind of grow into what it is today. What are the big moments then on this march from the 80s to the

present? The first big thing is 1983, Atari pretty much goes bust. So the early 80s had this huge boom, particularly in North America, of video game sales. And at the time, it was treated like the toy industry. And basically, everyone just flooded into the market too many games most of them fairly rubbish and suddenly the sales all stopped and everyone went bust so it seemed like consoles were dead but then nintendo um in japan decides well kids still like games we're going to bring out games console everyone thought they were completely insane but what nintendo did that was different is they had this iron grip of control over what games would be published on their system the nes and that redefined kind of what console gaming was it kind of meant they could

control the quality so you didn't have kind of everyone just turning up going oh well i've kind of worked out how to do it i'll make this awful kind of game and shove it out there and i'll make a quick buck so nintendo came along with that and super mario bros and basically revived the entire game industry off the back of that so this kind of transfers everything towards everyone's looking at japan as the leader of the industry and also consoles are kind of where the big stuff happens you're listening to the history hit podcast we're talking the history of gaming with Tristan Donovan more coming up after this land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the

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a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. history hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians.

Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. When did people take gaming seriously as a kind of cultural phenomenon? At that time, it was definitely still kind of boys' toys kind of thing. And I think that really changes when Sony come into the market with the playstation and games go to 3d so what sony did is we're going to market this not as a kid's toy but as a consumer product a bit like a hi-fi or a video player we're going to market at young adults we're going to accept there being more mature themes so you get games like Grand Theft Auto which would have been unthinkable in the heyday of Nintendo in the 80s where it was like this is for kids you wouldn't

put out a game like Grand Theft Auto where people are going around robbing each other you also start getting things like Tomb Raider which you know 25 years later doesn't look as revolutionary and kind of looks a bit sexist but at the time just having a female lead character was a bold move for a game and so games sort of finally went out this kind of darkened kids bedroom kind of culture into the mainstream of society with things like fifa and grand theft auto and tomb raider it became cool almost to play video games. When do we see Hollywood waking up to the idea there might be money in games? I'm trying to think, what was the first big tie-in?

Would it be Sonic or something or Tomb Raider? What was it? Hollywood had always been paying attention, but the games industry had this kind of little brother kind of syndrome. So from the 90s till pretty much the end of the 2000s it it was always looking at Hollywood it's like oh one day we're gonna make games as big as what Hollywood makes and oh we like our games to be cinematic and we'll have these great stories and we'll show Hollywood

how it's done and kind of Hollywood was like well know, you're kind of geeks programming games. You know, what do you know? So there was always this kind of weird tension of kind of Hollywood's the kind of destination that games were trying to get to for a good 20 years. And I think that's changed now. I think the games industry kind of got over its inferiority complex and decided, actually, we're making more money than film. Why are we trying to be like Hollywood? We're bigger than Hollywood. We don't need to do that. We don't need to try and make games that are movies. We can just make games because they're doing well enough anyway. As a Brit, we've raced past the story of Sinclair, which I feel the rest of the world needs to know about. Early 80s, there's no PCs. Every computer format is different. And pretty much every country was

getting their own kind of version of a PC. And in the UK, we had Clive Sinclair, kind of inventor of, you know, kind of cutting edge, kind of wonky technology, but also very cheap technology. cutting edge kind of wonky technology but also very cheap technology so he came out with zx81 and the zx spectrum computers and these were the cheapest computers in in the world for anyone to buy i mean at time it computers were kind of several hundred pounds this was kind of a 99 pound computer so obviously it sold really really well and that kind of created a world where British game industry could grow up in and start making games like Jet Set Willy and Nightlaw and things like that which were really big in the 80s and part of the reason that worked is because not many other countries were playing the ZX Spectrum it was big in Spain and some other

parts of Europe but largely it was a British thing. And so, you know, American companies weren't making games for it. You won't have to worry about competition from Japan. So the British industry kind of had a bit of protection by being part of this kind of, hey, where are the people using ZX Spectrums and no one else is? I remember the ZX Spectrum and yeah, I'm not, did the Brits have much to be proud of there? Yeah, I think in terms of the cost, you know, it was a

radical breakthrough. The keyboard was awful. If you had the same colours together, I mean, it looked terrible. But you know, the programmers squeezed some great games out of it and you know it fostered an entire British game industry and British game industry is a major player worldwide

even today and it wouldn't have happened without ZX Spectrum. What happened to our mighty the mighty Spectrum and the Sinclair Empire? Yes well Clive Sinc wanted, he was never very into games and he wanted to go on and build and basically he did these things and they were expensive and they failed I mean he became a laughingstock with the Sinclair C5 and Sinclair really kind of just ran out of money the computer wasn't making that much money to save it so um Alan Sugar's Amstrad came in and bought Sinclair and basically continued it for a few years. But then Amstrad decided it was going to make PCs and abandoned the computer market. So it was kind of a sad end to the Clive Sinclair story.

Who starts making the waves in that decade, you know, 20 years ago? OK, it's South Korea is the country i'd point to so south korea is an interesting one it kind of late 90s it's got no history in video games whatsoever it's barely got game industry no one really pays any attention to south korea but south korea is kind of slightly unique because it's got a very bitter history with Japan. It's been invaded by Japan. The Japanese imperial empire were awful when they ran it. And so after the Second World War, South Korea bans Japanese cultural imports.

And that means no Japanese games consoles are going into Korea. So Korea becomes a nation of PC gamers. are going into Korea. So Korea becomes a nation of PC gamers. Then after the East Asia kind of financial crisis of the late 90s, the Korean government goes, we've got to find a way to kind of kickstart the economy. We're going to put in the world's fastest broadband connections. So it starts this massive program with super fast broadband, fastest broadband in the world. starts this massive program with super fast broadband, the fastest broadband in the world. And this kind of creates this culture of,

we're going to play online video games, multiplayer sort of World of Warcraft type games. But these games require subscriptions and subscriptions online require credit cards. No one in South Korea has got credit cards. So they come up with this idea that they sell little items in games. So it might be a hat for your character and you'll pay a small amount of money on your phone for it. And so this creates a kind of new way of doing the games business.

The games are free to play. You don't have to spend anything to play them, but you can buy little extras, whether it's a sword that makes you more powerful or kind of a faster go-kart or whatever it is. And that's where the game maker will make money. So this kind of new way of doing games kind of turns up in South Korea. And since then, it's spread worldwide. It spread first to China and now it's spread pretty much all over the world you know a lot of games now they're free to play and you just play for little you pay money for

little extras we mentioned hollywood now now it seems that the games gaming is almost the big brother to hollywood is it i mean in terms of in terms of what people spend their time doing and money yeah so if i can remember the figures right, I think the film industry is worth about 100 billion, the game industry is about 160 billion. So at this point, kind of, video games are noticeably bigger than film. And I think it was always an odd sort of bedfellows, you know, sort of. The interesting thing about video games is that they're sort of left and right brain together.

You know, they're partly the kind of tech world of Silicon Valley. They're also kind of the entertainment world of Los Angeles. So they've always been in that kind of strange middle place. But essentially, I don't think the video game industry looks to Hollywood anymore. place but essentially i don't think the video game industry looks to hollywood anymore i think it's more now hollywood might be looking to video games for um games it could turn into films i think the kind of balance of power has shifted i have a feeling vr may be having a false dawn again really yeah so i think it's here to, but it's kind of slightly trapped. It's yet to really break through into the mainstream.

So if you think of the PlayStation 4 that had something like 110 million consoles were sold, and it's got VR headset, which is the best-selling VR headset, and that's only sold 5 million. 5 million out of 110 million isn't that great a performance so there's not a huge incentive to make many games just for vr and so and there's there's also problems with people feeling nauseous when using vr that you know they're starting to overcome but it remains a problem that for many people their first taste of VR was like I played this for five minutes and then I felt ill so VR hasn't quite got its legs yet I don't think it's going to disappear like it did at the end of the 90s but I don't think it's going to take over as it might have seemed

it would four years ago. What is it about in the character of modern gaming that shows it's the unique journey that it's been on? I think it's in the way that it's brought people together and changed their relationship with media so you have to think before video games the experience of media was very passive you would be the consumer you were never kind of a participant in what you consumed you could watch tv you could watch a movie you could watch a movie, you could go watch a play, you could listen to the radio, but you can't control that. It's kind of beamed at you. Video games kind of changed that relationship. Now it's a case of, well, actually this game doesn't do anything unless I'm playing it. And it's changed how we think about media. We expect

more control over it so I think you can see that a little bit in how say something like Netflix works certainly how kind of social media works you know there are ideas from games that have kind of seeped into that and kind of how we interact with things because we expect to do something can get that feedback and the video game industry really kind of pioneered that they were the first ones to go you've got a tv but actually we're going to give you proper control over what's happening on the screen and that didn't exist before games so i think that's kind of the role they've played in sort of changing society and it and how it's sort

of wrapped up in it is the golden era still to come in gaming, do you think? I always kind of get worried about golden eras. You know, everyone's got a golden era. It's usually kind of their childhood. So, you know, there are people who talk about the golden era of the early 80s games. There was a golden era around 2010 when digital distribution of games began and it suddenly made it cheaper for sort of three or four person studios

start putting out games without needing a big publisher and a million dollars i think there will be many golden ages to come i think kind of golden age is kind of always very subjective and games are endlessly inventive there are so many different experiences that they offer i mean this is a kind of world that has everything from grand theft auto to farming simulator in it and you know there couldn't be two more different games but you know that they're still under the same hat thank you so much for coming on this podcast you've written you're that you're the like historian of the gaming world so tell me what what's uh what's your latest book latest Latest book is It's All a Game,

A Short History of Board Games. But obviously I've also written about video games. We've replayed A History of Video Games, which first came out in 2010. Very cool. Thank you very much indeed, Tristan, for coming on the podcast. Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that.

It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.