Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A History of Computer Games

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Video games have become almost ubiquitous in today’s world. Most of us probably have some sort of computer game on our smartphone, as well as games on our desktop computer, and you might even have one or more dedicated computing devices dedicated solely to playing games. The massive $100 billion dollar computer game industry had very humble beginnings, however. Learn more about the history of computer games on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Video games have become ubiquitous in today's world. Most of us probably have some sort of computer game in our smartphone, as well as games on our desktop computer, and you might even have one or more dedicated computing devices dedicated solely to playing games hooked up to your television. The massive $100 billion computer game industry had very humble beginnings, however. Learn more about the history of computer games and how it has closely followed the computer industry itself

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Expedia's OutTravel the System podcast. I know you love to hear the story behind the story.

So let me tell you why I think you might want to listen to the Expedia podcast, Out Travel the System. This season alone, the show talks to someone on a mission to visit every country in the world. In case you're wondering, the tally stands at 194 out of 197 countries. There's the man who's visited and stayed at literally thousands of hotels, who shares some of his favorite unique accommodations and experiences. Or how about the woman who has reached some deep philosophical conclusions about travel and privilege, in no small part because of the pandemic. Get all of this and more when you tune into the show,

including larger insights about the future of travel, as well as tips and tricks to maximize your savings for your next trip, whenever you feel ready to head out into the world again. You can find OutTravel the System on your podcast platform of choice. When I sat down to prepare this episode, I had a decision to make. Should I title the episode The History of Computer Games or the history of video games? I ended up going with computer games for one simple reason. The first computer-based games were created before there was a video component.

In fact, one of the surprising things I discovered in the process of researching this episode was just how quickly programmers began creating games, even in the earliest days of electronic computing. The very first computers were created before the integrated circuit was developed, and in fact even before the transistor. They were huge vacuum tube behemoths that took up entire buildings and used an incredible amount of electricity. Probably the first game, which was run on an electronic computer, was Bertie the Brain.

Bertie the Brain was a 13-foot-tall computer that had one and only one purpose, playing Tic-Tac-Tow. It was built by Yosef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The display was a 3-3 grid of lights. The computer would play against people, and it had different difficulty settings. After the two-week event, the computer was disassembled. The purpose of the game was to demonstrate a new type of vacuum tube. In 1951, the Ferranti Corporation in the United Kingdom created Nimrod,

which was a specially designed computer to play the game Nim. Nim is a very simple, ancient game where you pick up objects from different piles. It too was built for a festival, the festival of Britain. The interface was just a bank of lights that would turn on and off. There were a couple of these very simple games which were created in the 1950s, but they all shared something in common. They had a custom-built interface, they played a very simple game, and they couldn't be played anywhere other than on that particular computer.

Moreover, computer time back then was incredibly expensive. There were only a handful of computers in the entire world, and they had more important things to do other than play games. The next big breakthrough occurred in 1958, with the creation of the game Tennis for Two by William Higginbotton at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Tennis for Two was an innovative game in two very important ways. First, the display was on an oscilloscope, which had a cathode ray tube, the same as used to be used on television sets.

The game consisted of a straight horizontal line in the bottom, which was the tennis court, and a vertical line in the middle, which was the net. You just hit the pixels over the line as you would in tennis. This could be considered the first real video game, as it was sort of on a video monitor. The other big advancement was that it used custom-built controllers, which was created by Higginbotham, a technician named Robert Devorak. The game was only around for three days, again, as a demonstration before it was disassembled. Higginbotham actually testified in a patent trial in the 1970s

to show that there was prior art for video games. Tennis for Two was crude and simple, but most people would recognize it as a video game. There was a screen, there were controllers, and you played against another person. However, it was still tied to a single computer. The next big advance occurred in 1962, with the creation of Space War,

which was created by the computer scientist Stephen Russell at MIT. The game was designed for the Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP1 minicputer. The PDP1 was a general-purpose computer that cost under $25,000. Unlike many of the previous computers, this was a computer that could be found in many different locations around the world. Space War was the first video game that was designed to run as software on any PDP1. It wasn't hardwired to a single device. The game was a dogfight between two spaceships, which were really just cursors on the screen,

which orbited around a star with gravity. There was ammunition and fuel for the spaceships. What made this different was that the game was passed around to different institutions with PDP1 installations, and other programmers contributed to developing the game. Today, we would call it open source, but back then no one really thought to think of computer code as property. The machines were the expensive part, not the software. The game was extremely popular amongst the small community that used computers at the time. It was easily the most played computer game in history up until that point,

just because it was played in more than one location, and it wasn't created as just a hardware demonstration. Other computer games were designed for mainframes in the 1960s, but there was still severe limitations with the cost of computers and programming. However, things were changing rapidly. Computers were getting cheaper, more powerful. Computing programming languages were being developed, as well as the first Unix operating systems. In the 1970s, mini-computers gave way to micro-computers.

Computer enthusiasts could buy parts and build their own computers at home. These computers also use standard television sets as a display. Many of these early home computer games were text-based adventure games like Star Trek, Hunt the Wampas, and Colossil Cave Adventure. In 1971, the first computer arcade game was released. It was called Computer Space, and it was based on the 1962 game Space War. It was the first commercial video game of any type. 1972 saw the release of the first dedicated video game console which could be played on a television set. The Magnavox Odyssey.

The Odyssey sold for $995 in 1972 and came with two controllers and a light gunned. The creator of the Magnovox Odyssey was Ralph Baer, who was considered the father of the video game industry. Before the Odyssey, there were games, but this was the first device to be sold to consumers as a game with the intent of making a business off of it. 1972 also saw the creation of the Atari Corporation by one of the developers of Computer Space Nolan Bushnell. They released Atari's first cabinet arcade game, Pong, which was the really first popular arcade game. Pong was a descendant of the original Tennis for Two from 1958. Pong was actually the first computer game I remember playing. in the 1970s. My dad purchased a Radio Shack knockoff which hooked up to the TV set,

and it played four different games you selected by turning a knob, and it cost $299. 1977 and 1978 saw a real explosion of video games into the popular culture. In 1977, Atari released the Atari 2,600 console, which was the first and really only console that I have personally ever owned. The 2600 wasn't the first device to sell games separately, as read-only memory or ROM cartridges, but it did popularize the practice of selling games individually. 1978 saw the release of Space Invaders, which quickly became the most popular arcade video game in history.

In 1980, Atari got the license to release Space Invaders for the Atari 2,600, and sales of the device quadrupled within a single year. The early 80s saw an explosion in arcade culture. That's where I went to hang out as a kid. computer games had found a spot in the center of popular culture as evidenced by the 1982 movie Tron. Around this time, you also saw the sale of mass market home computers, machines like the Apple 2 and the Commodore 64. One of my friends had a Commodore VIC-20, and I can still remember buying video game magazines, where they would have all the code for the game published in the magazine.

We would have to type the code into the computer exactly as it was shown, and if we screwed up a single character, the game wouldn't work. The other big advance in gaming in the 1980s was the first network games. Dial-up bulletin boards were increasingly popular, and while incredibly slow, they did work well enough for text-based adventure games. The late 80s also saw a shift in the video game industry from the United States to Japan. Companies like Nintendo and Sega, which popularized 16-bit computer consoles in the late 80s and early 90s, became the dominant players in the industry. Obviously, the video game industry kept getting bigger into the 90s and beyond, and most of you

were probably around for that. Consoles kept getting better, the internet radically changed how we play games with each other, and smartphones allowed people to spend ridiculous amounts of money on games like Farmville. However, there's one last game that I do want to mention, because its legacy is still with us today in a very literal sense. The game is called Doom. Doom was the game that popularized the genre of first-person shooters. Released in 1993, it was originally released as shareware. I remember seeing CDs of Dune for sale at the checkout register at computer stores. When it was released, Doom was a cutting-edge game for serious desktop computers. Since then, however, a small community of people have taken it upon themselves to install the

original Doom on pretty much any and every device you can think of. It's been installed on digital cameras, industrial equipment, printers with very small screens, an oscilloscope, a single key of a programmable keyboard, smart watches, ATM machines, stadium jumbotrons, and even a digital home pregnancy test. FYI, the pregnancy test had a 128 by 32 pixel monochrome display. Now well into the 21st century, the video game industry just keeps getting bigger and better.

Tools like the Unreal Engine are allowing developers to create games that are now almost lifelike. All of this creativity and technology owes its existence to a 13-foot-high Canadian computer that could play Tic-Tac-Tow. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit.

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