Читать книгу The Ultimate Guide to Classic Game Consoles - Kevin Baker - Страница 5

As this is a book about classic game consoles, it seems fitting to take a look at what point electronic gaming was born, as well as the factors leading up to making it possible to produce electronic gaming systems as we know them today. So, where did it all begin?

In today’s day and age we are surrounded by advanced 3D gaming systems, tablets, smartphones and other gaming devices. But there was a time when the things that we take for granted were unimaginable. For gaming consoles to get to where they are today they had to build upon previous console designs progressively. After all, everything is an improvement leading to something else. Without the first gaming console we couldn’t have had the second, the third, and so forth.

What’s really interesting about the evolution of electronic gaming is that at the very beginning there was nothing else to base consoles on. There wasn’t anything else to base games on either. There were no improvements to be had, only innovation.

Edsac OXO Emulator Image

In 1952 a developer created the very first digital graphic game ever to run on a computer, OXO. This was the the only game available on the Edsac (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) computer, as this machine mostly did mathematical calculations. OXO is a game known as 'Tic-tac-toe' in the U.S.A. or 'Noughts and Crosses' if you come from the UK. You can download the Edsac emulator online.

It is truly revolutionary what we have been able to achieve in the past half century. The beauty of the evolution of electronic gaming is that we can connect the dots and see how one revolutionary idea gave way to more revolutionary ideas.

Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device

While it is true that the Edsac OXO game was the first computer game to be able to run on a computer, the very first interactive electronic game ever designed was the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. It was created with analog electronics in 1947 and was never shown to the public. This game relied solely on knobs to control the trajectory of a CRT display’s light beam. The gameplay involved the player focusing the light beam onto painted airplanes on the screen. Once the beam was positioned on the airplane, the player would fire at the target by pressing a button. If the light beam was within the known coordinates of the airplane, then the CRT beam would simulate an explosion by defocusing.

The Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device was responsible for sparking the initial interest of game developers. Without this first game having been created no one would have thought to improve upon it.

More About The First Digital Graphical Computer Game - OXO

OXO was a computer game written by Alexander S. Douglas in 1952 for his thesis on human-computer interactions for the University of Cambridge. His game OXO was identical to the paper and pencil game Tic-tac-toe. The only difference was that the game was run completely on a computer and displayed via a 35-15 dot matrix cathode ray tube. Not only did the player interact with the computer but you could also play against the computer’s artificial intelligence.

This game was not played by the general public because the EDSAC computer was only available at Cambridge University's Mathematical Laboratory, where you needed special permissions to even get near it. Calling it a 'computer' would actually be an understatement, as the EDSAC was a mainframe which took up an entire room. Certainly there were more innovations to be had before bringing gaming to the masses.

OXO paved the way for more improvements in electronic gaming technology. William Higinbotham would create a very interesting game four years later…

Tennis For Two

Four years after EDSAC's OXO game was developed came the invention of yet another game, Tennis For Two. This game was developed by American physicist William Higinbotham on a Donner Model 30 analog computer. It is often debated whether OXO or Tennis For Two was the first graphical video game. You can argue that OXO only used static graphics to represent the classic Tic-tac-toe game via a CTR display, while Tennis For Two displayed a ball’s trajectory via video. If you want to get technical about it then Tennis For Two was the first electronic “video” game because the ball was animated.

The reason why William Higinbotham created Tennis For Two is even more interesting than the game itself. He created it to provide bored visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory with something entertaining to do.

After realizing that Brookhaven’s computers could calculate ballistic missile trajectories, Higinbotham used this feature to form his game. Instead of calculating a missile trajectory, Higinbotham used the computers to display the path of a ball on a tennis court instead. By using an oscilloscope he was also able to display the moving ball with a realistic velocity.

When the ball hit the ground its path would be reversed. If the ball hit the net its velocity would slow down and bounce back. Players could control the ball using an analog aluminium controller. Clicking a button would hit the ball (which would produce a sound) and using the knob would control the ball’s angle.

Although the device was designed in about two hours, it took three weeks to assemble with the help of Robert V. Dvorak. The game’s circuitry took up about the space of a microwave oven.

It’s important not to confuse Tennis For Two with the game Pong that was created in 1972. Tennis For Two showed only the side of the tennis court, while Pong showed a top down view as well as the player paddles.

Tennis For Two was first shown on October the 18th, 1958 where hundreds of visitors lined up to play. An upgraded version of the game was created in the following year because the game had been such a hit.

Tennis For Two is arguably one of the most important games ever created. Unlike OXO, which was created for a thesis, Tennis For Two was created for pure entertainment. Tennis For Two showed the world that even a physicist could use a computer to create a fun game that served no educational purpose. This game would go on to inspire people all over the world to experiment with game development. A handful of these people would just happen to be graduate students at MIT…

1959-1961

During this time period a few more video games were created on a TX-0 machine at MIT. One of these games was called Mouse in the Maze. It allowed players to place walls and cheese in a virtual room by using a light pen. A light pen was an ancient peripheral that would allow users to interact with computer displays like you would with a pen on paper. Once the Maze was complete the mouse would be released and you could watch it find the cheese.

Two more games that were designed at MIT on the TX-0 were HAX and Tic-tac-toe. HAX allowed players to adjust two switches on the console to create different graphics and sounds.

Tic-tac-toe let players play Tic-tac-toe against the computer by using a light pen.

Although the games created at MIT from 1959-1961 weren’t that revolutionary, they inspired hobbyists to continue developing interesting games.

Spacewar! CC Image – Wikipedia - Joi Ito

Spacewar!

'Spacewar!' is a two-player game created by Steve Russell and Wayne Wiitanen from the fictitious 'Hingham Institute'. The game was programmed on the PDP-1 and allowed two players to fight against each other.

Each player controlled their own spacecraft capable of firing missiles. The point of the game was to destroy the other ship whist avoiding getting sucked into the centre star. Players could also enter hyperspace in an emergency to be teleported to a random location on the screen, but would explode if used too often.

'Spacewar!' took approximately 200 hours of work to complete. Other features were later added on by Dan Edwards, Peter Samson, and Graetz.

The game was later distributed with new DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) computers.

With an entire generation of MIT students and computer enthusiasts having had their appetite wetted by early attempts at game development and the popularity of 'Spacewar!', it was only so long before the gaming industry would explode. It was also time for the MIT students to take what they had learnt out of the campuses and into the real world.

1961

John Burgeson wrote the first computer baseball simulation game at the IBM facility in Akron, Ohio.

1966

Ralph Baer and co-worker Bill Harrison created the first video game 'Chase' to display on a standard television set. They also created the world’s first video gaming peripheral, the light gun. After months of prototyping, Bill Rusch, Baer and Harrison, presented table tennis and target shooting games to Sander’s R & D in 1967. Then, two years later, Sanders was marketing the world’s first home video game console to manufacturers.

1969

AT&T programmer Ken Thompson wrote Space Travel where a player could land a spacecraft on moving planets of the solar system. After AT&T stopped funding the Multics project which Space Travel ran on, Thompson ported the game to Fortran. The new game ran on the GECOS operating system of General Electric’s GE635 mainframe computer. But Thompson was met by another problem… running the game on the GE635 mainframe cost about $75 an hour. So he started looking for a better computer alternative. That alternative turned out to be a PDP-7.

Soon Thompson together with computer scientist Dennis Ritchie were porting Space Travel to PDP-7’s assembly language. While they were learning how to develop software for the PDP-7, the development of the Unix operating system took place as well. Thus Space Travel has been called the first Unix application.

Galaxy Game CC Image – Wikipedia – Tom Purves

Galaxy Game

Galaxy Game was the first coin-operated video game. It was based on 'Spacewar!' and was programmed by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck. Galaxy Game was installed at Stanford University in September, 1971. The hardware cost around $20,000 (or the equivalent of about $114,774.03 today). A game cost 10 cents but you could also play three games for 25 cents. Although the game was very popular on campus it was removed in May 1979 because of a failing display processor.

Computer Space

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney released a coin-operated arcade version of 'Spacewar!' two months after the release of Galaxy Game. Their version was called Computer Space and it was the world’s first commercially sold coin-operated video game. In fact, Computer Space came out 6 months before the Magnavox Odyssey, the very first 1^st generation gaming console.

Computer Space got Nolan Bushnell and Ted Badney ready to create Atari, Inc. in 1972. Without them having had the experience of commercially marketing their first game, they wouldn’t have had the knowledge or capital to start their full-fledged gaming company. Atari released their first game, Pong, in 1972 which would forever change the gaming scene. Pong was initially a training exercise given to Allan Alcorn which was assigned to him by Nolan Bushnell. Atari were so surprised by the quality of his work that they decided to manufacture the game. The idea was based on a Magnavox Odyssey game of electronic ping-pong, which shortly after resulted in a lawsuit against Atari by Magnavox which was settled in court.

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney acted as a gateway in gaming history. They created the first commercially sold game, Computer Space, they created their own game company, Atari, and they created the hit game Pong, which then inspired the rest of the world to be just as revolutionary in game development as they had been.

Gateway To A New Era

This gateway finalised the first stages of gaming which were full of hobbyists, professors and students trying their hands at creating electronic gaming innovations. Then with the passing of the early stages of gaming we saw the emergence of the 1^st generation gaming consoles, which were commercially sold and developed at a corporate level.

For the first time ever, video games entered the consumer market at numbers never before seen. The entire ball game changed and that is what takes us into the 1^st generation. The beauty of it is that each generation refines itself more and more, always improving, but always leaving room for further improvements to be made in the following generation. This is the process that refined gaming consoles to the place they are at today. Gaming consoles are a long way from perfect though and it’s as interesting to watch them progress today as it is to trace their histories back to their predecessors.