Prepare for the greatest story ever told, and we’re not talking about Mass Effect. (Image courtesy of Lorenzo Herrera on Unsplash.com)

The History of Video Games (Part I)

Welcome, friends. 

I’m here, you’re here, we’re all here in this section of this site for one reason.

We love video games.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of! Gaming is a multi-billion-dollar industry[1] that grows in size and influence every year, and the number of people around the world who identify as “gamers” has grown exponentially since the dawn of the hobby[2]. 

For this series, that is exactly what we will be observing. 

Join us as we take a trip back in time to see what a glorious journey the video game industry has taken – from its inception to the incredible gaming experiences we have today, and perhaps even beyond to see what the future could possibly hold. 

So get comfortable, pour yourself some Gamer Supps (not sponsored, yet), and prepare for a history lesson you’ll actually want to remember.

Going Back to the Beginning

This diagram might just look like a bunch of nonsensical numbers and lines, but it’s actually the blueprint for one of the origins of video games. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

To begin our journey, we need to go back. Waaaaay back. Back to a time of War, the Nuclear Family, Leave it to Beaver, and strange Jell-O recipes…

Ok, maybe it wasn’t all great, but at least the 1940s and 50s were filled with researchers and programmers working to create the basis for what would become modern video games. In fact, the experiences these people created would go on to shape the future of entertainment as a whole, and they did it with technology that would be considered primitive by today’s standards. 

We’re talking World War II-era tech.

For instance, the Canadian engineer Josef Kates created something that sounds simple now, but was a revolution in its time: a digital version of tic-tac-toe called Bertie the Brain[3]. When onlookers stepped up to play Bertie the Brain at the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition, they were faced with a 13-foot-tall computer armed with nothing but a grid of lights, a keypad, and the AI that they would play against. 

That’s right, AI has been challenging humanity as long as computers have been around. However, this was not exactly as complex as ChatGPT. Far from it!

Predating that marvel of technology was the Nimatron[4]. This was an electromechanical machine that was designed exclusively to play the mathematical strategy game Nim, which has been entertaining people since at least the 16th century[5]. The Nimatron was created by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation under the direction of the nuclear physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics – Edward Condon – for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. 

Similar to the Bertie the Brain machine, the Nimatron was a massive machine that weighed over a ton and featured a grid of light bulbs that were used to visualize calculations being conducted inside the glowing monolith.

Bertie and Nimatron started us on the path, but they weren’t true video games yet. They were primarily machines built for simulation and calculation – lacking the “video” component of video games.

It wasn’t until 1958 that visuals were implemented, and things started to really heat up.

This is when the American physicist William Higinbotham designed and created a game called Tennis for Two[6], which utilized a Donner Model 30 analog computer to calculate trajectory and wind resistance and an oscilloscope to display a representation of a tennis court viewed from the side. This invention gave us the first “video” game, as it had a proper video display instead of a light bulb grid. 

Well, “proper” by the standards of the time. Oscilloscopes were used for military radar readouts, so they were limited in what they could display. 

While the previous games were built as single-player, “human vs. AI” experiences, Tennis for Two stayed true to its name. It was not just one of the first-ever video games, but also the first sports video game[7] and the first multiplayer video game[8]! 

Hiding a Light Under a Bushnell

This is what a battlestation looked like in the 1960s. (PDP-1 computer on the left, oscilloscope monitor on the right) (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Video games continued to proliferate following the creation of Tennis for Two. 

Just a few years later in 1961, a trio of intrepid MIT and Harvard employees by the names of Steve Russell, Martin Gaetz, and Wayne Wiitanen created a sci-fi dogfighting game called Spacewar! for Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-1 minicomputer[9]. 

Spacewar! was a two-player dogfighting game with a randomly generated starfield for the background, an impressive feat for the time. Because the game put every aspect of the PDP-1 hardware through its paces, it was even used to test systems before they shipped out to buyers.

Spacewar! really started a revolution. Not just because it was wholly impressive for its time, but also because it is largely credited with inspiring programmers to create their own games. Thanks to this development, games like Space Travel, The Sumerian Game, and Hamurabi were created. Although, these and other games created throughout the 1960s were largely passed around to other programmers, as the computer hardware required to play them was much too expensive for regular people[10]. 

That PDP-1 Spacewar! was made for? It went for $120,000. In 1961. By today’s standards, that’s roughly $1.2 MILLION[11]. That was why these games were created and playable only within research institutions and universities. The concept of having easy access to video games seemed like a pipe dream at that point.

Thankfully, all of that changed in the 70s because of one man: Nolan Bushnell.

You see, Nolan Bushnell grew up around games, but not the ones we know now or even the ones that were being created in the 60s. Rather, he was surrounded by amusement park and midway-style games, where players used either skill or luck for a chance to win a prize. This was a common experience for college students working their way through school at amusement parks, as Bushnell did in Farmington, Utah’s Lagoon Amusement Park[12]. 

After graduating from the University of Utah’s College of Engineering in 1964 and having his dreams of being hired by Disney shattered into a million pieces, Bushnell went to work as an electrical engineer for a company called Ampex. This is where he met a friend who would become his partner in making video game history, Ted Dabney. Bushnell and Dabney bonded over dreams of creating pizza shops filled with the sounds of fun, profitable electronic games, and after a visit to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, they embarked on their first venture.

The purpose of that visit to the Stanford lab was to observe Spacewar!, a game Bushnell had been enamored by since its creation. So much so, that he had the brilliant idea to create a coin-operated arcade game based on it. Dabney jumped at the idea, and they founded a company together in 1969 called “Syzygy” with the purpose of making that idea a reality. A few years and some trial and error later, they produced the very first commercial arcade video game in 1971, which they called Computer Space.

Unfortunately, Computer Space was also largely a commercial failure. It made over $1,000,000, but that still fell short of the expectations of the company Bushnell and Dabney partnered with to produce the game cabinets, Nutting Associates. Undeterred by this, they then went to work immediately on their follow-up game. Unfortunately, they also discovered around this time that their company name, Syzygy, was also being used by a roofing company and a hippie candle-making company. Go figure.

So, they incorporated under a new name. One that you might even recognize.

Atari.

The Dawn of the Arcade

They’re a relic of an age long past now, but arcades were the only places you could play the latest games at one point in time. (Image courtesy of David Bayliss on Unsplash.com)

Soon after forming Atari, Bushnell and Dabney hired a design engineer named Alan Alcorn, who was almost immediately put to work on creating an arcade version of the Magnavox Odyssey’s Tennis game. The Magnavox Odyssey was a video game revolution in itself as it was the first home video game console, but the game Alan Alcron created as his first project blew it out of the water, and allowed Atari to build an empire that lasted throughout the 70s and into the 80s.

Pong. He made Pong[13].

Rather than create a straight-up knockoff, Alcorn took the core concept and implemented his own ideas and concepts to make the game irresistible, such as increasing the difficulty by making the ball speed up over time. 

The runaway success of Pong led to other companies also entering the arcade game arena, and by 1974 there were more than fifteen different companies across America and Japan creating arcade video games[14]. Some of these companies are even still in operation, including Sega and Nintendo.

The following years were marked by the release of games like Gun Fight, Breakout, Death Race, and Space Wars, but the Golden Age of arcade gaming was still yet to come. Funny enough, that exciting new era could arguably be traced back to the launch of Bushnell’s “Pizza Arcade”, Pizza Time Theatre, in 1977. If you don’t recognize Pizza Time Theatre, maybe you’ll know it by the name it goes by today: Chuck E. Cheese’s[15].

Throughout the rest of the decade, Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre and arcades everywhere stocked games that defined the generation like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Centipede, Donkey Kong, and more. As you can see, gamers between 1978 and 1981 had it very, very good, and video games would soon enter peoples’ homes from there.

Thanks for reading “Part I” of The History of Video Games here on Peepaboo.co. That only covered roughly forty years of history, and there’s so much more left to go, so be sure to stay tuned for the next part coming soon! 

Until then, Happy Gaming!

References

  1. Turner, A. (2023, April 4). Video Game Industry Revenue & Market Share. Retrieved from https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/video-game-industry-revenue.
  2. Howarth, J. (2023, January 18). How Many Gamers Are There? (New 2023 Statistics). Retrieved from https://explodingtopics.com/blog/number-of-gamers.
  3. Bertie the Brain – Wikipedia. (2014, October). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain.
  4. Nimatron – Wikipedia. (2021, January). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimatron.
  5. Nim – Wikipedia. (2020, September 4). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim.
  6. Tennis for Two – Wikipedia. (2018, October). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two.
  7. Reimer, J. (2005, September 1). The evolution of gaming: computers, consoles, and arcade. Retrieved from https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/10/gaming-evolution/.
  8. Multiplayer video game – Wikipedia. (2021, September 5). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_video_game.
  9. Spacewar! – Wikipedia. (2021, February 3). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!.
  10. Early history of video games – Wikipedia. (2015, November 5). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_video_games.
  11. Spacewar! – Wikipedia. (2021, February 3). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!.
  12. Control, A. (2014, May 4). Nolan Bushnell – Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell.
  13. Control, A. (2008, September 3). Pong – Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong.
  14. History of arcade video games – Wikipedia. (2019, February). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_arcade_video_games.
  15. Chuck E. Cheese – Wikipedia. (1977, April 2). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_E._Cheese.