games are awsome
-
El Banana
- Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2002 10:30 pm
- Location: somewhere...
The First Computer Game
The first computers were very big in size, very limited in processing power, had no real-time-graphics and only few people had access to them. In 1961, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) donated their latest computer to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1). It sold for $120,000. Compared to the many computers of its time, the PDP-1 was comparatively modest in size - about as big as a large automobile.
Like most universities, MIT had several campus organizations. One of them was the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). It appealed to students who liked to build systems and see how things worked. TMRC had access to PDP-1 and creating new programs and improving older ones was considered an impressive hack among them. They programmed for the fun of it, not for the money, and program source code was public domain, for anybody to use and improve.
Steve Russell, nicknamed "Slug", was a typical nerd with affection to Science Fiction and a member of TMRC. He decided to make the ultimate hack, an interactive game. It took Russell nearly six months and 200 man-hours to complete the first version of the game, a simple two-player game between rocket ships. Using toggle switches built into the PDP-1, players controlled the speed and direction of both ships and fired torpedoes at each other. Russell called his game, "Spacewar". In true hacker spirits the TMRC revised Spacewar and added several elements to it, including an accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with an accurate gravitational field in the foreground, hyperspace button, unpredictable torpedoes (for more realism) and built remote controllers to replace PDP-1's native controls (the forerunners of joystick). Spacewar was the predecessor of Asteroids (Atari) and Gravitar (Atari).
Although Russell's amazing hack created a sensation throughout MIT, he never made a penny from it. PDP computers cost too much to adapt the game for the consumer market, even as an arcade machine.
The First Video Game
The first video game was created by the engineers at Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire-based defense contractor. Ralph Baer was working Sanders Associates as manager of equipment design division. In August 1966 he came up with an idea building sometimes for $19.95, a game for TV set. He allocated few of his employees, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, to the project. In 1967, Rusch suggested a new game in which a hardwired logic circuit projected a spot flying across the screen. Originally, the object of the game was for players to catch the spot with manually controlled dots. Over time, the players' dots evolved into paddles, and the game became ping pong.
Sanders Associates had a rough time in the late sixties, down-sizing from 11,000 to 4,000 employees. As a military contractor, Sanders couldn't suddenly go into the toy business, so Baer had to find a customer for his invention. Baer tried to sell his invention to many parties, and finally in 1971 he made a deal with Magnavox. The product was called Magnavox Odyssey and it was first products were sold in 1972. Unfortunately Magnavox did a bad job - they over-engineered the machine and upped the price so that the system was sold for $100 and the advertisement campaign was poor. Ralph Baer's dream of $20 dollar game became a fiasco and his name was forgotten by most people.
History of Arcade Games
(based on Videotopia article)
The arcade video games are presented in choronological order. This is by no means a complete list. I have selected the most commercially successful games and games which had some technical innovations or new game idea or some other important reason to deserve to be mentioned here.
Computer Space, Nutting Associates, 1971
Computer Space was the first commercial arcade video game released to the public. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell. It had many technological innovations, but the gameplay was confusing and it didn't become a commercial success. Using the profits from the game Nolan Bushnell left Nutting Associates and formed Atari Inc.
Pong, Atari Inc., 1972
Pong was the first succesful arcade video game. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Alan Alcorn. The game play was extremely simple. It has two players, both which controlled a vertical bar which could bounce back a moving dot which moving between the vertical bars. Nolan placed the first game machine in a local gas station. When he became back the machine ceased to operate which it was full of money. Pong became an instant success and it created the arcade video game industry. Several home versions were also made of the Pong game and it also created the home video game industry as well.
[Pong: The Revolutionary Game]
Tank, Kee Games/Atari Inc., 1974
Tank was the first video game which used ROM chips to store graphic data. It had on-screen characters that actually looked like recognizable objects. Before that video games used simple block graphics like in Pong, or collections of dots as in Computer Space.
Gunfight, Taito/Midway, 1975
Gunfight was a two-player game in style of Western movies. It was the first Japanese title to be licensed for release in America. Midway redesigned it to allow more varied game play. The redesigned version was the first video arcade game to utilize a microprocessor.
Night Driver, Atari Inc., 1976
Night Driver was the first racing game with "first person" perspective, showing the road as if actually seen from the car. Before Night Driver there had been many racing games with bird perspective (seen from above), e.g. the popular Atari game called "Sprint 2" from 1976. The night theme was chosen to hide the limitation of the hardware to create more complicated images. For many years, most 3D games built on the basic concept of Night Driver, using computer hardware to "scale" flat images called "sprites" in order to simulate movement in the 3D.
Breakout, Atari Inc., 1976
Breakout was designed by Atari's fortieth employee Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak. A year later these two persons founded Apple Computer.
Space Invaders, Taito/Bally/Midway, 1978
Space Invaders was the first blockbuster videogame. It brought the video games out of arcades and bars into restaurants, corner stores an brought video games into the public conciousness. It was translated to Atari 2600 video home game system and the home versio was also a huge commercial hit.
[Space Invaders Manual]
Football, Atari Inc., 1978
Football was the first true video sports game. It was created by Dave Stubben. Its development originally began as a game called "X's and O's" by Steve Bristow in late 1973. The project was shelved for years until the Atari figured out a way to break out from the limits of the single-screen game displays of the time. Football introduced "scrolling" video game displays to the world, allowing games to take place on playfields larger than the monitor on which they were displayed. Later-on Atari has made a lot of money for its patent for scrolling video game displays that rose from Football. Football was also the first game to feature the track ball.
Asteroids, Atari Inc., 1979
Asteroids was Atari's answer to Space Invaders. The game was designed by Ed Logg and it utilized a monochrome vector graphics display, which was capable of fast moving objects made of very sharp lines (compared to crude pixel graphics of its time). Combined with great game play it became the biggest selling of game of its time.
Asteroids and Lunar Lander (Atari, 1980) were the predecessors Gravitar (Atari) and many modern rotating ship shoot'em'up games e.g. Xpilot.
Warrior, Vectorbeam/Cinematronics, 1979.
Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting game. It was a two-player overhead sword-fighting contest. It had a brillian vector graphics display for its time, but unfortunately it was less reliable than the Atari one. It was a very rare game.
Battlezone, Atari Inc., 1980
Battlezone was the the first video game to feature truly interactive 3-D environment. It had 2-color vector display. The United States Armed Forces were so impressed by the game that they commissioned Atari to build specially modified and upgraded versions for use in tank training.
Defender, Williams Electronics, 1980
Defender was designed by Eugene Jarvis. It was the first video game to feature artificial "world" in which game events could occur outside on-screen view presented to the player.
[Defender Information]
Pac-Man, Bally/Midway, 1980
Pac-Man designed by Toru Iwatani and it was licensed from Namco. It was based on an ancient Japanese folk-tale. The idea of the game was to control the pac-man character which was moving inside a maze eating dots and to avoid ghosts which tried to kill pac-man. The was a huge hit around the world. It appeared in magazines covers, spawned a cartoon and hit song.
Pac-Man has spawned more sequels than perhaps any other video game: Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Mr & Mrs. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Professor Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac- Attack, Pac-Man 2, Pac-In-Time, Pac-Man VR, Pac-Man Ghost Zone...
[First Church of Pac-Man]
Donkey Kong, Nintendo Ltd., 1981
Donkey Kong was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It used the same hardware as an older video game called 'Radarscope'. The idea of the game was to control a jumpman character which tried to rescue a girl from a giant ape. Later-on the jumpman was named Mario, the most famous and succesful game-character ever invented.
Centipede, Atari Inc., 1981
Centipede was designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey. It was the first arcade game to be co-designed by a woman. Its colorful graphics and good game play made Centipede the first video game to be more popular with women than with men.
Tempest, Atari Inc., 1981
Tempest was designed by Dave Theurer. It was the first Atari game to utilize a multicolor vector display. It had beautiful 3D wireframe graphics and it became an instant hit.
[Tempest Operation Information] [Tempest 2000]
Pole Position, Namco/Atari, 1982
Pole Position started the trend for foto-realistics graphics in video games. It was a driving game with persceptive from the car view point, just like Night Driver. In addition to great graphics, it had great game play and it was a huge success, dominated game charts for almost about 2 years. Modern driving games are still more or less based on Pole Position, only graphics have improved.
Robotron: 2084, Williams Electronics, 1982
Robotron was designed by the same people who created Defender. It had excellent gameplay and two joysticks were used for input.
[Robotron page]
Tron, Bally/Midway, 1982
Tron was designed in conjunction with the Disney's film of the same name. The game became an important part of the movie. Tron video game produced more profit than the movie.
[Tron Manual]
Zaxxon, Sega Ltd., 1982
Zaxxon introduced an 3D-lookalike isometric perspective to video games. It had brilliant graphics for its time and it became a big hit.
Star Wars, Atari Inc., 1983.
Star Wars was based on the Star Wars movie by George Lucas. It was designed by Mike Hally and it was programmed and developed by Greg Rivera, Norm Avellar, Eric Durfey, Jed Margolin and Earl Vickers. It was great multi-color vector graphics, 12 channel music and sound effects with speech. In 1985 released a sequel for the game, called The Empire Strikes Back.
Star Wars is the most successful movie of all time and more games have been made of it than any other movie.
[Star Wars: The New Republic]
Dragon's Lair, Starcom/Cinematronics, 1983
Dragon's Lair was created by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth. It was an interactive animated film and it was the first video games utilize laserdisc. Its graphics were much better than any of games of its time - of movie quality - and it had great stereo sound, but the gameplay wasn't good (player had only few choices to select from). Its incredible graphics created a huge media hype. Journalists predicted that laser video games would the soon dominate video games. But laserdisc players were very expensive in that time and laservideo games machines were very unreliable.
In 1984 Magicom/Cinematronics released another laser disc animation-movie-game, called Space Ace which was designed by the same team. The success of laser video games was short and it started to fade in the middle of 1984. About a decade later interactive movie type games re-apperad in CD-ROM format for home computers and are now one of the most popular PC game genres.
[picture of Dragon's Lair arcade game] [screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [yet another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [The Dragon's Lair Project]
I, Robot, Atari Inc., 1984
I, Robot was the first game to feature 3-D polygon graphics. Only a thousand I, Robots were ever produced.
Xevious, Namco/Atari Inc., 1985
Xevious had scrolling terrain background with both ground and air targets. Xevious became the basis of new generation of scrolling shoot'em'up games.
[Xevious Emulator Page (well worth to check!)]
Gauntlet, Atari Games, 1985
Gauntlet was designed by Ed Logg. It had good graphics and great game-play with up to 4 simultaneous players.
[Gauntlet I/II Hackers Page]
Space Harrier, Sega, 1986
Space Harrier had fast scaling sprite based 3D graphics with stereo diginal sound. It marked the beginning of transformation of established genres toward three-dimensionality and more high-powered arcade hardware.
The game was designed by Sega's legendary game designer Yu Suzuki, who is also responsible for Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Hang-On and Shen-Mue.
Street Fighter II, Capcom, 1991
Cinematronics Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting video game and Data East's Karate Champ (1984) had already introduced the "side view" perspective, the genre of fighting game practically didn't exist until Capcom released Street Fighter II. It had many truly different charachters to choose from and good game play. SFII started the new "golden age" of arcades. SFII was also converted to many home systems and the Super Nintendo version alone sold more than 15 million copies.
The success of SFII procudes many competitors e.g. the Mortal Kombat, Killing Instinct and Virtua Fighter series. SFII has numerous sequels and even a movie was made out of it. Fighting games started the new golden age of arcade games.
Virtua Racing, Sega, 1992
Virtua Racing started the new age of fast polygon racing games and high-powered multi-player simulators. Virtua Racing had good gameplay and force-feedback steering with the most realistic graphics up to its date.
Virtua Fighter, Sega, 1993
Virtua Fighter brought fast 3D polygon graphics to fighting games and changed the fighting game industry. Nowadays practically all fighting games have 3D graphics.
Daytona, Sega, 1994
Daytona was one of the first racing games to feature fast texture mapped and shaded 3D polygon graphics. Its great graphics, game-play and team-play option made it a huge hit.
Future
Nowadays most of the arcade games are either fighting games, racing games, sport games or shoot'em'ups, with some rare innovative titles. The lack of diversity leaves the arcade business into vulnerable position. The current trend is for more photo-realistics graphics and more processing power, with very little, or no, new ideas at all. The big question is, will the players remaing interested with current game genres or do they want something new?
Most arcade video games have custem designed hardware, but the increasing developing costs and fast development of PC 3D accelerator chips, will most likely make many companies to use more standard PC hardware instead custom solutions.
Nowadays most of the arcade games still have the program, graphics and sound data in ROM chips, but hard disks are coming more popular and popular and will probably replace ROMs.
Standard hardware and harddisks will make it easier to include many games to single video game machine or use the same hardware for different games.
Many current arcade video games had a local network option, enabling 2-16 machines to be connected to single multi-player game in the same arcade. In future arcade video games will probably be connected external network, enabling players to play against players from other cities or even countries.
History of Home Video Games
The home video game systems are presented in choronological order. I have selected the most commercially successful systems or systems which had some technical innovations. Hand-held video games and home computers are not discussed, although they are an interesting subject.
Magnavox Odyssey
Magnavox Odyssey was designed by Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch of Sanders Associates, a military electronics firm in 1966-67. It was introduced in 1972 at a price of $100. Because micro chips were so expensive at that time, the Odyssey was designed using only 40 transistors and 40 diodes. Odyssey was able to generate only very simple on-screen effects and the players had to keep score by themselves, because the machine was incapable of doing so. Odyssey was packaged with screen overlays (to be placed on the TV screen to simulate complex graphics), two controllers, six game cards, play money, playing cards, a roulette and football playfield, a fold-out scoreboard, poker chips and a pair of dice. It wasn't a successful game.
[Ralph H. Baer - the history of Odyssey with great pictures by the author himself]
Atari PONG
Pong was the home version of the successful arcade game. It was designed by Al Alcorn, Bob Brown, and Harold Lee and introduced in 1975. It became a big hit and spawned many clone machines.
[What's Wrong With Pong?]
Atari 2600
Atari 2600, also known as Atari Video Computer System (VCS), was designed by Joe Decure, Harold Lee, and Steve Meyer. It was released in 1977 at introductory price of $199.95. It was the most popular videogame console of its day and it was available until 1990, being on the market longer than any other system in history. Several hundred games were developed for it. It featured an 8-bit CPU, MOS 6507 @ 1.19 MHz, 16 color graphics, 2 channel audio (noise and sound). It only had 128 bytes of RAM memory and no video memory (CPU had control the video chip with screen refresh). The games were supplied in ROM cartridge, with the maximum size of 4 kilobytes. Later-on the limit of 4 kB was exceeded with paging ROM pages.
[Atari 2600/5200/7800 FAQ] [Atari 2600 fun facts and information]
Coleco Colecovision
Coleco released the Colecovision in 1982 at $199.95. It had 48 Kbytes of RAM and 3.58 MHz, 8-bit, Z80A CPU making it the most highpowered home system of its time.
[ColecoVision Homepage]
Atari 5200 SuperSystem
Atari released the 5200 SuperSystem in 1982. It was basically an Atari 400 home computer without a keyboard. It had 1.78, 8-bit, 6502C CPU and 16 Kbytes of RAM. It was capable of 320x192 resolution with 16 colors from 256 color palette and it 4-channel sound. It was the first system to come equipped with 4 controller ports for multi-player games. Despite that it had much better hardware than the Atari 2600, it never became the success Atari expected. Cheap home computers started to gain market from video games in the beginning of the 80's and it took too much time before quality game titles were developed to Atari 5200.
[Atari 5200 FAQ]
Milton Bradley/GCE Vectrex
Vectrex was designed by John Ross, Gerry Karr, John Hall and ex-Atari employees Paul Newell and Mark Indictor from an idea by Jay Smith. It was released in 1982 at a price of $199. It incorporated a 9 inch Vector graphic monitor and used a Motorola 68A09, 8-bit microprocessor. It wasn't a success, but it had loyal fans.
[Saturn's Vectrex World]
Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom)
Nintendo Entertainment System, briefly NES, was designed Masayuki Uemura. It released in 1985. It had an 8-bit CPU (6502 @ 1.79 MHz) and 2 kilobytes of RAM. The Graphics were capable of maximum of 256*224 pixel (NTSC) resolution and 16 simultaneous colors from a palette of 52 colors. It had 2 kilobytes graphics work RAM and 64 simultaneous sprites. Its sound system had 2 square wave channels, 1 triangle wave channel, 1 noise channel and 1 PCM channel.
[8 bits of power!]
NEC Turbografx-16
NEC Turbografx was released in Japan in 1988 as the PC Engine, the system was renamed the Turbografx-16 when it reached North America in 1989. Although it was advertised as a 16-bit game machine, it actually had an 8-bit CPU, 65802 @ 16 MHz. It did contain a separate 16-bit graphics chip however. The Turbografx-16 became the first system to have a CD-player attachment.
[Turbografx Information]
Sega Genesis
Sega noticed that great games sold systems, so it took elements from its 16-bit arcade machines and produced the Mega-Drive in 1989. In America the machine was called Genesis, and it retailed for $199. It had 16-bit CPU (Motorola 68000 @ 7.6 MHz) and 72 kbytes RAM in addition to 64 Kbytes video RAM. The graphics were capable of 320*224 to 320x448 (NTSC) resolution and 61 simultaneous colors from a palette of 512 colors and 80 sprites. It had 10 sound channels and Z80 was used as an audio processor.
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super Famicom)
Super Nintendo, or briefly, SNES, system was introduced in 1990. SNES had 16-bit CPU (65816 @ 3.6 MHz) and 128 kbytes RAM and 64 Kbytes of video RAM. Its graphics were capable of 256*224 to 512x448 (NTSC) resolution, 256 simultaneous colors from a palette of 32768 colors and 128 sprites. It had 8 separate 8-bit PCM sound channels.
[The Forbidden Super Nintendo Information Repositor] [SNES HQ]
Sega Saturn
Sega Saturn uses two 28.8 MHz, 32-bit, Hitachi SH2 CPUs along with several custom processors. It has hardware accelerated texturemapped 3D support, 320x224 resolution with 24-bit truecolor. It has a total of 4 megabytes RAM and a double speed CDROM drive. Saturn has 32 sound channels and Motorola 68EC000 is serving as an audio processor. Saturn was the first home video game to have an (optional) Internet connection module.
[Sega Zone]
Sony Playstation
The Sony playstation uses a 33 MHz, 32-bit, MIPS R3900i CPU and it has hardware acceleration for texturemapped 3D polygon graphics at max. 640x480 resolution with 24-bit truecolor, 24 channel sound and a double speed CDROM drive.
[Absolute Playstation] [Playstation Nation] [PSX Power]
Nintendo Ultra 64
Nintendo Ultra 64 was developed by Silicon Graphics and it was released in 1996 at an introductory price of $150. It has 64-bit CPU (customized MIPS R4300i series @ 93.75 MHz) and 4.5 Megabytes of RAM. It graphics are able to resolutions of 256 x 224 to 640 x 480 pixels with 32-bit RGBA pixel color frame buffer support, 3D graphics hardware acceleration (Z buffer, antialiasing, tri-linear filtered, mip-map and perspective corrected texture mapping etc.). Unlike the other new video games systems, Ultra 64 games are supplied on ROM cartridges. Its the most high-powered home system so far:
"Nintendo64 can perform 3.5 times as many adds per second as the original Cray-1, which cost $8,000,000 in 1976. The Cray-1 also consumed 60,000 wats of power, compared to the Nintendo64 machine's 5 watts. "
[N64.com] [N64 Gazetta]
Future
The introduction price of the popular video game has remained about the same for about twenty years. People don't want to pay a lot of money for a home video game machine. The profits are made by selling the games. The price of a single home video game has usually been much higher than the price of single computer game, despite the manufacturing costs for about the same, practically neglible.
The processing speed and the amount of RAM will increase. CDROM will probably be replaced with multispeed DVD. ROM has still its advantages; faster transfer rate and much faster random access time and most important better durability and ease of use.
In future almost all home video game system will have Internet connection either as on option or standard equipment. The cheap network consoles and Internet TV boxes will have also have games, shadowing the line between network consoles and video games.
The History of Atari
The rise and the fall of the pioneer firm of video game industry.
1971 Nolan Bushnell designed the first commercial arcade video game called "Computer Space", but it was not a big success.
1972 Atari Inc. was founded by Nolan Bushnell from a $250 investment. Pong arcade game becomes a smash hit.
1976 Atari Inc. was sold by Bushnell to Warner Inc. for $28 million.
1980 Atari Inc. posted record sales, $2 billion profits annually. Atari occupied 80 offices in Sunnyvale, California.
1983 Decline of video games and irresponsible spending by Atari Inc. resulted in record losses ($536 million, up to $2 million daily).
1984 Warner divided Atari Inc. to Atari Games (arcade games), and Atari Corporation (Home division). Atari Corp. was sold to Jack Tramiel.
1985 Atari Corp. released Atari ST home computer.
1989 Atari Corp. released Atari Lynx, the world's first color hand-held video game system.
1993 Atari Games became Time-Warner Interactive.
1993 Atari Corp. released Atari Jaguar, the world's first 64-bit home video game system.
1996 Time-Warner Interactive (Atari Games) was sold to WMS.
1996 Atari Corp. merged with JTS Corporation.
1998 Atari Corp. software and hardware rights were sold to Hasbro Inc. for only 5 million dollars.
power, had no real-time-graphics and only few people had access to them. In 1961, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) donated their latest computer to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1). It sold for $120,000. Compared to the many computers of its time, the PDP-1 was comparatively modest in size - about as big as a large automobile.
Like most universities, MIT had several campus organizations. One of them was the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). It appealed to students who liked to build systems and see how things worked. TMRC had access to PDP-1 and creating new programs and improving older ones was considered an impressive hack among them. They programmed for the fun of it, not for the money, and program source code was public domain, for anybody to use and improve.
Steve Russell, nicknamed "Slug", was a typical nerd with affection to Science Fiction and a member of TMRC. He decided to make the ultimate hack, an interactive game. It took Russell nearly six months and 200 man-hours to complete the first version of the game, a simple two-player game between rocket ships. Using toggle switches built into the PDP-1, players controlled the speed and direction of both ships and fired torpedoes at each other. Russell called his game, "Spacewar". In true hacker spirits the TMRC revised Spacewar and added several elements to it, including an accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with an accurate gravitational field in the foreground, hyperspace button, unpredictable torpedoes (for more realism) and built remote controllers to replace PDP-1's native controls (the forerunners of joystick). Spacewar was the predecessor of Asteroids (Atari) and Gravitar (Atari).
Although Russell's amazing hack created a sensation throughout MIT, he never made a penny from it. PDP computers cost too much to adapt the game for the consumer market, even as an arcade machine.
The First Video Game
The first video game was created by the engineers at Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire-based defense contractor. Ralph Baer was working Sanders Associates as manager of equipment design division. In August 1966 he came up with an idea building sometimes for $19.95, a game for TV set. He allocated few of his employees, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, to the project. In 1967, Rusch suggested a new game in which a hardwired logic circuit projected a spot flying across the screen. Originally, the object of the game was for players to catch the spot with manually controlled dots. Over time, the players' dots evolved into paddles, and the game became ping pong.
Sanders Associates had a rough time in the late sixties, down-sizing from 11,000 to 4,000 employees. As a military contractor, Sanders couldn't suddenly go into the toy business, so Baer had to find a customer for his invention. Baer tried to sell his invention to many parties, and finally in 1971 he made a deal with Magnavox. The product was called Magnavox Odyssey and it was first products were sold in 1972. Unfortunately Magnavox did a bad job - they over-engineered the machine and upped the price so that the system was sold for $100 and the advertisement campaign was poor. Ralph Baer's dream of $20 dollar game became a fiasco and his name was forgotten by most people.
History of Arcade Games
(based on Videotopia article)
The arcade video games are presented in choronological order. This is by no means a complete list. I have selected the most commercially successful games and games which had some technical innovations or new game idea or some other important reason to deserve to be mentioned here.
Computer Space, Nutting Associates, 1971
Computer Space was the first commercial arcade video game released to the public. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell. It had many technological innovations, but the gameplay was confusing and it didn't become a commercial success. Using the profits from the game Nolan Bushnell left Nutting Associates and formed Atari Inc.
Pong, Atari Inc., 1972
Pong was the first succesful arcade video game. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Alan Alcorn. The game play was extremely simple. It has two players, both which controlled a vertical bar which could bounce back a moving dot which moving between the vertical bars. Nolan placed the first game machine in a local gas station. When he became back the machine ceased to operate which it was full of money. Pong became an instant success and it created the arcade video game industry. Several home versions were also made of the Pong game and it also created the home video game industry as well.
[Pong: The Revolutionary Game]
Tank, Kee Games/Atari Inc., 1974
Tank was the first video game which used ROM chips to store graphic data. It had on-screen characters that actually looked like recognizable objects. Before that video games used simple block graphics like in Pong, or collections of dots as in Computer Space.
Gunfight, Taito/Midway, 1975
Gunfight was a two-player game in style of Western movies. It was the first Japanese title to be licensed for release in America. Midway redesigned it to allow more varied game play. The redesigned version was the first video arcade game to utilize a microprocessor.
Night Driver, Atari Inc., 1976
Night Driver was the first racing game with "first person" perspective, showing the road as if actually seen from the car. Before Night Driver there had been many racing games with bird perspective (seen from above), e.g. the popular Atari game called "Sprint 2" from 1976. The night theme was chosen to hide the limitation of the hardware to create more complicated images. For many years, most 3D games built on the basic concept of Night Driver, using computer hardware to "scale" flat images called "sprites" in order to simulate movement in the 3D.
Breakout, Atari Inc., 1976
Breakout was designed by Atari's fortieth employee Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak. A year later these two persons founded Apple Computer.
Space Invaders, Taito/Bally/Midway, 1978
Space Invaders was the first blockbuster videogame. It brought the video games out of arcades and bars into restaurants, corner stores an brought video games into the public conciousness. It was translated to Atari 2600 video home game system and the home versio was also a huge commercial hit.
[Space Invaders Manual]
Football, Atari Inc., 1978
Football was the first true video sports game. It was created by Dave Stubben. Its development originally began as a game called "X's and O's" by Steve Bristow in late 1973. The project was shelved for years until the Atari figured out a way to break out from the limits of the single-screen game displays of the time. Football introduced "scrolling" video game displays to the world, allowing games to take place on playfields larger than the monitor on which they were displayed. Later-on Atari has made a lot of money for its patent for scrolling video game displays that rose from Football. Football was also the first game to feature the track ball.
Asteroids, Atari Inc., 1979
Asteroids was Atari's answer to Space Invaders. The game was designed by Ed Logg and it utilized a monochrome vector graphics display, which was capable of fast moving objects made of very sharp lines (compared to crude pixel graphics of its time). Combined with great game play it became the biggest selling of game of its time.
Asteroids and Lunar Lander (Atari, 1980) were the predecessors Gravitar (Atari) and many modern rotating ship shoot'em'up games e.g. Xpilot.
Warrior, Vectorbeam/Cinematronics, 1979.
Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting game. It was a two-player overhead sword-fighting contest. It had a brillian vector graphics display for its time, but unfortunately it was less reliable than the Atari one. It was a very rare game.
Battlezone, Atari Inc., 1980
Battlezone was the the first video game to feature truly interactive 3-D environment. It had 2-color vector display. The United States Armed Forces were so impressed by the game that they commissioned Atari to build specially modified and upgraded versions for use in tank training.
Defender, Williams Electronics, 1980
Defender was designed by Eugene Jarvis. It was the first video game to feature artificial "world" in which game events could occur outside on-screen view presented to the player.
[Defender Information]
Pac-Man, Bally/Midway, 1980
Pac-Man designed by Toru Iwatani and it was licensed from Namco. It was based on an ancient Japanese folk-tale. The idea of the game was to control the pac-man character which was moving inside a maze eating dots and to avoid ghosts which tried to kill pac-man. The was a huge hit around the world. It appeared in magazines covers, spawned a cartoon and hit song.
Pac-Man has spawned more sequels than perhaps any other video game: Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Mr & Mrs. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Professor Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac- Attack, Pac-Man 2, Pac-In-Time, Pac-Man VR, Pac-Man Ghost Zone...
[First Church of Pac-Man]
Donkey Kong, Nintendo Ltd., 1981
Donkey Kong was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It used the same hardware as an older video game called 'Radarscope'. The idea of the game was to control a jumpman character which tried to rescue a girl from a giant ape. Later-on the jumpman was named Mario, the most famous and succesful game-character ever invented.
Centipede, Atari Inc., 1981
Centipede was designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey. It was the first arcade game to be co-designed by a woman. Its colorful graphics and good game play made Centipede the first video game to be more popular with women than with men.
Tempest, Atari Inc., 1981
Tempest was designed by Dave Theurer. It was the first Atari game to utilize a multicolor vector display. It had beautiful 3D wireframe graphics and it became an instant hit.
[Tempest Operation Information] [Tempest 2000]
Pole Position, Namco/Atari, 1982
Pole Position started the trend for foto-realistics graphics in video games. It was a driving game with persceptive from the car view point, just like Night Driver. In addition to great graphics, it had great game play and it was a huge success, dominated game charts for almost about 2 years. Modern driving games are still more or less based on Pole Position, only graphics have improved.
Robotron: 2084, Williams Electronics, 1982
Robotron was designed by the same people who created Defender. It had excellent gameplay and two joysticks were used for input.
[Robotron page]
Tron, Bally/Midway, 1982
Tron was designed in conjunction with the Disney's film of the same name. The game became an important part of the movie. Tron video game produced more profit than the movie.
[Tron Manual]
Zaxxon, Sega Ltd., 1982
Zaxxon introduced an 3D-lookalike isometric perspective to video games. It had brilliant graphics for its time and it became a big hit.
Star Wars, Atari Inc., 1983.
Star Wars was based on the Star Wars movie by George Lucas. It was designed by Mike Hally and it was programmed and developed by Greg Rivera, Norm Avellar, Eric Durfey, Jed Margolin and Earl Vickers. It was great multi-color vector graphics, 12 channel music and sound effects with speech. In 1985 released a sequel for the game, called The Empire Strikes Back.
Star Wars is the most successful movie of all time and more games have been made of it than any other movie.
[Star Wars: The New Republic]
Dragon's Lair, Starcom/Cinematronics, 1983
Dragon's Lair was created by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth. It was an interactive animated film and it was the first video games utilize laserdisc. Its graphics were much better than any of games of its time - of movie quality - and it had great stereo sound, but the gameplay wasn't good (player had only few choices to select from). Its incredible graphics created a huge media hype. Journalists predicted that laser video games would the soon dominate video games. But laserdisc players were very expensive in that time and laservideo games machines were very unreliable.
In 1984 Magicom/Cinematronics released another laser disc animation-movie-game, called Space Ace which was designed by the same team. The success of laser video games was short and it started to fade in the middle of 1984. About a decade later interactive movie type games re-apperad in CD-ROM format for home computers and are now one of the most popular PC game genres.
[picture of Dragon's Lair arcade game] [screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [yet another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [The Dragon's Lair Project]
I, Robot, Atari Inc., 1984
I, Robot was the first game to feature 3-D polygon graphics. Only a thousand I, Robots were ever produced.
Xevious, Namco/Atari Inc., 1985
Xevious had scrolling terrain background with both ground and air targets. Xevious became the basis of new generation of scrolling shoot'em'up games.
[Xevious Emulator Page (well worth to check!)]
Gauntlet, Atari Games, 1985
Gauntlet was designed by Ed Logg. It had good graphics and great game-play with up to 4 simultaneous players.
[Gauntlet I/II Hackers Page]
Space Harrier, Sega, 1986
Space Harrier had fast scaling sprite based 3D graphics with stereo diginal sound. It marked the beginning of transformation of established genres toward three-dimensionality and more high-powered arcade hardware.
The game was designed by Sega's legendary game designer Yu Suzuki, who is also responsible for Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Hang-On and Shen-Mue.
Street Fighter II, Capcom, 1991
Cinematronics Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting video game and Data East's Karate Champ (1984) had already introduced the "side view" perspective, the genre of fighting game practically didn't exist until Capcom released Street Fighter II. It had many truly different charachters to choose from and good game play. SFII started the new "golden age" of arcades. SFII was also converted to many home systems and the Super Nintendo version alone sold more than 15 million copies.
The success of SFII procudes many competitors e.g. the Mortal Kombat, Killing Instinct and Virtua Fighter series. SFII has numerous sequels and even a movie was made out of it. Fighting games started the new golden age of arcade games.
Virtua Racing, Sega, 1992
Virtua Racing started the new age of fast polygon racing games and high-powered multi-player simulators. Virtua Racing had good gameplay and force-feedback steering with the most realistic graphics up to its date.
Virtua Fighter, Sega, 1993
Virtua Fighter brought fast 3D polygon graphics to fighting games and changed the fighting game industry. Nowadays practically all fighting games have 3D graphics.
Daytona, Sega, 1994
Daytona was one of the first racing games to feature fast texture mapped and shaded 3D polygon graphics. Its great graphics, game-play and team-play option made it a huge hit.
Future
Nowadays most of the arcade games are either fighting games, racing games, sport games or shoot'em'ups, with some rare innovative titles. The lack of diversity leaves the arcade business into vulnerable position. The current trend is for more photo-realistics graphics and more processing power, with very little, or no, new ideas at all. The big question is, will the players remaing interested with current game genres or do they want something new?
Most arcade video games have custem designed hardware, but the increasing developing costs and fast development of PC 3D accelerator chips, will most likely make many companies to use more standard PC hardware instead custom solutions.
Nowadays most of the arcade games still have the program, graphics and sound data in ROM chips, but hard disks are coming more popular and popular and will probably replace ROMs.
Standard hardware and harddisks will make it easier to include many games to single video game machine or use the same hardware for different games.
Many current arcade video games had a local network option, enabling 2-16 machines to be connected to single multi-player game in the same arcade. In future arcade video games will probably be connected external network, enabling players to play against players from other cities or even countries.
History of Home Video Games
The home video game systems are presented in choronological order. I have selected the most commercially successful systems or systems which had some technical innovations. Hand-held video games and home computers are not discussed, although they are an interesting subject.
Magnavox Odyssey
Magnavox Odyssey was designed by Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch of Sanders Associates, a military electronics firm in 1966-67. It was introduced in 1972 at a price of $100. Because micro chips were so expensive at that time, the Odyssey was designed using only 40 transistors and 40 diodes. Odyssey was able to generate only very simple on-screen effects and the players had to keep score by themselves, because the machine was incapable of doing so. Odyssey was packaged with screen overlays (to be placed on the TV screen to simulate complex graphics), two controllers, six game cards, play money, playing cards, a roulette and football playfield, a fold-out scoreboard, poker chips and a pair of dice. It wasn't a successful game.
[Ralph H. Baer - the history of Odyssey with great pictures by the author himself]
Atari PONG
Pong was the home version of the successful arcade game. It was designed by Al Alcorn, Bob Brown, and Harold Lee and introduced in 1975. It became a big hit and spawned many clone machines.
[What's Wrong With Pong?]
Atari 2600
Atari 2600, also known as Atari Video Computer System (VCS), was designed by Joe Decure, Harold Lee, and Steve Meyer. It was released in 1977 at introductory price of $199.95. It was the most popular videogame console of its day and it was available until 1990, being on the market longer than any other system in history. Several hundred games were developed for it. It featured an 8-bit CPU, MOS 6507 @ 1.19 MHz, 16 color graphics, 2 channel audio (noise and sound). It only had 128 bytes of RAM memory and no video memory (CPU had control the video chip with screen refresh). The games were supplied in ROM cartridge, with the maximum size of 4 kilobytes. Later-on the limit of 4 kB was exceeded with paging ROM pages.
[Atari 2600/5200/7800 FAQ] [Atari 2600 fun facts and information]
Coleco Colecovision
Coleco released the Colecovision in 1982 at $199.95. It had 48 Kbytes of RAM and 3.58 MHz, 8-bit, Z80A CPU making it the most highpowered home system of its time.
[ColecoVision Homepage]
Atari 5200 SuperSystem
Atari released the 5200 SuperSystem in 1982. It was basically an Atari 400 home computer without a keyboard. It had 1.78, 8-bit, 6502C CPU and 16 Kbytes of RAM. It was capable of 320x192 resolution with 16 colors from 256 color palette and it 4-channel sound. It was the first system to come equipped with 4 controller ports for multi-player games. Despite that it had much better hardware than the Atari 2600, it never became the success Atari expected. Cheap home computers started to gain market from video games in the beginning of the 80's and it took too much time before quality game titles were developed to Atari 5200.
[Atari 5200 FAQ]
Milton Bradley/GCE Vectrex
Vectrex was designed by John Ross, Gerry Karr, John Hall and ex-Atari employees Paul Newell and Mark Indictor from an idea by Jay Smith. It was released in 1982 at a price of $199. It incorporated a 9 inch Vector graphic monitor and used a Motorola 68A09, 8-bit microprocessor. It wasn't a success, but it had loyal fans.
[Saturn's Vectrex World]
Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom)
Nintendo Entertainment System, briefly NES, was designed Masayuki Uemura. It released in 1985. It had an 8-bit CPU (6502 @ 1.79 MHz) and 2 kilobytes of RAM. The Graphics were capable of maximum of 256*224 pixel (NTSC) resolution and 16 simultaneous colors from a palette of 52 colors. It had 2 kilobytes graphics work RAM and 64 simultaneous sprites. Its sound system had 2 square wave channels, 1 triangle wave channel, 1 noise channel and 1 PCM channel.
[8 bits of power!]
NEC Turbografx-16
NEC Turbografx was released in Japan in 1988 as the PC Engine, the system was renamed the Turbografx-16 when it reached North America in 1989. Although it was advertised as a 16-bit game machine, it actually had an 8-bit CPU, 65802 @ 16 MHz. It did contain a separate 16-bit graphics chip however. The Turbografx-16 became the first system to have a CD-player attachment.
[Turbografx Information]
Sega Genesis
Sega noticed that great games sold systems, so it took elements from its 16-bit arcade machines and produced the Mega-Drive in 1989. In America the machine was called Genesis, and it retailed for $199. It had 16-bit CPU (Motorola 68000 @ 7.6 MHz) and 72 kbytes RAM in addition to 64 Kbytes video RAM. The graphics were capable of 320*224 to 320x448 (NTSC) resolution and 61 simultaneous colors from a palette of 512 colors and 80 sprites. It had 10 sound channels and Z80 was used as an audio processor.
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super Famicom)
Super Nintendo, or briefly, SNES, system was introduced in 1990. SNES had 16-bit CPU (65816 @ 3.6 MHz) and 128 kbytes RAM and 64 Kbytes of video RAM. Its graphics were capable of 256*224 to 512x448 (NTSC) resolution, 256 simultaneous colors from a palette of 32768 colors and 128 sprites. It had 8 separate 8-bit PCM sound channels.
[The Forbidden Super Nintendo Information Repositor] [SNES HQ]
Sega Saturn
Sega Saturn uses two 28.8 MHz, 32-bit, Hitachi SH2 CPUs along with several custom processors. It has hardware accelerated texturemapped 3D support, 320x224 resolution with 24-bit truecolor. It has a total of 4 megabytes RAM and a double speed CDROM drive. Saturn has 32 sound channels and Motorola 68EC000 is serving as an audio processor. Saturn was the first home video game to have an (optional) Internet connection module.
[Sega Zone]
Sony Playstation
The Sony playstation uses a 33 MHz, 32-bit, MIPS R3900i CPU and it has hardware acceleration for texturemapped 3D polygon graphics at max. 640x480 resolution with 24-bit truecolor, 24 channel sound and a double speed CDROM drive.
[Absolute Playstation] [Playstation Nation] [PSX Power]
Nintendo Ultra 64
Nintendo Ultra 64 was developed by Silicon Graphics and it was released in 1996 at an introductory price of $150. It has 64-bit CPU (customized MIPS R4300i series @ 93.75 MHz) and 4.5 Megabytes of RAM. It graphics are able to resolutions of 256 x 224 to 640 x 480 pixels with 32-bit RGBA pixel color frame buffer support, 3D graphics hardware acceleration (Z buffer, antialiasing, tri-linear filtered, mip-map and perspective corrected texture mapping etc.). Unlike the other new video games systems, Ultra 64 games are supplied on ROM cartridges. Its the most high-powered home system so far:
"Nintendo64 can perform 3.5 times as many adds per second as the original Cray-1, which cost $8,000,000 in 1976. The Cray-1 also consumed 60,000 wats of power, compared to the Nintendo64 machine's 5 watts. "
[N64.com] [N64 Gazetta]
Future
The introduction price of the popular video game has remained about the same for about twenty years. People don't want to pay a lot of money for a home video game machine. The profits are made by selling the games. The price of a single home video game has usually been much higher than the price of single computer game, despite the manufacturing costs for about the same, practically neglible.
The processing speed and the amount of RAM will increase. CDROM will probably be replaced with multispeed DVD. ROM has still its advantages; faster transfer rate and much faster random access time and most important better durability and ease of use.
In future almost all home video game system will have Internet connection either as on option or standard equipment. The cheap network consoles and Internet TV boxes will have also have games, shadowing the line between network consoles and video games.
The History of Atari
The rise and the fall of the pioneer firm of video game industry.
1971 Nolan Bushnell designed the first commercial arcade video game called "Computer Space", but it was not a big success.
1972 Atari Inc. was founded by Nolan Bushnell from a $250 investment. Pong arcade game becomes a smash hit.
1976 Atari Inc. was sold by Bushnell to Warner Inc. for $28 million.
1980 Atari Inc. posted record sales, $2 billion profits annually. Atari occupied 80 offices in Sunnyvale, California.
1983 Decline of video games and irresponsible spending by Atari Inc. resulted in record losses ($536 million, up to $2 million daily).
1984 Warner divided Atari Inc. to Atari Games (arcade games), and Atari Corporation (Home division). Atari Corp. was sold to Jack Tramiel.
1985 Atari Corp. released Atari ST home computer.
1989 Atari Corp. released Atari Lynx, the world's first color hand-held video game system.
1993 Atari Games became Time-Warner Interactive.
1993 Atari Corp. released Atari Jaguar, the world's first 64-bit home video game system.
1996 Time-Warner Interactive (Atari Games) was sold to WMS.
1996 Atari Corp. merged with JTS Corporation.
1998 Atari Corp. software and hardware rights were sold to Hasbro Inc. for only 5 million dollars.
power, had no real-time-graphics and only few people had access to them. In 1961, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) donated their latest computer to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1). It sold for $120,000. Compared to the many computers of its time, the PDP-1 was comparatively modest in size - about as big as a large automobile.
Like most universities, MIT had several campus organizations. One of them was the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). It appealed to students who liked to build systems and see how things worked. TMRC had access to PDP-1 and creating new programs and improving older ones was considered an impressive hack among them. They programmed for the fun of it, not for the money, and program source code was public domain, for anybody to use and improve.
Steve Russell, nicknamed "Slug", was a typical nerd with affection to Science Fiction and a member of TMRC. He decided to make the ultimate hack, an interactive game. It took Russell nearly six months and 200 man-hours to complete the first version of the game, a simple two-player game between rocket ships. Using toggle switches built into the PDP-1, players controlled the speed and direction of both ships and fired torpedoes at each other. Russell called his game, "Spacewar". In true hacker spirits the TMRC revised Spacewar and added several elements to it, including an accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with an accurate gravitational field in the foreground, hyperspace button, unpredictable torpedoes (for more realism) and built remote controllers to replace PDP-1's native controls (the forerunners of joystick). Spacewar was the predecessor of Asteroids (Atari) and Gravitar (Atari).
Although Russell's amazing hack created a sensation throughout MIT, he never made a penny from it. PDP computers cost too much to adapt the game for the consumer market, even as an arcade machine.
The First Video Game
The first video game was created by the engineers at Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire-based defense contractor. Ralph Baer was working Sanders Associates as manager of equipment design division. In August 1966 he came up with an idea building sometimes for $19.95, a game for TV set. He allocated few of his employees, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, to the project. In 1967, Rusch suggested a new game in which a hardwired logic circuit projected a spot flying across the screen. Originally, the object of the game was for players to catch the spot with manually controlled dots. Over time, the players' dots evolved into paddles, and the game became ping pong.
Sanders Associates had a rough time in the late sixties, down-sizing from 11,000 to 4,000 employees. As a military contractor, Sanders couldn't suddenly go into the toy business, so Baer had to find a customer for his invention. Baer tried to sell his invention to many parties, and finally in 1971 he made a deal with Magnavox. The product was called Magnavox Odyssey and it was first products were sold in 1972. Unfortunately Magnavox did a bad job - they over-engineered the machine and upped the price so that the system was sold for $100 and the advertisement campaign was poor. Ralph Baer's dream of $20 dollar game became a fiasco and his name was forgotten by most people.
History of Arcade Games
(based on Videotopia article)
The arcade video games are presented in choronological order. This is by no means a complete list. I have selected the most commercially successful games and games which had some technical innovations or new game idea or some other important reason to deserve to be mentioned here.
Computer Space, Nutting Associates, 1971
Computer Space was the first commercial arcade video game released to the public. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell. It had many technological innovations, but the gameplay was confusing and it didn't become a commercial success. Using the profits from the game Nolan Bushnell left Nutting Associates and formed Atari Inc.
Pong, Atari Inc., 1972
Pong was the first succesful arcade video game. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Alan Alcorn. The game play was extremely simple. It has two players, both which controlled a vertical bar which could bounce back a moving dot which moving between the vertical bars. Nolan placed the first game machine in a local gas station. When he became back the machine ceased to operate which it was full of money. Pong became an instant success and it created the arcade video game industry. Several home versions were also made of the Pong game and it also created the home video game industry as well.
[Pong: The Revolutionary Game]
Tank, Kee Games/Atari Inc., 1974
Tank was the first video game which used ROM chips to store graphic data. It had on-screen characters that actually looked like recognizable objects. Before that video games used simple block graphics like in Pong, or collections of dots as in Computer Space.
Gunfight, Taito/Midway, 1975
Gunfight was a two-player game in style of Western movies. It was the first Japanese title to be licensed for release in America. Midway redesigned it to allow more varied game play. The redesigned version was the first video arcade game to utilize a microprocessor.
Night Driver, Atari Inc., 1976
Night Driver was the first racing game with "first person" perspective, showing the road as if actually seen from the car. Before Night Driver there had been many racing games with bird perspective (seen from above), e.g. the popular Atari game called "Sprint 2" from 1976. The night theme was chosen to hide the limitation of the hardware to create more complicated images. For many years, most 3D games built on the basic concept of Night Driver, using computer hardware to "scale" flat images called "sprites" in order to simulate movement in the 3D.
Breakout, Atari Inc., 1976
Breakout was designed by Atari's fortieth employee Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak. A year later these two persons founded Apple Computer.
Space Invaders, Taito/Bally/Midway, 1978
Space Invaders was the first blockbuster videogame. It brought the video games out of arcades and bars into restaurants, corner stores an brought video games into the public conciousness. It was translated to Atari 2600 video home game system and the home versio was also a huge commercial hit.
[Space Invaders Manual]
Football, Atari Inc., 1978
Football was the first true video sports game. It was created by Dave Stubben. Its development originally began as a game called "X's and O's" by Steve Bristow in late 1973. The project was shelved for years until the Atari figured out a way to break out from the limits of the single-screen game displays of the time. Football introduced "scrolling" video game displays to the world, allowing games to take place on playfields larger than the monitor on which they were displayed. Later-on Atari has made a lot of money for its patent for scrolling video game displays that rose from Football. Football was also the first game to feature the track ball.
Asteroids, Atari Inc., 1979
Asteroids was Atari's answer to Space Invaders. The game was designed by Ed Logg and it utilized a monochrome vector graphics display, which was capable of fast moving objects made of very sharp lines (compared to crude pixel graphics of its time). Combined with great game play it became the biggest selling of game of its time.
Asteroids and Lunar Lander (Atari, 1980) were the predecessors Gravitar (Atari) and many modern rotating ship shoot'em'up games e.g. Xpilot.
Warrior, Vectorbeam/Cinematronics, 1979.
Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting game. It was a two-player overhead sword-fighting contest. It had a brillian vector graphics display for its time, but unfortunately it was less reliable than the Atari one. It was a very rare game.
Battlezone, Atari Inc., 1980
Battlezone was the the first video game to feature truly interactive 3-D environment. It had 2-color vector display. The United States Armed Forces were so impressed by the game that they commissioned Atari to build specially modified and upgraded versions for use in tank training.
Defender, Williams Electronics, 1980
Defender was designed by Eugene Jarvis. It was the first video game to feature artificial "world" in which game events could occur outside on-screen view presented to the player.
[Defender Information]
Pac-Man, Bally/Midway, 1980
Pac-Man designed by Toru Iwatani and it was licensed from Namco. It was based on an ancient Japanese folk-tale. The idea of the game was to control the pac-man character which was moving inside a maze eating dots and to avoid ghosts which tried to kill pac-man. The was a huge hit around the world. It appeared in magazines covers, spawned a cartoon and hit song.
Pac-Man has spawned more sequels than perhaps any other video game: Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Mr & Mrs. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Professor Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac- Attack, Pac-Man 2, Pac-In-Time, Pac-Man VR, Pac-Man Ghost Zone...
[First Church of Pac-Man]
Donkey Kong, Nintendo Ltd., 1981
Donkey Kong was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It used the same hardware as an older video game called 'Radarscope'. The idea of the game was to control a jumpman character which tried to rescue a girl from a giant ape. Later-on the jumpman was named Mario, the most famous and succesful game-character ever invented.
Centipede, Atari Inc., 1981
Centipede was designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey. It was the first arcade game to be co-designed by a woman. Its colorful graphics and good game play made Centipede the first video game to be more popular with women than with men.
Tempest, Atari Inc., 1981
Tempest was designed by Dave Theurer. It was the first Atari game to utilize a multicolor vector display. It had beautiful 3D wireframe graphics and it became an instant hit.
[Tempest Operation Information] [Tempest 2000]
Pole Position, Namco/Atari, 1982
Pole Position started the trend for foto-realistics graphics in video games. It was a driving game with persceptive from the car view point, just like Night Driver. In addition to great graphics, it had great game play and it was a huge success, dominated game charts for almost about 2 years. Modern driving games are still more or less based on Pole Position, only graphics have improved.
Robotron: 2084, Williams Electronics, 1982
Robotron was designed by the same people who created Defender. It had excellent gameplay and two joysticks were used for input.
[Robotron page]
Tron, Bally/Midway, 1982
Tron was designed in conjunction with the Disney's film of the same name. The game became an important part of the movie. Tron video game produced more profit than the movie.
[Tron Manual]
Zaxxon, Sega Ltd., 1982
Zaxxon introduced an 3D-lookalike isometric perspective to video games. It had brilliant graphics for its time and it became a big hit.
Star Wars, Atari Inc., 1983.
Star Wars was based on the Star Wars movie by George Lucas. It was designed by Mike Hally and it was programmed and developed by Greg Rivera, Norm Avellar, Eric Durfey, Jed Margolin and Earl Vickers. It was great multi-color vector graphics, 12 channel music and sound effects with speech. In 1985 released a sequel for the game, called The Empire Strikes Back.
Star Wars is the most successful movie of all time and more games have been made of it than any other movie.
[Star Wars: The New Republic]
Dragon's Lair, Starcom/Cinematronics, 1983
Dragon's Lair was created by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth. It was an interactive animated film and it was the first video games utilize laserdisc. Its graphics were much better than any of games of its time - of movie quality - and it had great stereo sound, but the gameplay wasn't good (player had only few choices to select from). Its incredible graphics created a huge media hype. Journalists predicted that laser video games would the soon dominate video games. But laserdisc players were very expensive in that time and laservideo games machines were very unreliable.
In 1984 Magicom/Cinematronics released another laser disc animation-movie-game, called Space Ace which was designed by the same team. The success of laser video games was short and it started to fade in the middle of 1984. About a decade later interactive movie type games re-apperad in CD-ROM format for home computers and are now one of the most popular PC game genres.
[picture of Dragon's Lair arcade game] [screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [yet another screenshot from D
The first computers were very big in size, very limited in processing power, had no real-time-graphics and only few people had access to them. In 1961, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) donated their latest computer to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1). It sold for $120,000. Compared to the many computers of its time, the PDP-1 was comparatively modest in size - about as big as a large automobile.
Like most universities, MIT had several campus organizations. One of them was the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). It appealed to students who liked to build systems and see how things worked. TMRC had access to PDP-1 and creating new programs and improving older ones was considered an impressive hack among them. They programmed for the fun of it, not for the money, and program source code was public domain, for anybody to use and improve.
Steve Russell, nicknamed "Slug", was a typical nerd with affection to Science Fiction and a member of TMRC. He decided to make the ultimate hack, an interactive game. It took Russell nearly six months and 200 man-hours to complete the first version of the game, a simple two-player game between rocket ships. Using toggle switches built into the PDP-1, players controlled the speed and direction of both ships and fired torpedoes at each other. Russell called his game, "Spacewar". In true hacker spirits the TMRC revised Spacewar and added several elements to it, including an accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with an accurate gravitational field in the foreground, hyperspace button, unpredictable torpedoes (for more realism) and built remote controllers to replace PDP-1's native controls (the forerunners of joystick). Spacewar was the predecessor of Asteroids (Atari) and Gravitar (Atari).
Although Russell's amazing hack created a sensation throughout MIT, he never made a penny from it. PDP computers cost too much to adapt the game for the consumer market, even as an arcade machine.
The First Video Game
The first video game was created by the engineers at Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire-based defense contractor. Ralph Baer was working Sanders Associates as manager of equipment design division. In August 1966 he came up with an idea building sometimes for $19.95, a game for TV set. He allocated few of his employees, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, to the project. In 1967, Rusch suggested a new game in which a hardwired logic circuit projected a spot flying across the screen. Originally, the object of the game was for players to catch the spot with manually controlled dots. Over time, the players' dots evolved into paddles, and the game became ping pong.
Sanders Associates had a rough time in the late sixties, down-sizing from 11,000 to 4,000 employees. As a military contractor, Sanders couldn't suddenly go into the toy business, so Baer had to find a customer for his invention. Baer tried to sell his invention to many parties, and finally in 1971 he made a deal with Magnavox. The product was called Magnavox Odyssey and it was first products were sold in 1972. Unfortunately Magnavox did a bad job - they over-engineered the machine and upped the price so that the system was sold for $100 and the advertisement campaign was poor. Ralph Baer's dream of $20 dollar game became a fiasco and his name was forgotten by most people.
History of Arcade Games
(based on Videotopia article)
The arcade video games are presented in choronological order. This is by no means a complete list. I have selected the most commercially successful games and games which had some technical innovations or new game idea or some other important reason to deserve to be mentioned here.
Computer Space, Nutting Associates, 1971
Computer Space was the first commercial arcade video game released to the public. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell. It had many technological innovations, but the gameplay was confusing and it didn't become a commercial success. Using the profits from the game Nolan Bushnell left Nutting Associates and formed Atari Inc.
Pong, Atari Inc., 1972
Pong was the first succesful arcade video game. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Alan Alcorn. The game play was extremely simple. It has two players, both which controlled a vertical bar which could bounce back a moving dot which moving between the vertical bars. Nolan placed the first game machine in a local gas station. When he became back the machine ceased to operate which it was full of money. Pong became an instant success and it created the arcade video game industry. Several home versions were also made of the Pong game and it also created the home video game industry as well.
[Pong: The Revolutionary Game]
Tank, Kee Games/Atari Inc., 1974
Tank was the first video game which used ROM chips to store graphic data. It had on-screen characters that actually looked like recognizable objects. Before that video games used simple block graphics like in Pong, or collections of dots as in Computer Space.
Gunfight, Taito/Midway, 1975
Gunfight was a two-player game in style of Western movies. It was the first Japanese title to be licensed for release in America. Midway redesigned it to allow more varied game play. The redesigned version was the first video arcade game to utilize a microprocessor.
Night Driver, Atari Inc., 1976
Night Driver was the first racing game with "first person" perspective, showing the road as if actually seen from the car. Before Night Driver there had been many racing games with bird perspective (seen from above), e.g. the popular Atari game called "Sprint 2" from 1976. The night theme was chosen to hide the limitation of the hardware to create more complicated images. For many years, most 3D games built on the basic concept of Night Driver, using computer hardware to "scale" flat images called "sprites" in order to simulate movement in the 3D.
Breakout, Atari Inc., 1976
Breakout was designed by Atari's fortieth employee Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak. A year later these two persons founded Apple Computer.
Space Invaders, Taito/Bally/Midway, 1978
Space Invaders was the first blockbuster videogame. It brought the video games out of arcades and bars into restaurants, corner stores an brought video games into the public conciousness. It was translated to Atari 2600 video home game system and the home versio was also a huge commercial hit.
[Space Invaders Manual]
Football, Atari Inc., 1978
Football was the first true video sports game. It was created by Dave Stubben. Its development originally began as a game called "X's and O's" by Steve Bristow in late 1973. The project was shelved for years until the Atari figured out a way to break out from the limits of the single-screen game displays of the time. Football introduced "scrolling" video game displays to the world, allowing games to take place on playfields larger than the monitor on which they were displayed. Later-on Atari has made a lot of money for its patent for scrolling video game displays that rose from Football. Football was also the first game to feature the track ball.
Asteroids, Atari Inc., 1979
Asteroids was Atari's answer to Space Invaders. The game was designed by Ed Logg and it utilized a monochrome vector graphics display, which was capable of fast moving objects made of very sharp lines (compared to crude pixel graphics of its time). Combined with great game play it became the biggest selling of game of its time.
Asteroids and Lunar Lander (Atari, 1980) were the predecessors Gravitar (Atari) and many modern rotating ship shoot'em'up games e.g. Xpilot.
Warrior, Vectorbeam/Cinematronics, 1979.
Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting game. It was a two-player overhead sword-fighting contest. It had a brillian vector graphics display for its time, but unfortunately it was less reliable than the Atari one. It was a very rare game.
Battlezone, Atari Inc., 1980
Battlezone was the the first video game to feature truly interactive 3-D environment. It had 2-color vector display. The United States Armed Forces were so impressed by the game that they commissioned Atari to build specially modified and upgraded versions for use in tank training.
Defender, Williams Electronics, 1980
Defender was designed by Eugene Jarvis. It was the first video game to feature artificial "world" in which game events could occur outside on-screen view presented to the player.
[Defender Information]
Pac-Man, Bally/Midway, 1980
Pac-Man designed by Toru Iwatani and it was licensed from Namco. It was based on an ancient Japanese folk-tale. The idea of the game was to control the pac-man character which was moving inside a maze eating dots and to avoid ghosts which tried to kill pac-man. The was a huge hit around the world. It appeared in magazines covers, spawned a cartoon and hit song.
Pac-Man has spawned more sequels than perhaps any other video game: Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Mr & Mrs. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Professor Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac- Attack, Pac-Man 2, Pac-In-Time, Pac-Man VR, Pac-Man Ghost Zone...
[First Church of Pac-Man]
Donkey Kong, Nintendo Ltd., 1981
Donkey Kong was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It used the same hardware as an older video game called 'Radarscope'. The idea of the game was to control a jumpman character which tried to rescue a girl from a giant ape. Later-on the jumpman was named Mario, the most famous and succesful game-character ever invented.
Centipede, Atari Inc., 1981
Centipede was designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey. It was the first arcade game to be co-designed by a woman. Its colorful graphics and good game play made Centipede the first video game to be more popular with women than with men.
Tempest, Atari Inc., 1981
Tempest was designed by Dave Theurer. It was the first Atari game to utilize a multicolor vector display. It had beautiful 3D wireframe graphics and it became an instant hit.
[Tempest Operation Information] [Tempest 2000]
Pole Position, Namco/Atari, 1982
Pole Position started the trend for foto-realistics graphics in video games. It was a driving game with persceptive from the car view point, just like Night Driver. In addition to great graphics, it had great game play and it was a huge success, dominated game charts for almost about 2 years. Modern driving games are still more or less based on Pole Position, only graphics have improved.
Robotron: 2084, Williams Electronics, 1982
Robotron was designed by the same people who created Defender. It had excellent gameplay and two joysticks were used for input.
[Robotron page]
Tron, Bally/Midway, 1982
Tron was designed in conjunction with the Disney's film of the same name. The game became an important part of the movie. Tron video game produced more profit than the movie.
[Tron Manual]
Zaxxon, Sega Ltd., 1982
Zaxxon introduced an 3D-lookalike isometric perspective to video games. It had brilliant graphics for its time and it became a big hit.
Star Wars, Atari Inc., 1983.
Star Wars was based on the Star Wars movie by George Lucas. It was designed by Mike Hally and it was programmed and developed by Greg Rivera, Norm Avellar, Eric Durfey, Jed Margolin and Earl Vickers. It was great multi-color vector graphics, 12 channel music and sound effects with speech. In 1985 released a sequel for the game, called The Empire Strikes Back.
Star Wars is the most successful movie of all time and more games have been made of it than any other movie.
[Star Wars: The New Republic]
Dragon's Lair, Starcom/Cinematronics, 1983
Dragon's Lair was created by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth. It was an interactive animated film and it was the first video games utilize laserdisc. Its graphics were much better than any of games of its time - of movie quality - and it had great stereo sound, but the gameplay wasn't good (player had only few choices to select from). Its incredible graphics created a huge media hype. Journalists predicted that laser video games would the soon dominate video games. But laserdisc players were very expensive in that time and laservideo games machines were very unreliable.
In 1984 Magicom/Cinematronics released another laser disc animation-movie-game, called Space Ace which was designed by the same team. The success of laser video games was short and it started to fade in the middle of 1984. About a decade later interactive movie type games re-apperad in CD-ROM format for home computers and are now one of the most popular PC game genres.
[picture of Dragon's Lair arcade game] [screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [yet another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [The Dragon's Lair Project]
I, Robot, Atari Inc., 1984
I, Robot was the first game to feature 3-D polygon graphics. Only a thousand I, Robots were ever produced.
Xevious, Namco/Atari Inc., 1985
Xevious had scrolling terrain background with both ground and air targets. Xevious became the basis of new generation of scrolling shoot'em'up games.
[Xevious Emulator Page (well worth to check!)]
Gauntlet, Atari Games, 1985
Gauntlet was designed by Ed Logg. It had good graphics and great game-play with up to 4 simultaneous players.
[Gauntlet I/II Hackers Page]
Space Harrier, Sega, 1986
Space Harrier had fast scaling sprite based 3D graphics with stereo diginal sound. It marked the beginning of transformation of established genres toward three-dimensionality and more high-powered arcade hardware.
The game was designed by Sega's legendary game designer Yu Suzuki, who is also responsible for Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Hang-On and Shen-Mue.
Street Fighter II, Capcom, 1991
Cinematronics Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting video game and Data East's Karate Champ (1984) had already introduced the "side view" perspective, the genre of fighting game practically didn't exist until Capcom released Street Fighter II. It had many truly different charachters to choose from and good game play. SFII started the new "golden age" of arcades. SFII was also converted to many home systems and the Super Nintendo version alone sold more than 15 million copies.
The success of SFII procudes many competitors e.g. the Mortal Kombat, Killing Instinct and Virtua Fighter series. SFII has numerous sequels and even a movie was made out of it. Fighting games started the new golden age of arcade games.
Virtua Racing, Sega, 1992
Virtua Racing started the new age of fast polygon racing games and high-powered multi-player simulators. Virtua Racing had good gameplay and force-feedback steering with the most realistic graphics up to its date.
Virtua Fighter, Sega, 1993
Virtua Fighter brought fast 3D polygon graphics to fighting games and changed the fighting game industry. Nowadays practically all fighting games have 3D graphics.
Daytona, Sega, 1994
Daytona was one of the first racing games to feature fast texture mapped and shaded 3D polygon graphics. Its great graphics, game-play and team-play option made it a huge hit.
Future
Nowadays most of the arcade games are either fighting games, racing games, sport games or shoot'em'ups, with some rare innovative titles. The lack of diversity leaves the arcade business into vulnerable position. The current trend is for more photo-realistics graphics and more processing power, with very little, or no, new ideas at all. The big question is, will the players remaing interested with current game genres or do they want something new?
Most arcade video games have custem designed hardware, but the increasing developing costs and fast development of PC 3D accelerator chips, will most likely make many companies to use more standard PC hardware instead custom solutions.
Nowadays most of the arcade games still have the program, graphics and sound data in ROM chips, but hard disks are coming more popular and popular and will probably replace ROMs.
Standard hardware and harddisks will make it easier to include many games to single video game machine or use the same hardware for different games.
Many current arcade video games had a local network option, enabling 2-16 machines to be connected to single multi-player game in the same arcade. In future arcade video games will probably be connected external network, enabling players to play against players from other cities or even countries.
History of Home Video Games
The home video game systems are presented in choronological order. I have selected the most commercially successful systems or systems which had some technical innovations. Hand-held video games and home computers are not discussed, although they are an interesting subject.
Magnavox Odyssey
Magnavox Odyssey was designed by Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch of Sanders Associates, a military electronics firm in 1966-67. It was introduced in 1972 at a price of $100. Because micro chips were so expensive at that time, the Odyssey was designed using only 40 transistors and 40 diodes. Odyssey was able to generate only very simple on-screen effects and the players had to keep score by themselves, because the machine was incapable of doing so. Odyssey was packaged with screen overlays (to be placed on the TV screen to simulate complex graphics), two controllers, six game cards, play money, playing cards, a roulette and football playfield, a fold-out scoreboard, poker chips and a pair of dice. It wasn't a successful game.
[Ralph H. Baer - the history of Odyssey with great pictures by the author himself]
Atari PONG
Pong was the home version of the successful arcade game. It was designed by Al Alcorn, Bob Brown, and Harold Lee and introduced in 1975. It became a big hit and spawned many clone machines.
[What's Wrong With Pong?]
Atari 2600
Atari 2600, also known as Atari Video Computer System (VCS), was designed by Joe Decure, Harold Lee, and Steve Meyer. It was released in 1977 at introductory price of $199.95. It was the most popular videogame console of its day and it was available until 1990, being on the market longer than any other system in history. Several hundred games were developed for it. It featured an 8-bit CPU, MOS 6507 @ 1.19 MHz, 16 color graphics, 2 channel audio (noise and sound). It only had 128 bytes of RAM memory and no video memory (CPU had control the video chip with screen refresh). The games were supplied in ROM cartridge, with the maximum size of 4 kilobytes. Later-on the limit of 4 kB was exceeded with paging ROM pages.
[Atari 2600/5200/7800 FAQ] [Atari 2600 fun facts and information]
Coleco Colecovision
Coleco released the Colecovision in 1982 at $199.95. It had 48 Kbytes of RAM and 3.58 MHz, 8-bit, Z80A CPU making it the most highpowered home system of its time.
[ColecoVision Homepage]
Atari 5200 SuperSystem
Atari released the 5200 SuperSystem in 1982. It was basically an Atari 400 home computer without a keyboard. It had 1.78, 8-bit, 6502C CPU and 16 Kbytes of RAM. It was capable of 320x192 resolution with 16 colors from 256 color palette and it 4-channel sound. It was the first system to come equipped with 4 controller ports for multi-player games. Despite that it had much better hardware than the Atari 2600, it never became the success Atari expected. Cheap home computers started to gain market from video games in the beginning of the 80's and it took too much time before quality game titles were developed to Atari 5200.
[Atari 5200 FAQ]
Milton Bradley/GCE Vectrex
Vectrex was designed by John Ross, Gerry Karr, John Hall and ex-Atari employees Paul Newell and Mark Indictor from an idea by Jay Smith. It was released in 1982 at a price of $199. It incorporated a 9 inch Vector graphic monitor and used a Motorola 68A09, 8-bit microprocessor. It wasn't a success, but it had loyal fans.
[Saturn's Vectrex World]
Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom)
Nintendo Entertainment System, briefly NES, was designed Masayuki Uemura. It released in 1985. It had an 8-bit CPU (6502 @ 1.79 MHz) and 2 kilobytes of RAM. The Graphics were capable of maximum of 256*224 pixel (NTSC) resolution and 16 simultaneous colors from a palette of 52 colors. It had 2 kilobytes graphics work RAM and 64 simultaneous sprites. Its sound system had 2 square wave channels, 1 triangle wave channel, 1 noise channel and 1 PCM channel.
[8 bits of power!]
NEC Turbografx-16
NEC Turbografx was released in Japan in 1988 as the PC Engine, the system was renamed the Turbografx-16 when it reached North America in 1989. Although it was advertised as a 16-bit game machine, it actually had an 8-bit CPU, 65802 @ 16 MHz. It did contain a separate 16-bit graphics chip however. The Turbografx-16 became the first system to have a CD-player attachment.
[Turbografx Information]
Sega Genesis
Sega noticed that great games sold systems, so it took elements from its 16-bit arcade machines and produced the Mega-Drive in 1989. In America the machine was called Genesis, and it retailed for $199. It had 16-bit CPU (Motorola 68000 @ 7.6 MHz) and 72 kbytes RAM in addition to 64 Kbytes video RAM. The graphics were capable of 320*224 to 320x448 (NTSC) resolution and 61 simultaneous colors from a palette of 512 colors and 80 sprites. It had 10 sound channels and Z80 was used as an audio processor.
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super Famicom)
Super Nintendo, or briefly, SNES, system was introduced in 1990. SNES had 16-bit CPU (65816 @ 3.6 MHz) and 128 kbytes RAM and 64 Kbytes of video RAM. Its graphics were capable of 256*224 to 512x448 (NTSC) resolution, 256 simultaneous colors from a palette of 32768 colors and 128 sprites. It had 8 separate 8-bit PCM sound channels.
[The Forbidden Super Nintendo Information Repositor] [SNES HQ]
Sega Saturn
Sega Saturn uses two 28.8 MHz, 32-bit, Hitachi SH2 CPUs along with several custom processors. It has hardware accelerated texturemapped 3D support, 320x224 resolution with 24-bit truecolor. It has a total of 4 megabytes RAM and a double speed CDROM drive. Saturn has 32 sound channels and Motorola 68EC000 is serving as an audio processor. Saturn was the first home video game to have an (optional) Internet connection module.
[Sega Zone]
Sony Playstation
The Sony playstation uses a 33 MHz, 32-bit, MIPS R3900i CPU and it has hardware acceleration for texturemapped 3D polygon graphics at max. 640x480 resolution with 24-bit truecolor, 24 channel sound and a double speed CDROM drive.
[Absolute Playstation] [Playstation Nation] [PSX Power]
Nintendo Ultra 64
Nintendo Ultra 64 was developed by Silicon Graphics and it was released in 1996 at an introductory price of $150. It has 64-bit CPU (customized MIPS R4300i series @ 93.75 MHz) and 4.5 Megabytes of RAM. It graphics are able to resolutions of 256 x 224 to 640 x 480 pixels with 32-bit RGBA pixel color frame buffer support, 3D graphics hardware acceleration (Z buffer, antialiasing, tri-linear filtered, mip-map and perspective corrected texture mapping etc.). Unlike the other new video games systems, Ultra 64 games are supplied on ROM cartridges. Its the most high-powered home system so far:
"Nintendo64 can perform 3.5 times as many adds per second as the original Cray-1, which cost $8,000,000 in 1976. The Cray-1 also consumed 60,000 wats of power, compared to the Nintendo64 machine's 5 watts. "
[N64.com] [N64 Gazetta]
Future
The introduction price of the popular video game has remained about the same for about twenty years. People don't want to pay a lot of money for a home video game machine. The profits are made by selling the games. The price of a single home video game has usually been much higher than the price of single computer game, despite the manufacturing costs for about the same, practically neglible.
The processing speed and the amount of RAM will increase. CDROM will probably be replaced with multispeed DVD. ROM has still its advantages; faster transfer rate and much faster random access time and most important better durability and ease of use.
In future almost all home video game system will have Internet connection either as on option or standard equipment. The cheap network consoles and Internet TV boxes will have also have games, shadowing the line between network consoles and video games.
The History of Atari
The rise and the fall of the pioneer firm of video game industry.
1971 Nolan Bushnell designed the first commercial arcade video game called "Computer Space", but it was not a big success.
1972 Atari Inc. was founded by Nolan Bushnell from a $250 investment. Pong arcade game becomes a smash hit.
1976 Atari Inc. was sold by Bushnell to Warner Inc. for $28 million.
1980 Atari Inc. posted record sales, $2 billion profits annually. Atari occupied 80 offices in Sunnyvale, California.
1983 Decline of video games and irresponsible spending by Atari Inc. resulted in record losses ($536 million, up to $2 million daily).
1984 Warner divided Atari Inc. to Atari Games (arcade games), and Atari Corporation (Home division). Atari Corp. was sold to Jack Tramiel.
1985 Atari Corp. released Atari ST home computer.
1989 Atari Corp. released Atari Lynx, the world's first color hand-held video game system.
1993 Atari Games became Time-Warner Interactive.
1993 Atari Corp. released Atari Jaguar, the world's first 64-bit home video game system.
1996 Time-Warner Interactive (Atari Games) was sold to WMS.
1996 Atari Corp. merged with JTS Corporation.
1998 Atari Corp. software and hardware rights were sold to Hasbro Inc. for only 5 million dollars.
power, had no real-time-graphics and only few people had access to them. In 1961, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) donated their latest computer to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1). It sold for $120,000. Compared to the many computers of its time, the PDP-1 was comparatively modest in size - about as big as a large automobile.
Like most universities, MIT had several campus organizations. One of them was the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). It appealed to students who liked to build systems and see how things worked. TMRC had access to PDP-1 and creating new programs and improving older ones was considered an impressive hack among them. They programmed for the fun of it, not for the money, and program source code was public domain, for anybody to use and improve.
Steve Russell, nicknamed "Slug", was a typical nerd with affection to Science Fiction and a member of TMRC. He decided to make the ultimate hack, an interactive game. It took Russell nearly six months and 200 man-hours to complete the first version of the game, a simple two-player game between rocket ships. Using toggle switches built into the PDP-1, players controlled the speed and direction of both ships and fired torpedoes at each other. Russell called his game, "Spacewar". In true hacker spirits the TMRC revised Spacewar and added several elements to it, including an accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with an accurate gravitational field in the foreground, hyperspace button, unpredictable torpedoes (for more realism) and built remote controllers to replace PDP-1's native controls (the forerunners of joystick). Spacewar was the predecessor of Asteroids (Atari) and Gravitar (Atari).
Although Russell's amazing hack created a sensation throughout MIT, he never made a penny from it. PDP computers cost too much to adapt the game for the consumer market, even as an arcade machine.
The First Video Game
The first video game was created by the engineers at Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire-based defense contractor. Ralph Baer was working Sanders Associates as manager of equipment design division. In August 1966 he came up with an idea building sometimes for $19.95, a game for TV set. He allocated few of his employees, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, to the project. In 1967, Rusch suggested a new game in which a hardwired logic circuit projected a spot flying across the screen. Originally, the object of the game was for players to catch the spot with manually controlled dots. Over time, the players' dots evolved into paddles, and the game became ping pong.
Sanders Associates had a rough time in the late sixties, down-sizing from 11,000 to 4,000 employees. As a military contractor, Sanders couldn't suddenly go into the toy business, so Baer had to find a customer for his invention. Baer tried to sell his invention to many parties, and finally in 1971 he made a deal with Magnavox. The product was called Magnavox Odyssey and it was first products were sold in 1972. Unfortunately Magnavox did a bad job - they over-engineered the machine and upped the price so that the system was sold for $100 and the advertisement campaign was poor. Ralph Baer's dream of $20 dollar game became a fiasco and his name was forgotten by most people.
History of Arcade Games
(based on Videotopia article)
The arcade video games are presented in choronological order. This is by no means a complete list. I have selected the most commercially successful games and games which had some technical innovations or new game idea or some other important reason to deserve to be mentioned here.
Computer Space, Nutting Associates, 1971
Computer Space was the first commercial arcade video game released to the public. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell. It had many technological innovations, but the gameplay was confusing and it didn't become a commercial success. Using the profits from the game Nolan Bushnell left Nutting Associates and formed Atari Inc.
Pong, Atari Inc., 1972
Pong was the first succesful arcade video game. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Alan Alcorn. The game play was extremely simple. It has two players, both which controlled a vertical bar which could bounce back a moving dot which moving between the vertical bars. Nolan placed the first game machine in a local gas station. When he became back the machine ceased to operate which it was full of money. Pong became an instant success and it created the arcade video game industry. Several home versions were also made of the Pong game and it also created the home video game industry as well.
[Pong: The Revolutionary Game]
Tank, Kee Games/Atari Inc., 1974
Tank was the first video game which used ROM chips to store graphic data. It had on-screen characters that actually looked like recognizable objects. Before that video games used simple block graphics like in Pong, or collections of dots as in Computer Space.
Gunfight, Taito/Midway, 1975
Gunfight was a two-player game in style of Western movies. It was the first Japanese title to be licensed for release in America. Midway redesigned it to allow more varied game play. The redesigned version was the first video arcade game to utilize a microprocessor.
Night Driver, Atari Inc., 1976
Night Driver was the first racing game with "first person" perspective, showing the road as if actually seen from the car. Before Night Driver there had been many racing games with bird perspective (seen from above), e.g. the popular Atari game called "Sprint 2" from 1976. The night theme was chosen to hide the limitation of the hardware to create more complicated images. For many years, most 3D games built on the basic concept of Night Driver, using computer hardware to "scale" flat images called "sprites" in order to simulate movement in the 3D.
Breakout, Atari Inc., 1976
Breakout was designed by Atari's fortieth employee Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak. A year later these two persons founded Apple Computer.
Space Invaders, Taito/Bally/Midway, 1978
Space Invaders was the first blockbuster videogame. It brought the video games out of arcades and bars into restaurants, corner stores an brought video games into the public conciousness. It was translated to Atari 2600 video home game system and the home versio was also a huge commercial hit.
[Space Invaders Manual]
Football, Atari Inc., 1978
Football was the first true video sports game. It was created by Dave Stubben. Its development originally began as a game called "X's and O's" by Steve Bristow in late 1973. The project was shelved for years until the Atari figured out a way to break out from the limits of the single-screen game displays of the time. Football introduced "scrolling" video game displays to the world, allowing games to take place on playfields larger than the monitor on which they were displayed. Later-on Atari has made a lot of money for its patent for scrolling video game displays that rose from Football. Football was also the first game to feature the track ball.
Asteroids, Atari Inc., 1979
Asteroids was Atari's answer to Space Invaders. The game was designed by Ed Logg and it utilized a monochrome vector graphics display, which was capable of fast moving objects made of very sharp lines (compared to crude pixel graphics of its time). Combined with great game play it became the biggest selling of game of its time.
Asteroids and Lunar Lander (Atari, 1980) were the predecessors Gravitar (Atari) and many modern rotating ship shoot'em'up games e.g. Xpilot.
Warrior, Vectorbeam/Cinematronics, 1979.
Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting game. It was a two-player overhead sword-fighting contest. It had a brillian vector graphics display for its time, but unfortunately it was less reliable than the Atari one. It was a very rare game.
Battlezone, Atari Inc., 1980
Battlezone was the the first video game to feature truly interactive 3-D environment. It had 2-color vector display. The United States Armed Forces were so impressed by the game that they commissioned Atari to build specially modified and upgraded versions for use in tank training.
Defender, Williams Electronics, 1980
Defender was designed by Eugene Jarvis. It was the first video game to feature artificial "world" in which game events could occur outside on-screen view presented to the player.
[Defender Information]
Pac-Man, Bally/Midway, 1980
Pac-Man designed by Toru Iwatani and it was licensed from Namco. It was based on an ancient Japanese folk-tale. The idea of the game was to control the pac-man character which was moving inside a maze eating dots and to avoid ghosts which tried to kill pac-man. The was a huge hit around the world. It appeared in magazines covers, spawned a cartoon and hit song.
Pac-Man has spawned more sequels than perhaps any other video game: Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Mr & Mrs. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Professor Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac- Attack, Pac-Man 2, Pac-In-Time, Pac-Man VR, Pac-Man Ghost Zone...
[First Church of Pac-Man]
Donkey Kong, Nintendo Ltd., 1981
Donkey Kong was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It used the same hardware as an older video game called 'Radarscope'. The idea of the game was to control a jumpman character which tried to rescue a girl from a giant ape. Later-on the jumpman was named Mario, the most famous and succesful game-character ever invented.
Centipede, Atari Inc., 1981
Centipede was designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey. It was the first arcade game to be co-designed by a woman. Its colorful graphics and good game play made Centipede the first video game to be more popular with women than with men.
Tempest, Atari Inc., 1981
Tempest was designed by Dave Theurer. It was the first Atari game to utilize a multicolor vector display. It had beautiful 3D wireframe graphics and it became an instant hit.
[Tempest Operation Information] [Tempest 2000]
Pole Position, Namco/Atari, 1982
Pole Position started the trend for foto-realistics graphics in video games. It was a driving game with persceptive from the car view point, just like Night Driver. In addition to great graphics, it had great game play and it was a huge success, dominated game charts for almost about 2 years. Modern driving games are still more or less based on Pole Position, only graphics have improved.
Robotron: 2084, Williams Electronics, 1982
Robotron was designed by the same people who created Defender. It had excellent gameplay and two joysticks were used for input.
[Robotron page]
Tron, Bally/Midway, 1982
Tron was designed in conjunction with the Disney's film of the same name. The game became an important part of the movie. Tron video game produced more profit than the movie.
[Tron Manual]
Zaxxon, Sega Ltd., 1982
Zaxxon introduced an 3D-lookalike isometric perspective to video games. It had brilliant graphics for its time and it became a big hit.
Star Wars, Atari Inc., 1983.
Star Wars was based on the Star Wars movie by George Lucas. It was designed by Mike Hally and it was programmed and developed by Greg Rivera, Norm Avellar, Eric Durfey, Jed Margolin and Earl Vickers. It was great multi-color vector graphics, 12 channel music and sound effects with speech. In 1985 released a sequel for the game, called The Empire Strikes Back.
Star Wars is the most successful movie of all time and more games have been made of it than any other movie.
[Star Wars: The New Republic]
Dragon's Lair, Starcom/Cinematronics, 1983
Dragon's Lair was created by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth. It was an interactive animated film and it was the first video games utilize laserdisc. Its graphics were much better than any of games of its time - of movie quality - and it had great stereo sound, but the gameplay wasn't good (player had only few choices to select from). Its incredible graphics created a huge media hype. Journalists predicted that laser video games would the soon dominate video games. But laserdisc players were very expensive in that time and laservideo games machines were very unreliable.
In 1984 Magicom/Cinematronics released another laser disc animation-movie-game, called Space Ace which was designed by the same team. The success of laser video games was short and it started to fade in the middle of 1984. About a decade later interactive movie type games re-apperad in CD-ROM format for home computers and are now one of the most popular PC game genres.
[picture of Dragon's Lair arcade game] [screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [yet another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [The Dragon's Lair Project]
I, Robot, Atari Inc., 1984
I, Robot was the first game to feature 3-D polygon graphics. Only a thousand I, Robots were ever produced.
Xevious, Namco/Atari Inc., 1985
Xevious had scrolling terrain background with both ground and air targets. Xevious became the basis of new generation of scrolling shoot'em'up games.
[Xevious Emulator Page (well worth to check!)]
Gauntlet, Atari Games, 1985
Gauntlet was designed by Ed Logg. It had good graphics and great game-play with up to 4 simultaneous players.
[Gauntlet I/II Hackers Page]
Space Harrier, Sega, 1986
Space Harrier had fast scaling sprite based 3D graphics with stereo diginal sound. It marked the beginning of transformation of established genres toward three-dimensionality and more high-powered arcade hardware.
The game was designed by Sega's legendary game designer Yu Suzuki, who is also responsible for Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Hang-On and Shen-Mue.
Street Fighter II, Capcom, 1991
Cinematronics Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting video game and Data East's Karate Champ (1984) had already introduced the "side view" perspective, the genre of fighting game practically didn't exist until Capcom released Street Fighter II. It had many truly different charachters to choose from and good game play. SFII started the new "golden age" of arcades. SFII was also converted to many home systems and the Super Nintendo version alone sold more than 15 million copies.
The success of SFII procudes many competitors e.g. the Mortal Kombat, Killing Instinct and Virtua Fighter series. SFII has numerous sequels and even a movie was made out of it. Fighting games started the new golden age of arcade games.
Virtua Racing, Sega, 1992
Virtua Racing started the new age of fast polygon racing games and high-powered multi-player simulators. Virtua Racing had good gameplay and force-feedback steering with the most realistic graphics up to its date.
Virtua Fighter, Sega, 1993
Virtua Fighter brought fast 3D polygon graphics to fighting games and changed the fighting game industry. Nowadays practically all fighting games have 3D graphics.
Daytona, Sega, 1994
Daytona was one of the first racing games to feature fast texture mapped and shaded 3D polygon graphics. Its great graphics, game-play and team-play option made it a huge hit.
Future
Nowadays most of the arcade games are either fighting games, racing games, sport games or shoot'em'ups, with some rare innovative titles. The lack of diversity leaves the arcade business into vulnerable position. The current trend is for more photo-realistics graphics and more processing power, with very little, or no, new ideas at all. The big question is, will the players remaing interested with current game genres or do they want something new?
Most arcade video games have custem designed hardware, but the increasing developing costs and fast development of PC 3D accelerator chips, will most likely make many companies to use more standard PC hardware instead custom solutions.
Nowadays most of the arcade games still have the program, graphics and sound data in ROM chips, but hard disks are coming more popular and popular and will probably replace ROMs.
Standard hardware and harddisks will make it easier to include many games to single video game machine or use the same hardware for different games.
Many current arcade video games had a local network option, enabling 2-16 machines to be connected to single multi-player game in the same arcade. In future arcade video games will probably be connected external network, enabling players to play against players from other cities or even countries.
History of Home Video Games
The home video game systems are presented in choronological order. I have selected the most commercially successful systems or systems which had some technical innovations. Hand-held video games and home computers are not discussed, although they are an interesting subject.
Magnavox Odyssey
Magnavox Odyssey was designed by Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch of Sanders Associates, a military electronics firm in 1966-67. It was introduced in 1972 at a price of $100. Because micro chips were so expensive at that time, the Odyssey was designed using only 40 transistors and 40 diodes. Odyssey was able to generate only very simple on-screen effects and the players had to keep score by themselves, because the machine was incapable of doing so. Odyssey was packaged with screen overlays (to be placed on the TV screen to simulate complex graphics), two controllers, six game cards, play money, playing cards, a roulette and football playfield, a fold-out scoreboard, poker chips and a pair of dice. It wasn't a successful game.
[Ralph H. Baer - the history of Odyssey with great pictures by the author himself]
Atari PONG
Pong was the home version of the successful arcade game. It was designed by Al Alcorn, Bob Brown, and Harold Lee and introduced in 1975. It became a big hit and spawned many clone machines.
[What's Wrong With Pong?]
Atari 2600
Atari 2600, also known as Atari Video Computer System (VCS), was designed by Joe Decure, Harold Lee, and Steve Meyer. It was released in 1977 at introductory price of $199.95. It was the most popular videogame console of its day and it was available until 1990, being on the market longer than any other system in history. Several hundred games were developed for it. It featured an 8-bit CPU, MOS 6507 @ 1.19 MHz, 16 color graphics, 2 channel audio (noise and sound). It only had 128 bytes of RAM memory and no video memory (CPU had control the video chip with screen refresh). The games were supplied in ROM cartridge, with the maximum size of 4 kilobytes. Later-on the limit of 4 kB was exceeded with paging ROM pages.
[Atari 2600/5200/7800 FAQ] [Atari 2600 fun facts and information]
Coleco Colecovision
Coleco released the Colecovision in 1982 at $199.95. It had 48 Kbytes of RAM and 3.58 MHz, 8-bit, Z80A CPU making it the most highpowered home system of its time.
[ColecoVision Homepage]
Atari 5200 SuperSystem
Atari released the 5200 SuperSystem in 1982. It was basically an Atari 400 home computer without a keyboard. It had 1.78, 8-bit, 6502C CPU and 16 Kbytes of RAM. It was capable of 320x192 resolution with 16 colors from 256 color palette and it 4-channel sound. It was the first system to come equipped with 4 controller ports for multi-player games. Despite that it had much better hardware than the Atari 2600, it never became the success Atari expected. Cheap home computers started to gain market from video games in the beginning of the 80's and it took too much time before quality game titles were developed to Atari 5200.
[Atari 5200 FAQ]
Milton Bradley/GCE Vectrex
Vectrex was designed by John Ross, Gerry Karr, John Hall and ex-Atari employees Paul Newell and Mark Indictor from an idea by Jay Smith. It was released in 1982 at a price of $199. It incorporated a 9 inch Vector graphic monitor and used a Motorola 68A09, 8-bit microprocessor. It wasn't a success, but it had loyal fans.
[Saturn's Vectrex World]
Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom)
Nintendo Entertainment System, briefly NES, was designed Masayuki Uemura. It released in 1985. It had an 8-bit CPU (6502 @ 1.79 MHz) and 2 kilobytes of RAM. The Graphics were capable of maximum of 256*224 pixel (NTSC) resolution and 16 simultaneous colors from a palette of 52 colors. It had 2 kilobytes graphics work RAM and 64 simultaneous sprites. Its sound system had 2 square wave channels, 1 triangle wave channel, 1 noise channel and 1 PCM channel.
[8 bits of power!]
NEC Turbografx-16
NEC Turbografx was released in Japan in 1988 as the PC Engine, the system was renamed the Turbografx-16 when it reached North America in 1989. Although it was advertised as a 16-bit game machine, it actually had an 8-bit CPU, 65802 @ 16 MHz. It did contain a separate 16-bit graphics chip however. The Turbografx-16 became the first system to have a CD-player attachment.
[Turbografx Information]
Sega Genesis
Sega noticed that great games sold systems, so it took elements from its 16-bit arcade machines and produced the Mega-Drive in 1989. In America the machine was called Genesis, and it retailed for $199. It had 16-bit CPU (Motorola 68000 @ 7.6 MHz) and 72 kbytes RAM in addition to 64 Kbytes video RAM. The graphics were capable of 320*224 to 320x448 (NTSC) resolution and 61 simultaneous colors from a palette of 512 colors and 80 sprites. It had 10 sound channels and Z80 was used as an audio processor.
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super Famicom)
Super Nintendo, or briefly, SNES, system was introduced in 1990. SNES had 16-bit CPU (65816 @ 3.6 MHz) and 128 kbytes RAM and 64 Kbytes of video RAM. Its graphics were capable of 256*224 to 512x448 (NTSC) resolution, 256 simultaneous colors from a palette of 32768 colors and 128 sprites. It had 8 separate 8-bit PCM sound channels.
[The Forbidden Super Nintendo Information Repositor] [SNES HQ]
Sega Saturn
Sega Saturn uses two 28.8 MHz, 32-bit, Hitachi SH2 CPUs along with several custom processors. It has hardware accelerated texturemapped 3D support, 320x224 resolution with 24-bit truecolor. It has a total of 4 megabytes RAM and a double speed CDROM drive. Saturn has 32 sound channels and Motorola 68EC000 is serving as an audio processor. Saturn was the first home video game to have an (optional) Internet connection module.
[Sega Zone]
Sony Playstation
The Sony playstation uses a 33 MHz, 32-bit, MIPS R3900i CPU and it has hardware acceleration for texturemapped 3D polygon graphics at max. 640x480 resolution with 24-bit truecolor, 24 channel sound and a double speed CDROM drive.
[Absolute Playstation] [Playstation Nation] [PSX Power]
Nintendo Ultra 64
Nintendo Ultra 64 was developed by Silicon Graphics and it was released in 1996 at an introductory price of $150. It has 64-bit CPU (customized MIPS R4300i series @ 93.75 MHz) and 4.5 Megabytes of RAM. It graphics are able to resolutions of 256 x 224 to 640 x 480 pixels with 32-bit RGBA pixel color frame buffer support, 3D graphics hardware acceleration (Z buffer, antialiasing, tri-linear filtered, mip-map and perspective corrected texture mapping etc.). Unlike the other new video games systems, Ultra 64 games are supplied on ROM cartridges. Its the most high-powered home system so far:
"Nintendo64 can perform 3.5 times as many adds per second as the original Cray-1, which cost $8,000,000 in 1976. The Cray-1 also consumed 60,000 wats of power, compared to the Nintendo64 machine's 5 watts. "
[N64.com] [N64 Gazetta]
Future
The introduction price of the popular video game has remained about the same for about twenty years. People don't want to pay a lot of money for a home video game machine. The profits are made by selling the games. The price of a single home video game has usually been much higher than the price of single computer game, despite the manufacturing costs for about the same, practically neglible.
The processing speed and the amount of RAM will increase. CDROM will probably be replaced with multispeed DVD. ROM has still its advantages; faster transfer rate and much faster random access time and most important better durability and ease of use.
In future almost all home video game system will have Internet connection either as on option or standard equipment. The cheap network consoles and Internet TV boxes will have also have games, shadowing the line between network consoles and video games.
The History of Atari
The rise and the fall of the pioneer firm of video game industry.
1971 Nolan Bushnell designed the first commercial arcade video game called "Computer Space", but it was not a big success.
1972 Atari Inc. was founded by Nolan Bushnell from a $250 investment. Pong arcade game becomes a smash hit.
1976 Atari Inc. was sold by Bushnell to Warner Inc. for $28 million.
1980 Atari Inc. posted record sales, $2 billion profits annually. Atari occupied 80 offices in Sunnyvale, California.
1983 Decline of video games and irresponsible spending by Atari Inc. resulted in record losses ($536 million, up to $2 million daily).
1984 Warner divided Atari Inc. to Atari Games (arcade games), and Atari Corporation (Home division). Atari Corp. was sold to Jack Tramiel.
1985 Atari Corp. released Atari ST home computer.
1989 Atari Corp. released Atari Lynx, the world's first color hand-held video game system.
1993 Atari Games became Time-Warner Interactive.
1993 Atari Corp. released Atari Jaguar, the world's first 64-bit home video game system.
1996 Time-Warner Interactive (Atari Games) was sold to WMS.
1996 Atari Corp. merged with JTS Corporation.
1998 Atari Corp. software and hardware rights were sold to Hasbro Inc. for only 5 million dollars.
power, had no real-time-graphics and only few people had access to them. In 1961, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) donated their latest computer to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1). It sold for $120,000. Compared to the many computers of its time, the PDP-1 was comparatively modest in size - about as big as a large automobile.
Like most universities, MIT had several campus organizations. One of them was the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). It appealed to students who liked to build systems and see how things worked. TMRC had access to PDP-1 and creating new programs and improving older ones was considered an impressive hack among them. They programmed for the fun of it, not for the money, and program source code was public domain, for anybody to use and improve.
Steve Russell, nicknamed "Slug", was a typical nerd with affection to Science Fiction and a member of TMRC. He decided to make the ultimate hack, an interactive game. It took Russell nearly six months and 200 man-hours to complete the first version of the game, a simple two-player game between rocket ships. Using toggle switches built into the PDP-1, players controlled the speed and direction of both ships and fired torpedoes at each other. Russell called his game, "Spacewar". In true hacker spirits the TMRC revised Spacewar and added several elements to it, including an accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with an accurate gravitational field in the foreground, hyperspace button, unpredictable torpedoes (for more realism) and built remote controllers to replace PDP-1's native controls (the forerunners of joystick). Spacewar was the predecessor of Asteroids (Atari) and Gravitar (Atari).
Although Russell's amazing hack created a sensation throughout MIT, he never made a penny from it. PDP computers cost too much to adapt the game for the consumer market, even as an arcade machine.
The First Video Game
The first video game was created by the engineers at Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire-based defense contractor. Ralph Baer was working Sanders Associates as manager of equipment design division. In August 1966 he came up with an idea building sometimes for $19.95, a game for TV set. He allocated few of his employees, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, to the project. In 1967, Rusch suggested a new game in which a hardwired logic circuit projected a spot flying across the screen. Originally, the object of the game was for players to catch the spot with manually controlled dots. Over time, the players' dots evolved into paddles, and the game became ping pong.
Sanders Associates had a rough time in the late sixties, down-sizing from 11,000 to 4,000 employees. As a military contractor, Sanders couldn't suddenly go into the toy business, so Baer had to find a customer for his invention. Baer tried to sell his invention to many parties, and finally in 1971 he made a deal with Magnavox. The product was called Magnavox Odyssey and it was first products were sold in 1972. Unfortunately Magnavox did a bad job - they over-engineered the machine and upped the price so that the system was sold for $100 and the advertisement campaign was poor. Ralph Baer's dream of $20 dollar game became a fiasco and his name was forgotten by most people.
History of Arcade Games
(based on Videotopia article)
The arcade video games are presented in choronological order. This is by no means a complete list. I have selected the most commercially successful games and games which had some technical innovations or new game idea or some other important reason to deserve to be mentioned here.
Computer Space, Nutting Associates, 1971
Computer Space was the first commercial arcade video game released to the public. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell. It had many technological innovations, but the gameplay was confusing and it didn't become a commercial success. Using the profits from the game Nolan Bushnell left Nutting Associates and formed Atari Inc.
Pong, Atari Inc., 1972
Pong was the first succesful arcade video game. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Alan Alcorn. The game play was extremely simple. It has two players, both which controlled a vertical bar which could bounce back a moving dot which moving between the vertical bars. Nolan placed the first game machine in a local gas station. When he became back the machine ceased to operate which it was full of money. Pong became an instant success and it created the arcade video game industry. Several home versions were also made of the Pong game and it also created the home video game industry as well.
[Pong: The Revolutionary Game]
Tank, Kee Games/Atari Inc., 1974
Tank was the first video game which used ROM chips to store graphic data. It had on-screen characters that actually looked like recognizable objects. Before that video games used simple block graphics like in Pong, or collections of dots as in Computer Space.
Gunfight, Taito/Midway, 1975
Gunfight was a two-player game in style of Western movies. It was the first Japanese title to be licensed for release in America. Midway redesigned it to allow more varied game play. The redesigned version was the first video arcade game to utilize a microprocessor.
Night Driver, Atari Inc., 1976
Night Driver was the first racing game with "first person" perspective, showing the road as if actually seen from the car. Before Night Driver there had been many racing games with bird perspective (seen from above), e.g. the popular Atari game called "Sprint 2" from 1976. The night theme was chosen to hide the limitation of the hardware to create more complicated images. For many years, most 3D games built on the basic concept of Night Driver, using computer hardware to "scale" flat images called "sprites" in order to simulate movement in the 3D.
Breakout, Atari Inc., 1976
Breakout was designed by Atari's fortieth employee Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak. A year later these two persons founded Apple Computer.
Space Invaders, Taito/Bally/Midway, 1978
Space Invaders was the first blockbuster videogame. It brought the video games out of arcades and bars into restaurants, corner stores an brought video games into the public conciousness. It was translated to Atari 2600 video home game system and the home versio was also a huge commercial hit.
[Space Invaders Manual]
Football, Atari Inc., 1978
Football was the first true video sports game. It was created by Dave Stubben. Its development originally began as a game called "X's and O's" by Steve Bristow in late 1973. The project was shelved for years until the Atari figured out a way to break out from the limits of the single-screen game displays of the time. Football introduced "scrolling" video game displays to the world, allowing games to take place on playfields larger than the monitor on which they were displayed. Later-on Atari has made a lot of money for its patent for scrolling video game displays that rose from Football. Football was also the first game to feature the track ball.
Asteroids, Atari Inc., 1979
Asteroids was Atari's answer to Space Invaders. The game was designed by Ed Logg and it utilized a monochrome vector graphics display, which was capable of fast moving objects made of very sharp lines (compared to crude pixel graphics of its time). Combined with great game play it became the biggest selling of game of its time.
Asteroids and Lunar Lander (Atari, 1980) were the predecessors Gravitar (Atari) and many modern rotating ship shoot'em'up games e.g. Xpilot.
Warrior, Vectorbeam/Cinematronics, 1979.
Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting game. It was a two-player overhead sword-fighting contest. It had a brillian vector graphics display for its time, but unfortunately it was less reliable than the Atari one. It was a very rare game.
Battlezone, Atari Inc., 1980
Battlezone was the the first video game to feature truly interactive 3-D environment. It had 2-color vector display. The United States Armed Forces were so impressed by the game that they commissioned Atari to build specially modified and upgraded versions for use in tank training.
Defender, Williams Electronics, 1980
Defender was designed by Eugene Jarvis. It was the first video game to feature artificial "world" in which game events could occur outside on-screen view presented to the player.
[Defender Information]
Pac-Man, Bally/Midway, 1980
Pac-Man designed by Toru Iwatani and it was licensed from Namco. It was based on an ancient Japanese folk-tale. The idea of the game was to control the pac-man character which was moving inside a maze eating dots and to avoid ghosts which tried to kill pac-man. The was a huge hit around the world. It appeared in magazines covers, spawned a cartoon and hit song.
Pac-Man has spawned more sequels than perhaps any other video game: Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Mr & Mrs. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Professor Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac- Attack, Pac-Man 2, Pac-In-Time, Pac-Man VR, Pac-Man Ghost Zone...
[First Church of Pac-Man]
Donkey Kong, Nintendo Ltd., 1981
Donkey Kong was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It used the same hardware as an older video game called 'Radarscope'. The idea of the game was to control a jumpman character which tried to rescue a girl from a giant ape. Later-on the jumpman was named Mario, the most famous and succesful game-character ever invented.
Centipede, Atari Inc., 1981
Centipede was designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey. It was the first arcade game to be co-designed by a woman. Its colorful graphics and good game play made Centipede the first video game to be more popular with women than with men.
Tempest, Atari Inc., 1981
Tempest was designed by Dave Theurer. It was the first Atari game to utilize a multicolor vector display. It had beautiful 3D wireframe graphics and it became an instant hit.
[Tempest Operation Information] [Tempest 2000]
Pole Position, Namco/Atari, 1982
Pole Position started the trend for foto-realistics graphics in video games. It was a driving game with persceptive from the car view point, just like Night Driver. In addition to great graphics, it had great game play and it was a huge success, dominated game charts for almost about 2 years. Modern driving games are still more or less based on Pole Position, only graphics have improved.
Robotron: 2084, Williams Electronics, 1982
Robotron was designed by the same people who created Defender. It had excellent gameplay and two joysticks were used for input.
[Robotron page]
Tron, Bally/Midway, 1982
Tron was designed in conjunction with the Disney's film of the same name. The game became an important part of the movie. Tron video game produced more profit than the movie.
[Tron Manual]
Zaxxon, Sega Ltd., 1982
Zaxxon introduced an 3D-lookalike isometric perspective to video games. It had brilliant graphics for its time and it became a big hit.
Star Wars, Atari Inc., 1983.
Star Wars was based on the Star Wars movie by George Lucas. It was designed by Mike Hally and it was programmed and developed by Greg Rivera, Norm Avellar, Eric Durfey, Jed Margolin and Earl Vickers. It was great multi-color vector graphics, 12 channel music and sound effects with speech. In 1985 released a sequel for the game, called The Empire Strikes Back.
Star Wars is the most successful movie of all time and more games have been made of it than any other movie.
[Star Wars: The New Republic]
Dragon's Lair, Starcom/Cinematronics, 1983
Dragon's Lair was created by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth. It was an interactive animated film and it was the first video games utilize laserdisc. Its graphics were much better than any of games of its time - of movie quality - and it had great stereo sound, but the gameplay wasn't good (player had only few choices to select from). Its incredible graphics created a huge media hype. Journalists predicted that laser video games would the soon dominate video games. But laserdisc players were very expensive in that time and laservideo games machines were very unreliable.
In 1984 Magicom/Cinematronics released another laser disc animation-movie-game, called Space Ace which was designed by the same team. The success of laser video games was short and it started to fade in the middle of 1984. About a decade later interactive movie type games re-apperad in CD-ROM format for home computers and are now one of the most popular PC game genres.
[picture of Dragon's Lair arcade game] [screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [another screenshot from Dragon's Lair] [yet another screenshot from D
I like bugging people. Deal with it.
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CaTaClYsM
- Joined: Fri Jul 26, 2002 3:54 am
DRAGONS LAIR OWNS YOU ALL!!!!!
So in other words, one part of the community is waging war on another part of the community because they take their community seriously enough to want to do so. Then they tell the powerless side to get over the loss cause it's just an online community. I'm glad people make so much sense." -- Tab
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xtc_kurama
- Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2003 4:26 pm
- Location: Sitting in my chair as the head of CC
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CaTaClYsM
- Joined: Fri Jul 26, 2002 3:54 am
actually that is hwere you would be wrong, because DRAGONS LAIR I5 TEH B3ST G4M3 3V4R!
So in other words, one part of the community is waging war on another part of the community because they take their community seriously enough to want to do so. Then they tell the powerless side to get over the loss cause it's just an online community. I'm glad people make so much sense." -- Tab
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xtc_kurama
- Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2003 4:26 pm
- Location: Sitting in my chair as the head of CC