50 THINGS THAT CHANGED GAMING
Humanity had accomplished many things by the start of 1971, plenty of them rather impressive – we’d erected great buildings like the pyramids, created beautiful works of art and literature, and invented machines that could take us to the moon. Yet somehow, despite having invented a box that could display moving pictures and play sounds – you know, a television – somehow, nobody had yet figured out a way to sell us games to play on that box. By the end of the year, that had all changed with the introduction of Nutting Associates’ Computer Space, the first arcade videogame to be sold commercially.
Fifty years have passed since then, and the changes that have taken place since could scarcely have been imagined. There have been companies that have endured for years to shape the direction of the business, technologies that have transformed the possibilities of the medium and landmark games have pushed the boundaries of development. To celebrate this landmark anniversary, we’ve chosen to highlight 50 of these things, without which games would undoubtedly be very different indeed.
While plenty of the things we’ll talk about here are great, greatness alone isn’t sufficient to make the list. Everything we speak about here has been chosen for the effect it had on gaming as a whole, whether it made a difference in the past or continues to be influential to this day. You might even believe that some of these things are malign influences on videogames, and that’s certainly something to discuss – we’ll welcome your comments in the Mailbag pages – but you’d be hard-pressed to argue that any of them didn’t matter. So without further ado, let’s go back to the very beginning…
Special thanks to David Crookes
COMPUTER SPACE
■ Prior to 1971, the public was wholly unaware of videogames. That’s not to say that they didn’t exist, mind – they just existed behind closed doors, accessible only to those fortunate few at universities that hosted enormously expensive home computers. The most popular of these early games was Spacewar!, a competitive shooting game that spread from institution to institution throughout the Sixties. This was the starting point for Syzygy, an engineering company founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.
“I was emulating the game Space War that I had played in college on a PDP1,” Nolan recalls, half a century on from the release of the game. “My objective was to create the first coin-operated videogame. I knew the economics of that business from my experience as manager of the games department at an amusement park where I worked while in college. The cost of integrated circuits had dropped precipitously and I felt confident that I could make the economics work,” he explains.
Indeed, those looking for thrills had access to electromechanical amusements and pinball machines, so the business model was well established – it was only the technology that was particularly novel.
The game set the player’s spaceship against two computer-controlled UFOs, in a competition to score more hits than the enemy – a popular theme, given the Cold War competition between the USA and the Soviet Union. A brightly coloured plastic cabinet evoked the futurism of the era, and looked considerably fancier than the wooden cabinets that became commonplace as the arcade business grew. “Many decisions that I made were a combination of young exuberance and passion for the subject,” Nolan recalls “I thought a sleek, space-aged looking cabinet, which had never been done before, would be proper housing for the game.”
“I was confident from the start. The game was so revolutionary for the coin-op market and the state of games at that point,” Nolan recalls. It was a modest success for its manufacturer Nutting Associates, but the spaceship proved difficult for players to control. “Although it turned out to be too complex to be a massive success, I was happy with the few million sales it did make. Subsequently we simplified the gameplay with Pong, which was a tremendous success,” Nolan continues. Indeed, Computer Space was not the biggest videogame in the world – but it was the very first one you could put a coin in and play.
PONG
■ When people talk about the origins of videogames, has often been cited as the game that launched the industry. You naturally know that’s not the case, but the reason it has mistakenly received that accolade so often is simple – it was the first arcade game to achieve widespread success, in part because the simple bat and ball concept was far easier for had been.
