electronic game
- Also called:
- computer game or video game
- Key People:
- John Carmack
- Richard Garriott
- Nolan Bushnell
electronic game, any interactive game operated by computer circuitry. The machines, or “platforms,” on which electronic games are played include general-purpose shared and personal computers, arcade consoles, video consoles connected to home television sets, handheld game machines, mobile devices such as cellular phones, and server-based networks. The term video game can be used to represent the totality of these formats, or it can refer more specifically only to games played on devices with video displays: television and arcade consoles.
From chess to Spacewar! to Pong
The idea of playing games on computers is almost as old as the computer itself. Initially, the payoffs expected from this activity were closely related to the study of computation. For example, the mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon proposed in 1950 that computers could be programmed to play chess, and he questioned whether this would mean that a computer could think. Shannon’s proposal stimulated decades of research on chess- and checkers-playing programs, generally by computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence.
Many computer games grew out of university and industrial computer laboratories. Several historically important games functioned originally as technology demonstrations, after having been developed as “after hours” amusements by students and technical staff. For example, in 1958 William A. Higinbotham of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York used an analog computer, control boxes, and an oscilloscope to create Tennis for Two as part of a public display for visitors to the laboratory. Only a few years later Steve Russell, Alan Kotok, J. Martin Graetz, and others created Spacewar! (1962) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This game began as a demonstration program to show off the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) minicomputer donated by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to MIT and the new Precision CRT Display Type 30 attached to it. This new technology appealed to the “hacker” culture of the Tech Model Railroad Club on campus, and its authors were members of this group. They wrote software and built control boxes that gave players the ability to move spaceships about on accurate star maps, maneuvering and firing space torpedoes at each other. Spacewar! was distinctly a product of MIT computing.
The widespread adoption of the PDP line of minicomputers on other campuses and laboratories in the 1960s and ’70s made Spacewar! a ubiquitous part of computing culture. One such institution was the University of Utah, home of a strong program in computer graphics and an electrical engineering student named Nolan Bushnell. After graduating in 1968, Bushnell moved to Silicon Valley to work for the Ampex Corporation. Bushnell had worked at an amusement park during college and after playing Spacewar! he dreamed of filling entertainment arcades with such electronic games. Together with one of his coworkers at Ampex, Ted Dabney, Bushnell designed Computer Space (1971), a coin-operated version of Spacewar! set in a wildly futuristic arcade cabinet. Although the game—manufactured and marketed by Nutting Associates, a vendor of coin-operated arcades—was a commercial failure, it established a standard design and general technical configuration for arcade consoles.
In 1972 Bushnell, Dabney, and Al Alcorn, another Ampex alumnus, founded the Atari Corporation. Bushnell asked Alcorn to design a simple game based on Ping-Pong, explaining by way of inspiration that Atari had received a contract to make it. While there was in fact no such contract, Alcorn was adept at television electronics and produced a simple and addictive game, which they named Pong. Unable to interest manufacturers of pinball games in this prototype, Bushnell and Alcorn installed it in a local bar, where it became an immediate success as a coin-operated game. After clearing a legal obstacle posed by the Magnavox Company’s hold on the patent for video games (discussed in the next section), Atari geared up to manufacture arcade consoles in volume. It thus created the “coin-op” game industry, achieving such success that it drew competitors into its new business space, the electronic game arcade, which became perhaps the main source for innovative electronic games well into the 1980s. (See Sidebar: Pac-Man.)
Early home video consoles
After computers and arcades, the third inspiration for early electronic games was television. Ralph Baer, a television engineer and manager at the military electronics firm of Sanders Associates (later integrated into BAE Systems), began in the late 1960s to develop technology and design games that could be played on television sets. In 1966 Baer designed circuitry to display and control moving dots on a television screen, leading to a simple chase game that he called Fox and Hounds. With this success in hand, Baer secured permission and funding from Sanders management to assemble a small group, the TV Game Project. Within a year several promising game designs had been demonstrated, and Baer’s group experimented with ways of delivering games to households by means such as cable television. In 1968 they completed the Brown Box, a solid-state prototype for a video game console. Three years later Baer was granted a U.S. patent for a “television gaming apparatus.” Magnavox acquired the rights soon thereafter, leading in 1972 to production of the first home video console, the Magnavox Odyssey.
The success of Pong as a coin-operated game led a number of companies, including Atari itself, to forge ahead with home versions and imitations of the game. Seeking to expand its coin-operated arcade business, Atari reached agreement with Sears, Roebuck and Company to manufacture and distribute the home version of Pong. Its success intensified the already brutal competition in this market. The Fairchild Channel F, released in 1976, and the Atari 2600 VCS (Video Computer System), released in 1977, led a new generation of consoles that used programmable ROM cartridges for distribution and storage of game software. These systems were programmable in the sense that different game cartridges could be inserted into special slots—a technical step that encouraged the separation of game development from hardware design. Activision, founded in 1979 by former Atari game designers David Crane and Alan Miller and entertainment executive Jim Levy, was the first company exclusively focused on game software. By 1983, however, the flood of game titles for the leading home consoles had led to a consumer backlash against the unpredictable quality of these games and a sharp decline in the home console industry.
