As usual, the opinions expressed in this column are the author’s alone, and do not reflect those of MyGaming
Epic Games made tabloidy headlines yesterday with their “money’s on console” business model, and with all the tedious predictability of a JRPG plot device*, PC fanboys everywhere responded with outrage. “HOW DARE THEY BETRAY US,” writes Hypothetical Furious PC Fanboy all over the internet. “GAMING STARTED ON PC.”
Well, that’s actually a bit of a yes and no.
Video gaming goes back a little further than most of you might think – just about all the way to the Mesozoic, in the complicated time continuum of computing. So that’s back to 1952, when everybody was busy digging bits of the Luftwaffe out of their gardens, and this guy Alexander Douglas over at Cambridge wrote a version of tic-tac-toe on the university’s monster EDSAC mainframe as part of his PhD. I say “mainframe” which makes it sound impressive, but this thing was basically a room full of cabinets stuffed with vacuum tubes, and its single input peripheral was a 5-hole punched tape reader. This was before Logitech, obviously.
Subsequent decades saw a bit more fiddling about on campuses with somethings that might be called “games”, but mostly weren’t much more than academic experiments in human-computer interaction models and excuses not to study for maths tests, although Steve Russell’s Spacewar, programmed on MIT’s DEC PDP-1 (a slightly more impressive mainframe than the EDSAC, now featuring bits of blue plastic), was something of a cult hit, and subsequently distributed with the computer. Then sometime during the 70s, the DEC PDP-10 mainframe played host to a bunch of simple games including Colossal Cave Adventure (in Stanford) and Multi-User Dungeon (in Essex). The latter has the distinction of being the first game to cross the Atlantic when the university opened remote access to the mainframe through the UK’s Packet Switch Stream, linking it with the ARPANET in America. Yeah, that’s the Cro-Mag’s online multiplayer there. It was probably laggy.
What’s significant here, however, is that gaming – for what it was back then – was very much confined to university computer science departments. That’s mostly because home computers didn’t actually exist, and that’s mostly because computers back then cost in excess of US$300 000. Which most people would reasonably agree is somewhat extortionate for something packing a 0.0002 gHz CPU.
But in 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney rolled out Computer Space, which was pretty much a Spacewar clone but with a slightly different name to avoid litigation (maybe), and turned it into the first commercially sold coin-operated video game. It bombed, but Bushnell and Dabney made enough cash to start their own company, Atari. You might’ve heard of it.
In 1972, Atari released Pong, which was pretty much a clone of a Magnavox Odyssey game but with a slightly different name to avoid litigation (although it didn’t work out this time) and video gaming arrived on the public scene in a big way. Initially manufactured and distributed as an arcade title , the game was signed to Sears, and the Sears Home Pong console turned up under Xmas trees everywhere in 1975. Where, conspicuously, there weren’t many PDP-10s bundled with Hunt the Wumpus. Or any, for that matter.
So the Magnavox Odyssey and Sears Home Pong consoles preceded the Tandy TRS-80 and Apple I home computers by over a year, and the Commodore 64 didn’t even turn up until the 80s. That looks suspiciously like home video gaming being very much a console thing at the start, doesn’t it? Uh-oh, it kinda does.
In conclusion then, while gaming technically kicked off on computers, these certainly weren’t home computers – or anything even remotely resembling what we’re calling computers these days, really – and it’s not unlikely that, without the advent of consoles, the entire industry would have fallen over and died before it even got properly started.
Here endeth the lesson.
* Aeris dies.
For another look at the history of video games, check out this article: The History of Video Games
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