Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Night Driver introduced the idea of first-person perspective driving games, which are still widespread today, to a wider audience. The illusion of fast movement the game conjured up also showed just how microprocessors had released video games from the constraints of hardware-based design. But as well as ushering in changes in the arcades, microprocessors were about to alter the nature of home video games as well.

  [ 1 ]. The Video Pinball console was a home Pong -type console featuring seven games, including Breakout , Rebound and four pinball games. The console was also released as the Sears Pinball Breakaway. In Japan, Epoch released it as the Epoch TV-Block in 1979.

  [ 2 ]. Less than the memory used by an email with no text or subject line.

  [ 3 ]. It remains unclear what the game on the flyer was, but the most likely candidate is Nürburgring/1 , an arcade video game released in West Germany earlier in 1976 by the company Dr Ing Reiner Forest. Created by the company’s founder Reiner Forest and named after the famous German racetrack, Nürburgring/1 pioneered the drivers’ perspective viewpoint used in Night Driver . Forest later created Nürburgring/2 , a motorcycle-based driving game, and Nürburgring/3 , a more advanced version of the original game. But by the early 1980s, Forest’s company had quit the video game business to focus on making driving simulations.

  Dungeon master: Richard Garriott, aka Lord British. Courtesy of Richard Garriott

  5. The Biggest Eureka Moment Ever

  While the video game set about conquering the arcades of early 1970s, the birthplace of the medium – the computer – remained the preserve of the elite: sealed behind the closedoors of academia, government and business. Yet, unknown to players lining up to spend their loose change on Pong , video games were also thriving on the computer. The post- Spacewar! generation of computer programmers had picked up the baton of the Tech Model Railroad Club and begun to hone their coding skills by creating games.

  Unlike their counterparts in Atari and Bally, these game makers faced none of the commercial pressures of the arcades, where the demand was for simple, attention-grabbing games designed to extract cash from punters’ pockets as fast as possible. Their only limitation was the capabilities of the computers they used. While the Spacewar! team enjoyed the luxury of a screen, most users were still interacting with computers via teleprinters even as late as the mid-1970s.

  The reliance of teleprinters meant the only visuals their games could offer came in the form of text printed out on rolls of paper. “Whatever the machine had to say or display was printed on a narrow roll of newsprint paper that would click up the teleprinter painfully slowly,” said Don Daglow, who started making games while studying playwriting at Pomona College in Claremont, California. “We had a terminal that printed at 30 characters per second on paper 80 characters wide. It would print a new line every two seconds. It was so fast it took our breath away. When you’ve never seen it before it’s like magic – speed doesn’t enter into it.”

  This lack of speed, however, ruled out the creation of action games similar to those in the arcades. Instead, computer programmers had little choice but to make turn-based games. The vast majority of these games were incredibly crude. There were countless versions of tic-tac-toe, hangman and roulette, dozens of copies of board games such as Battleships and swarms of games that challenged players to guess numbers or words selected at random by the computer. But as the culture of game making spread amongst computer users, programmers began to explore more innovative ideas. Soon players could take part in Wild West shoot outs in Highnoon , take command of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek , manage virtual cities in The Sumer Game , search for monsters that lurked within digital caves in Hunt the Wumpus and try to land an Apollo Lunar Module on the moon in Lunar . The action in all these games took place turn by turn, with the text describing the outcomes of each player decision pecked out slowly on teleprinters.

  Even sport got the text-and-turns treatment, thanks to Daglow’s 1971 game Baseball . “Simulating things on computers was one of the things people did – if you read about something being done on a computer in a newspaper, very often you’d read they did a simulation of this or that,” said Daglow. “Once I understood what the computer could do, the idea of Baseball came from there – because baseball is such a mathematical game.” [1] Baseball’s simulation approach to sport was worlds away from the sports video games of the early arcades, which were, by-and-large, variations on Pong . Other programmers took the concept of simulations even further, pushing at the very limits of what could be regarded as a game. Eliza was one such experiment. Written in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Eliza turned the computer into a virtual psychotherapist that would ask users about their feelings and then use their typed replies to try and create a meaningful conversation. [2] Although it was often unconvincing, Eliza ’s attempt at letting people to interact with a computer using everyday language fired the imaginations of programmers across the world.

  One programmer Eliza influenced was Will Crowther. Crowther was a programmer at defence contractor Bolt Beranek and Newman where he helped lay the foundations for the internet by creating data transfer routines for the US military computer network ARPAnet. In 1975 Crowther and his wife Pat divorced and his two daughters went to live with their mother. Crowther worried he was drifting away from his daughters and began searching for a way to connect with them. He homed in on the idea of writing a game for them on his workplace computer.

  He based the game on the Bed Quilt Cave, part of the Mammoth-Flint Ridge caves of Kentucky that he and his wife used to explore together. He divided the caves into separate locations and gave each a text description before adding treasure to find, puzzles to solve and roaming monsters to fight. To make the game easy for his children to play he decided that, like Eliza , they should be able to use everyday English and got the game to recognise a small number of two-word verb-noun commands such as ‘go north’ or ‘get treasure’. Crowther hoped this ‘natural language’ approach would make the game less intimidating to non-computer users.

  The result, Adventure , was a giant leap forward for text games. While Hunt the Wumpus let people explore a virtual cave and Highnoon had described in-game events in text, none had used writing to try and create a world in the mind of players or let them interact with it using plain English. Yet while his daughters loved the game, Crowther thought it was nothing special. After completing Adventure in 1976, he left it on the computer system at work and headed to Alaska for a holiday. It could have ended there. Disapproving system administrators regularly deleted games they found to save precious memory space on the computers they managed. Indeed many of the computer games created during the 1960s and 1970s were lost forever thanks to these purges. “Only a small minority actually survived,” said Daglow. “The ones that were on systems that got spread around by Decus – the Digital Equipment Corporation User Sety – are the most likely to have survived, in part because a lot of those were reformatted or republished in the earliest computer hobbyist magazines.” But while Crowther took in the icy sights of Alaska, his colleagues discovered Adventure and began sharing it with other computer users. Soon it began turning up on computer networks in universities and workplaces throughout the world.

  In early 1977 Adventure arrived at Stanford University where it caught the attention of computer science student Don Woods. “A fellow student who had an account on the medical school’s time-sharing computer had discovered a copy in the ‘games’ folder there and described it briefly,” said Woods. “I was intrigued and got him to transfer a copy to the artificial intelligence lab’s computer where I had an account. It was definitely different from other computer games of the time. Some computer games included the element of exploration, but they were generally abstract and limited ‘worlds’ such as the 20 randomly connected rooms of Hunt the Wumpus . The descriptions in Crowther’s game really drew me into it and the various puzzles hooked me.”

 
; At the time it was common for the programmers to enhance or make alterations to games made by other people, after all no one had any expectation of making money from their creations. Woods believed he could improve Adventure and, after getting Crowther’s blessing, began to reprogram it.

  He changed around the layout of the caves, added new puzzles to solve and made the dwarves of the original roam the caves at random rather than follow pre-defined routes. Woods’ roommate Robert Pariseau also contributed ideas for enhancements, one of which was to make a maze of indistinguishable caverns that Crowther created even harder to solve. By April 1977 Woods had completed his alterations. He made the new version of Adventure available for others to play and copy, and went away for the university’s spring break. Woods was in for a surprise when he returned. “I was told the lab computer had been overloaded due to people connecting from all over to play Adventure ,” said Woods. The new version of Adventure generated even more interest than Crowther’s original and inspired others to write their own ‘text adventures’.

  Among them were a four members of the Dynamic Modelling group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer science lab: Tim Anderson; Marc Blank; Bruce Daniels; and Dave Lebling. “We decided to write a follow on to Adventure because we were simultaneously entranced and captivated by Adventure and annoyed at how hard it was to guess the right word to use, how few objects that were mentioned in the text could actually be referenced and how many things we wanted to say to the game that it couldn’t understand,” said Lebling. “We also wanted to see if we could do one; this is a typical reaction to a chunk of new code or a new idea if you are a software person.”

  Lebling had been making games for some time when the four decided to create their own take on Adventure , which they gave the work-in-progress title of Zork! . Unlike some of his computer game making peers he, as a student at MIT, had access to the one of the more cutting-edge systems of the era: the Imlac PDS-1. The Imlac could not only do graphics on its built-in display, but was one of the first computers that offered a Windows -style interface although it used a light pen instead of a mouse and required users to press a foot pedal to click. After making an enhanced version of Spacewar! and creating a graphical version of the previously text-only Hunt the Wumpus , Lebling started helping fellow MIT programmer Greg Thompson who wanted to update a game called Maze .

  Steve Colley and Howard Palmer, two programmers at NASA Ames Research Centre in California, created Maze in 1973 on an Imlac. It took full advantage of the Imlac’s visual capabilities to create a 3D maze viewed from a first-person perspective that players had to escape from. Later Palmer and Thompson, who worked at NASA Ames at the time, changed the game so that two Imlacs could be linked together and players – represented by floating eyeballs – could move around the maze trying to shoot each other. When Thompson ended up leaving NASA Ames to join MIT’s Dynamic Modelling team in early 1974, he brought Maze with him. “ Maze was based on a graphical maze-running game, Greg had brought from NASA Ames. We decided it would be much more fun if multiple people could play it and shoot each other,” Lebling said. The pair reworked Maze again so that up to eight people could play it at once. They created computer-controlled ‘robot’ players to make up the numbers when there weren’t enough real players and let players send each other text messages during while playing. Lebling and Thompson’s 1974 update of Maze pre-dated the online player versus player ‘death matches’ of first-person shooters, which would come to dominate the video games after the success of Doom , by nearly 20 years. “We actually played it a few times with colleagues on the West Coast, though ARPAnet was rather slow and the lag was horrible. Maze became so popular that the management of our group tried to suppress it,” said Lebling.

  In stark contrast to Maze , however, Zork! – Lebling, Blank, Daniels and Anderson’s attempt to outdo Adventure – was a text only. To outshine Adventure , the quartet invented a new fantasy world to explore and improved on the writing of Adventure seeking to give Zork! a more literary feel. The four also reworked thay the computer read players’ instructions so that people could use more complex sentences, such as ‘pick up the axe and chop down the tree’ rather than two-word commands. After completing the game they renamed it Dungeon . It wasn’t long before the lawyers of TSR, the makers of the pen-and-paper role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons , came knocking.

  * * *

  Dungeons & Dragons – a fusion of tabletop war games, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books and amateur dramatics – had become a phenomenon since its 1974 launch, recruiting millions of fans who spent hours acting out adventures based on complex statistical rules and rolls of polyhedral dice.

  Being a Dungeons & Dragons player required serious commitment, even if you were not the dungeon master – the player who had the job of designing the quest, running the game and handling the numerous probability equations that decide the outcomes of player decisions. Games of Dungeons & Dragons could take weeks with each play session lasting hours. Much of this would be taken up with debates about the calculations that accompanied the actions of players, said Richard Garriott, who joined the legions of Dungeons & Dragons fans in 1977 aged 17. “When you watch most people play paper Dungeons & Dragons they would sit down and go I’ve got a +3 sword, I’m standing behind you and I surprised you so I have initiative – that gives me +2,” said Garriott. “They go through this amazingly detailed argument about what the probability of a hit or miss should be. Finally, when they resolve that after five to 10 minutes, they roll a die and go ‘look I hit’ or ‘oops I missed’ and then they would start the argument all over. So the frequency of a turn of play is stunningly low.”

  The amount of number crunching and frustration involved made Dungeons & Dragons perfect for computerisation. “It was so well suited to simulate on a computer,” said Daglow, who in 1975 created Dungeon – one of the earliest computer role-playing games after getting fed up with the difficulty of getting players together for a game of Dungeons & Dragons . [3] “With Dungeons & Dragons a lot of the things that were most frustrating on paper and time consuming, the computer does all that for you.” Dungeon gave Daglow the chance to make a game for the new computer monitor terminals that were arriving at Stanford at the time rather than for a teleprinter. These terminals, however, could only display monochrome text and it could take up to 20 to 30 seconds for the screen to change. But the screen allowed Daglow to give his game some visuals in the form of a map composed of punctuation marks and mathemical symbols. It was an approach many subsequent video games, particularly role-playing games, would revisit time and time again in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

  TSR had paid no attention to Daglow’s game or many of the other computer role-playing games that copied Dungeons & Dragons , but when it got wind of MIT’s Dungeon it decided to send in the lawyers. “TSR had a trademark on the word ‘dungeon’, which they decided to defend,” said Lebling. “MIT’s lawyers told them at great length that they were being silly, but we decided to change the name back to Zork! anyway as it was more distinctive and unusual.”

  By this time the idea of having an unusual name had grown in appeal since the game’s creators were thinking about forming a software publishing business to cash in on the latest by-product of the microprocessor: the home computer.

  Kit computers such as the Altair 8800 and KIM-1 had already brought the idea of home computers closer to reality, but as more advanced microprocessors came onto the market in the second half of the 1970s the vision really began to gather momentum. Soon pioneering companies and technologically minded entrepreneurs were investigating the idea of creating computers small and cheap enough that everyone could own one.

  One of the first people to really push the idea forward was Steve Wozniak. After completing his prototype of Atari’s coin-op game Breakout , he decided to make his own computer. He spent his evenings and weekends building the Apple I, a microprocessor-based computer that could connect to a keyboard and a home
TV. He showed the prototype to his friend Steve Jobs, who had just returned from his trip to India. Jobs suggested they form a company to sell it to other computer enthusiasts and on 1st April 1976 they formed Apple Computer. The company produced more than 150 hand-made Apple Is but, by the time it went on sale in the summer of 1976, Wozniak was already close to completing work on a better computer that could appeal to a wider audience: the Apple II. Wozniak set himself the goal of designing a computer powerful enough to allow people to create state-of-the-art video games.

  It would, he decided, have colour graphics, proper sound and connections for game controllers and plug into home TVs. In particular he wanted it to be good enough to run a version of Breakout created in BASIC – a slow but relatively easy programming language. It was a wildly ambitious goal. Home computers were still a new concept and the idea that he could make one that could run arcade video games and still have a price tag acceptable to the general public seemed crazy. But by August 1976 he, almost to his own amazement, had created just that. In his biography iWoz , Wozniak described getting Breakout running on his computer as “the biggest, earth-shaking, Eureka moment ever”. Being the canny businessman he was, Jobs saw that the Apple II was a machine that would appeal to more than just technically minded computer geeks and started searching for an investor who could help put it on the shop shelves throughout the US.

  Apple’s first port of call was Chuck Peddle, an engineer at Commodore Business Machines. Jack Tramiel, a Polish immigrant who had survived the Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration camp, formed Commodore in 1955 as a typewriter repair shop in the Bronx, New York City, and built it into a leading manufacturer of office equipment. For Peddle, the call from Jobs was well timed. Commodore had recently bought microprocessor manufacturer MOS Technologies, the maker of the KIM-1, and Peddle was trying to persuade Tramiel to forget about pocket calculators and get into home computers. Peddle arranged for the two to present the Apple II to board of Commodore. Impressed, the board asked how much they wanted for it. Jobs demanded several hundred thousand dollars and the pair were promptly shown the door. Commodore decided it would make its first home computer itself instead. Undeterred, Jobs and Wozniak decided to see if Atari would back them. “The decision Nolan Bushnell and Joe Keenan came up with was that this was outside our area but we have this investor on our board – Don Valentine – and we’ll put you in touch with Don,” said Steve Bristow, Atari’s vice-president of engineering. Valentine also declined to invest, but arranged a meeting between Apple and Mike Markkula, a 30-year-old who had just left Intel having made his fortune working for the firm. Markkula was convinced the Apple II would be a success and provided the funds Apple needed to start manufacturing the computer and his business expertise.