Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  By the time the Apple II finally started rolling off the production line, however, Commodore had already got its home computer on the market. The $599 Commodore PET was an all-in-one system that fused keyboard, monitor, tape cassette player and computer together in curvy beige plastic. Despite its monochrome visuals, the PET attracted $3 million of pre-orders enough to make it an instant success. Apple also faced competition from Tandy, the owners of electronics retailer Radio Shack, which had released another monochrome home computer: the TRS-80. As the smallest of the three companies, Apple could easily have struggled, but Wozniak’s video game-inspired inclusion of colour graphics and the company’s clever marketing gave it the edge. By 1981 the Apple II had claimed 23 per cent of the US home computer market compared to Tandy’s 16 per cent and Commodore’s 10 per cent.

  The arrival of the Apple II, TRS-80 and PET brought a swift end to days when computers were only found in large institutions. Now anyone could potentially have a computer in their home. But while most people agreed computers were the future, few had any idea what households would do with them. Would they calculate their tax returns or catalogue record collections? Would they teach their children to program the machines in the hope that they would have the skills that would be needed in the workplace of the future? Or would they store family recipes or address books on a cassette tape?

  It turned out that early home computers would be used almost exclusively for one purpose alone: playing video games. And many of the games they played were versions of those once locked away on the computers of academia, government and business. These games first started to migrate into the home through magazines and books that contained listings of computer programmes for people to type in line by line. Then these games began to be sold in stores. Computer Chess, arguably the original video game, was among the first to go on sale thanks to a Canadian company called Micro-Ware, which released Microchess on the KIM-1 in 1976. Other forms of computer game quickly followed, among them educational titles such as ThOregon Trail – a 1971 game developed by three student teachers to teach elementary school children in Minnesota about the life and trials faced by the settlers who led the US’s western expansion in the mid-1800s. It became a staple of classrooms across the US in the 1980s and early 1990s. But one of the most popular forms of computer game to reach the home was the text adventure.

  Scott Adams, a computer programmer from Florida, brought the text adventure to the home after hearing work colleagues discussing Adventure while working at telecommunications firm Stromberg-Carlson. “I came in early and stayed late for a week and played it. I was hooked on the concept, it was great fun,” he said. Adams had already made a game on his TRS-80 computer that he was selling through a local Radio Shack store. “It was a dog racing game, with a random number generator and some text, that had you betting on which dog would finish first,” he said. “The game was a real dog itself. I sold maybe 10 copies. It was junk.”

  Unsurprisingly, Adams felt an Adventure -type game might be more popular and set about making a similar game. His programmer pals thought he was wasting his time. “I was told it would be impossible to make anything like Adventure fit into a computer with 16k of memory space,” he said. His sceptical programmer friends had a point; Adventure took up 256k of memory, far more than the TRS-80 could cope with. But Adams figured out a number of memory saving tricks that allowed him to squash his game, Adventureland , onto the TRS-80, such as getting the computer to recognise the players’ commands from the first three letters alone. Adventureland played much like Adventure although the story was set outdoors rather than within underground caves. Adams did, however, drop the idea of fighting monsters and concentrated on the puzzle solving after objections from some of his friends. “In the very first version of Adventureland you ended up killing the bear after it fell off the ledge,” he said. “One of my friends said that was too harsh and could I change it? I did and thereafter all my games were more orientated towards full family fun.”

  For a game-playing public used to action-based arcade games, Adventureland was an unusual and exciting concept. But while it eventually became a popular game, it took Adams some time to get it into shops. “There were very few companies making home computer software and even fewer selling games,” he said. “I started small with an ad in a computer magazine. I remember my first large order. It was from Manny Garcia who ran a Radio Shack in Chicago and he ordered 50 tapes. At the time I had no idea about wholesale-retail and he had to explain the concepts. It took a week to make all the tapes and send them to him. When he got them he called back and asked where was the packaging?” Adams was not alone.

  Across the US, business-naive computer enthusiasts were beginning to write games they hoped to sell to the growing ranks of home computer owners. Few had any idea there building an industry. They copied their games onto cassette tapes or 5.25-inch floppy disks on their own computers. They drove or posted their games to shops, photocopied instructions and packaged their work in Ziploc bags that were more commonly used to keep sandwiches fresh. The shortage of games, however, meant many of these game makers started earning significant sums from their work. Bill Budge, a student at Berkeley University in California, was one. He started out by writing a bunch of simple games, including a copy of Pong , on his Apple II. After selling Apple the rights to three of his games, which got released in 1979 as Penny Arcade , in return for a $700 printer, he started selling his work to Stoneware, a small game publisher run by Barney Stone. “Barney said I think I can sell these games in computer stores, which were springing up all over the place,” said Budge. “I remember my family went on vacation to Hawaii and I was so interested in writing these games that I decided not to go. I just stayed with my Apple and programmed for two weeks solid with nobody to bother me. Then he turned up one day with a cheque for $7,000 – my monthly royalties.”

  On the other side of the US, the creators of Zork! had also joined the fledgling game business by forming Infocom. “There was no plan to make games the focus, but after casting about for product ideas, Marc Blank and co-founder Joel Berez suggested Zork! might be a good choice to get us going,” said Lebling. Like Adams’ IT friends, Infocom worried that getting a huge game like Zork! onto a home computer was impossible. “There were lots of objections,” said Lebling. “Microcomputer memories were really, really small and Zork! was huge. We weren’t sure it was possible.”

  Despite the reservations, Infocom gave it a shot and, after chopping up the original into three separate games, managed to squash the game on the primitive home computers of the day. While Adventureland had introduced computer owners to the concept of the text adventure, Zork! ’s recognition of proper sentences and detailed descriptions was a marked improvement. The first game in the Zork! trilogy sold hundreds of thousands of copies across various computer formats and turned Infocom into one of the biggest names in computer gaming.

  Around the same time as Zork! arrived on the home computers in 1980, Ken and Roberta Williams – a husband and wife from Los Angeles, California – took the idea of the text adventure in a new direction with their debut game Mystery House . The Williams’ leap into the nascent video game business began when Ken, a freelance computer programmer, introduced Roberta to Adventure . “I showed it to Roberta and she grabbed the keyboard and played it all night. She was addicted. When she finished the game, she wanted me to program a similar game that she would design,” said Ken. Roberta saw the text adventure as an exciting new way ofstorytelling and set about designing a murder mystery inspired by the board game Cluedo and Agatha Christie’s 1939 best-selling novel And Then There Were None .

  She drew out the game’s locations and plot twists on the back of large sheets of wrapping paper while Ken set about turning her ideas into a working game on their Apple II. Unlike Adams and Infocom, Roberta decided that text alone would not do her game justice and insisted Ken allowed her to include black and white line drawings that illustrated each location alongside the text, despit
e the memory limitations of the Apple II. This refusal to bend to the technology at a time when most game makers built their creations around their programming skills would come to define Roberta’s approach to game design. “I always thought of the story, characters and game world,” she said. “I needed to understand those before I could even think about any game framework, engine or interface. The game engine was built around my ideas, not the other way around.”

  The pair released the game through Ken’s company On-Line Systems and turned their kitchen table into a makeshift factory floor where their Apple II produced copy after copy of the game. Each copy was packaged in a Ziploc bag with a photocopied set of instructions. They then called every computer store they could find to ask them to stock the game. “There were literally only about eight places that sold software. It was easy to call them and there was no software available, so they were thrilled to hear from us,” said Ken. They sold more than 3,000 copies of the $24.95 game in just six months and soon had enough money to turn their game making into a full-time business and move out of the Los Angeles sprawl to the outskirts of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They later renamed On-Line Systems, Sierra Online in honour of their new home. Their second game, 1981’s fairytale-themed The Wizard and the Princess , took the idea of illustrated text adventures a step further by including full colour visuals. Sierra’s use of graphics provoked very different reactions from Infocom and Adams’ company Adventure International. Adams eventually followed Sierra’s example and start adding visuals to try and compete. Infocom, however, went to the other extreme and sought to make its reliance on text a virtue, running adverts that declared, “we unleash the world’s most powerful graphics technology” next to an illustration of a big glowing brain.

  Text adventures, however, were not the only games making a splash with home computer users. Flight simulators also made the transition. Flight simulations had always lived a double life somewhere between training and entertainment. Edwin Link Jr, a pipe organ maker from Binghamton in New York state, created the first flight sim, the Link Trainer, in 1929. The Link Trainer consisted of a cockpit perched on a moveable platform and used motors, organ bellows and recorded sound effects to mimic the experience and sensation of flying a plane. Link originally envisaged it as a coin-operated carnival ride that might also be used to teach would-be pilots the basics of flying before they took to the skies. His 1931 patent for the machine described it as a “combination training device for student aviators and entertainment apparatus”.

  The outbreak of the Second World War, however, saw its use as a training tool come to the fore after the US Air Force ordered more than 10,000 Link Trainers. Over the course of the war it would be used to deliver basic traing to more than 500,000 pilots. The flight sim came on in leaps and bounds after the war as the growth of commercial aviation and the arms race of the Cold War fuelled investment in more advanced simulators. By the start of the 1960s, flight simulators had moveable cameras that scanned over model landscapes in line with the users’ controls to replicate the visual experience of flying. Despite these improvements, the increasing complexity of aircraft meant that these mechanical simulators were struggling to replicate the experience in a way that was useful for training. So when computers with visual displays started becoming a realistic option in the late 1960s, the flight sim transferred into the digital realm. This transition not only improved the effectiveness of flight simulators but also allowed amateur and would-be pilots with computer access to use them. One of these users was Bruce Artwick, a physics student and pilot. When the first home computers arrived Artwick believed other amateur pilots would jump at the chance to have a flight sim in their own home. He formed his own software company SubLogic and wrote Flight Simulator , the first home computer flight sim, which debuted on the Apple II in early 1978. Flight Simulator sought to replicate reality as closely as the Apple II could, using real-life physics and offering a wide range of planes, from crop dusters through to fighter jets, to fly. The popularity of Artwick’s creation would inspire others to produce more home computer flight sims, which quickly divided into military and civilian aviation, and simulations of other vehicles including submarines, space shuttles, helicopters and tanks.

  Recreations of tabletop war games were another regular sight in the early days of home computers. As with Dungeons & Dragons , the motivation behind transferring these to computers was mathematical. Tabletop war games had evolved out of Kriegsspiel, a game created for the Prussian army in the 18th century as a military training aid for its officers. Kriegsspiel became a national obsession. Sets with detailed figurines of soldiers were sent to every military division, the Kaiser attended tournaments and the original 60-page rulebook was later enhanced with data from real conflicts. When Prussia won the Six Weeks War against Austria in 1866 and defeated France in 1870’s Franco-Prussian War, the country thanked Kriegsspiel for its victories. Impressed, rival nations quickly adopted the game including Japan, which credited its success in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 to Kriegsspiel. Families across Europe also began playing the game using toy soldiers.

  Such was the craze that in 1913 science fiction writer H.G. Wells wrote Little Wars , a rulebook for toy soldiers that is sometimes credited as the basis of the modern tabletop war game. The craze faded from military prominence after Germany’s defeat in the First World War, but for a dedicated core of fans it never went away and there was still a loyal hobbyist following in the 1970s. Like the players of Dungeons & Dragons , itself the creation of three war game designers, war gamers had to grapple with lengthy games where huge amounts of time were spent calculating complex equations that decided the outcomes of the battles they replicated. It didn’t take long for war game fans to realise that computers could make their lives a lot easier and by the early 1970s simple war games such as Civil War , a recreation of the Aerican Civil War, were appearing.

  Home computers encouraged further growth in computerised war games, but few sought to do anything more than recreate the tabletop experience. “They were pretty grim,” said Chris Crawford, a war gamer who started making video games in the late 1970s on university computers. “Most commercial war games were written in BASIC and relied on a conventional board for the placement of the pieces.” Crawford’s answer to the lack of vision exercised by the early war game creators was Tanktics , a tank versus tank war game he created in 1977 on an IBM 1130 computer at his workplace - the University of California. “I was playing board war games and I was acutely aware of the absence of the fog of war, which I consider to be crucial to simulation of warfare,” he said. [4] “I considered that computers could solve the problem. I don’t think people fully appreciated just how big a leap this was. Most had become accustomed to the absence of fog of war and took full knowledge for granted. They didn’t like the idea of fog of war.”

  Crawford took his ideas further with Eastern Front 1941 , which he wrote in 1981 after joining Atari’s home computer division. [5] Eastern Front 1941 introduced the idea of real-time conflict into the war game. Tabletop war games were turn based and most computer war games had blindly followed suit. Crawford realised that on a computer players could make their decisions, but the actions themselves did not need to happen immediately. Instead the game could wait until all the decisions were made and then carry out each player’s move at the same time, replicating the real-time nature of war.

  The last major genre to make the leap to the home was the role-playing game and leading the way was Richard Garriott, a teenager from Houston, Texas. 1977 was a pivotal year for Garriott. Those 12 months saw all the ingredients that would make Garriott one of the world’s most recognised game designers come together. “It happened in fairly quick succession,” he said. “First my sister-in-law gave me a copy of The Lord of the Rings and right after I read the book, in the summer of 1977, I took a seven-week summer course for high-school students at the University of Oklahoma in things like computer programming and mathematics and statistics. When I arrived there
, all the other students had not only read The Lord of the Rings but they were all playing this game, Dungeons & Dragons , which became our evening activity. We also had access to some of the early computers that were around at universities before they were available in high school.”

  On arrival at the summer course, he was greeted by a group of students who mistook his lack of a southern US accent for an English one and nicknamed him British. Garriott embraced the nickname and eventually named his Dungeons & Dragons alter ego Lord British. Inspired by his trio of discoveries – Tolkien, Dungeons & Dragons and computers – Garriott returned to Houston and began writing games on the primitive teleprinter computer at his school. “I began to write games I used to call D&D1 , D&D2 , D&D3 , etc, in homage, of course, to Dungeons & Dragons ,” he said. “Because it was very hard to create this software on a Teletype, you generally wrote out every line of the program on paper first.” Garriott’s father, Owen – a NASA astronaut, noticed the program his son was working on and warned him what he was trying to do might be too ambitious. “It was a huge program compared to what anybody else bothered to write back in those days. It must have been a whopping 1,000 lines of code or something – it pales today but at the time seemed huge,” he said. “My dad said ‘Richard, there’s a pretty low probability that you’ll get that to work because it’s going to be so complicated’. I said well I’m pretty motivated to pull this off, so he said I’ll make you a bet. The bet was if I could get D&D1 working pretty much straight away he would cover half the price of a personal computer, right as the Apple II was coming out.”