History of computer and video games
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Home video-game systems became popular during the 1970s and 80s. The game featured on the stamp is Defender for the Atari 2600. |
Although the
history of computer and video games spans almost five decades,
computer and video games themselves did not become part of the popular culture until the late
1970s.
1947 is believed to be the first year when a game was designed for playing on a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). This very simple game was designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. A patent application was filed on January 25th, 1947 and U.S. Patent
#2 455 992 issued on Dec 14th, 1948. Though the filing date was in 1947, the game was probably designed earlier in 1946. The system used eight vacuum tubes (four 6Q5 triodes and four 6V6 tetrodes) and simulated a missile being fired at a target, probably inspired by radar displays used during World War II. Several knobs allowed adjusting the curve and speed of the moving point representing the missile. Because graphics could not be drawn electronically at the time, small targets drawn on a simple overlay were placed on the CRT by the builder of this game. It is believed to be the earliest system specifically designed for game play on a CRT screen.
A.S. Douglas developed
OXO, a graphical version of
noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe), in
1952 at the
University of Cambridge in order to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. It was played on the now archaic
EDSAC computer, which used a
cathode ray tube for a visual display. In spite of its technological antiquity, the game is still playable on an emulator available on the
Internet.
Many people attribute the invention of the video game to
William Higinbotham, who, in
1958, created a game called
Tennis for Two on an
oscilloscope to entertain visitors at
Brookhaven National Laboratory in
New York. Unlike
Pong and similar early games,
Tennis for Two shows a simplified
tennis court from the side. The ball is affected by
gravity and must be played over the net. The game is played with two bulky controllers each equipped with a knob for trajectory and a button for firing the ball over the net.
Tennis for Two was exhibited for two seasons before its dismantling in
1959.
Many of the earliest
computer games ran on
university mainframes in the
United States and were developed by individual users who programmed them in their idle time. However, the limited accessibility of early computer
hardware meant that these games were few and easily forgotten by posterity.
In
1961, a group of students at
MIT, including
Steve Russell, programmed a game called
Spacewar! on the then-new
DEC PDP-1. The game pitted two human players against each other, each controlling a space ship capable of firing missiles. A
black hole in the center created a large gravitational field and another source of hazard. This game was soon distributed with new DEC computers and traded throughout primitive cyberspace. Presented at the MIT Science Open House in
1962, it was the first widely available and influential game.
One of the developers of
Multics,
Ken Thompson, continued to develop the
operating system after
AT&T stopped funding it. His work focused on development of the OS for the
GE-645 mainframe. He actually wanted to play a game he was writing called
Space Travel. Though the game was never released commercially (and apparently costing $75 per go on the mainframe), the game's development led to the invention of the
UNIX operating system.
In
1966,
Ralph Baer (then at Sanders Associates) created a simple video game called
Chase that could be displayed on a standard
television set. Baer continued development, and in
1968 he had a prototype that could play several different games, including versions of table tennis and target shooting. Under Baer,
Bill Harrison developed the
light gun and, with
Bill Rusch, created video games in
1967.
Coin-op games: dawn of a golden age
By 1969 Ralph Baer had a working prototype console that hooked up to a TV set and played ball and paddle games. This prototype was sold to Magnavox who released it in May 1972 as the Odyssey, the world's first videogame console.
In
1971 Nolan Bushnell and
Ted Dabney created a coin-operated
arcade version of
Spacewar! and called it
Computer Space.
Nutting Associates bought the game, hired Bushnell, and manufactured 1,500
Computer Space machines. The game was not a success because many people found it difficult to play.
Nolan Bushnell attended a demonstration of the Odyssey in Burlingame California in January 1972. He played video Ping-Pong but found it uninteresting and unimaginative.
As Bushnell felt he did not receive enough pay by licensing games to other manufacturers, he founded his own company,
Atari, in
1972. The first arcade
video game with widespread success was Atari's
Pong, released the same year. The game is loosely based around
table tennis: ball is "served" from the center of the court and as the ball moves towards their side of the court each player must maneuver their bat to hit the ball back to their opponent. Atari sold 19,000
Pong machines, and soon many imitators followed. The
coin-operated
arcade video game craze had begun.
Exidy's
Death Race (
1976) sparked the first
controversy over gratuitous violence in a video game, because the object of the game was to run over "gremlins"—who looked more like pedestrians—with a car. The controversy increased public awareness of video games and has never ceased to be debated.
The arcade game industry entered its Golden Age in
1978 with the release of
Space Invaders by Taito. This game was a runaway blockbuster hit that inspired dozens of manufacturers to enter the market and produce their own video games. The Golden Age was marked by a prevalence of arcades and new color arcade games that continued until the
1980s or
1990s.
Also in 1978, Atari released
Asteroids, its biggest best-seller. It replaced the game
Lunar Lander as the number one arcade hit. Color arcade games became more popular in 1979 and
1980 (e.g.
Pac-Man).
Other arcade classics of the late 1970s include
Night Driver,
Galaxian, and
Breakout.
A coin op game that featured the first example of player versus player fighting was
Karate Champ published by Data East in 1984. The fighting genre was later popularized by Street Fighter II.
Games on university mainframe computers
University mainframe game development blossomed in the early 1970's. The history of this era is difficult to write in a comprehensive way for several reasons:
* Until the late 1970's game programmers never received any money for their work. The reward for designers of this era was praise from friends and an occasional fan letter from students at another university.
* There is little record of all but the most popular games, since they were played on machines which are no longer operated and saved on tapes that no longer exist.
* There were at least two major distribution networks for the student game designers of this time, and schools typically had access to only one brand of hardware and one supply of shared games. Many websites dedicated to the history of games focus solely on one system or the other, because the authors never had access to the "parallel universe" of the other hardware platform. The two largest systems were:
** The
PLATO System supported by
Control Data Corporation under the support of
William Norris and largely running on CDC
mainframe computers, and
** The
DECUS software sharing system run by
Digital Equipment Corporation for schools and other institutions utilizing DEC computers such as the
PDP-10.
Highlights of this period, in apporoximate chronological order, include:
*
1971:
Don Daglow wrote the first
Computer Baseball game on a PDP-10 mainframe at
Pomona College. Players could manage individual games or simulate an entire season. Daglow went on to team with programmer
Eddie Dombrower to design
Earl Weaver Baseball, published by
Electronic Arts in 1987.
* 1971:
Star Trek was created, probably by
Mike Mayfield on a Sigma 7
minicomputer at
MIT. This is the best-known and most widely played of the 1970's Star Trek titles, and was played on a series of small "maps" of galactic sectors printed on paper or on the screen. It was the first major game to be ported across hardware platforms by students. Daglow also wrote a popular
Star Trek game for the PDP-10 during 1971-72, which presented the action as a script spoken by the
TV program's characters. A number of other Star Trek themed games were also available via PLATO and DECUS throughout the decade.
*
1972:
Gregory Yob wrote
Hunt the Wumpus for the PDP-10, a hide-and-seek game, though it could be considered the first text adventure. Yob wrote it in reaction to existing hide-and-seek games such as
Hurkle,
Mugwump, and
Snark.
*
1974: Both
Maze War (on the
Imlacs PDS-1 at the
NASA Ames Research Center in California) and
Spasim (on PLATO) appeared, pioneering examples of early multi-player 3D
first person shooters.
*
1975:
Will Crowther wrote the first
text adventure game as we would recognize it today,
Adventure (originally called
ADVENT, and later
Colossal Cave). It was programmed in
Fortran for the PDP-10. The player controls the game through simple sentence-like text commands and receives descriptive text as output. The game was later re-created by students on PLATO, so it is one of the few titles that became part of both the PLATO and PDP-10 traditions.
* 1975: Before the mid-1970's games typically communicated to the player on paper, using
teletype machines or a
line printer, at speeds ranging from 10 to 30 characters per second with a rat-a-tat-tat sound as a metal ball or belt with characters was pressed against the paper through an inked ribbon by a hammer. By 1975 many universities had discarded these terminals for
CRT screens, which could display thirty lines of text in a few seconds instead of the minute or more that printing on paper required. This led to the development of a series of games that drew "graphics" on the screen.
* 1975: Daglow, then a student at
Claremont Graduate University, wrote the first Computer
Role Playing Game on PDP-10 mainframes,
Dungeon. The game was an unlicensed implementation of the new role playing game
Dungeons and Dragons. Although displayed in text, it was the first game to use
line of sight graphics, top-down dungeon maps that showed the areas that the party had seen or could see, allowing for light or darkness, the different vision of elves and dwarves, etc.
* 1975: At about the same time the RPG
dnd, also based on
Dungeons and Dragons first appeared on PLATO system CDC computers. For players in these schools
dnd, not
Dungeon, was the first computer role-playing game.
*
1977:
Kelton Flinn and John Taylor create the first version of
Air, a text air combat game that foreshadowed their later work creating the first-ever graphical online multi-player game,
Air Warrior. They would found the first successful online game company,
Kesmai, now part of
Electronic Arts. As Flinn has said: "If Air Warrior was a primate swinging in the trees, AIR was the text-based amoeba crawling on the ocean floor. But it was quasi-real time, multi-player, and attempted to render 3-D on the terminal using ASCII graphics. It was an acquired taste."
* 1977: The writing of the original
Zork was started by
Dave Lebling,
Marc Blank,
Tim Anderson, and
Bruce Daniels. Unlike Crowther, Daglow and Yob, the Zork team recognized the potential to move these games to the new personal computers, and they founded
text adventure publisher
Infocom in 1979. The company was later sold to
Activision. In a classic case of "connections", Lebling was a member of the same D&D group as Will Crowther, but not at the same time. Lebling has been quoted as saying "I think I actually replaced him when he dropped out.
Zork was 'derived' from
Advent in that we played
Advent... and tried to do a 'better' one. There was no code borrowed... and we didn't meet either Crowther or Woods until much later."
*
1980:
Michael Toy,
Glenn Wichman and
Ken Arnold released
Rogue on BSD Unix after two years of work, inspiring many
roguelike games ever since. Like
Dungeon on the PDP-10 and
dnd on PLATO,
Rogue displayed dungeon maps using text characters. Unlike those games, however, the dungeon was randomly generated for each play session, so the path to treasure and the enemies who protected it were different for each game. As the
Zork team had done,
Rogue was adapted for home computers and became a commercial product.
Early handheld games
The first portable,
handheld electronic game was
Tic Tac Toe, made in 1972 by a company called Waco. The display consisted of a grid of nine buttons, that could turn red or green when pushed. The first
handheld game console with interchangeable cartridges was the
Microvision designed by
Smith Engineering, and distributed and sold by
Milton-Bradley in 1979. Crippled by a small, fragile LCD display and a very narrow selection of games, it was discontinued two years later. Although neither would prove popular, they paved the way for more advanced single-game handhelds, often simply called "
LED games" or "
LCD games" depending on their display system.
Mattel had seen car-race games in arcades, and wanted to mass-produce something similar,but a video-game version would have been too costly. In 1974, Mattel engineers George Klose and Richard Cheng contracted with John Denker to writethe
Mattel Auto Race game as we know it, played on a 7x3array of LED dots. Mark Lesser at
Rockwell International Microelectronics Division portedthe code to a calculator chip. The program was 512 bytes long. Subsequently, the same team produced
Mattel Football I, which sold well over one million units and ushered in a short golden age of LED handheld games, especially sports games. At first composed of simple arrangements of LEDs, later games incorporated
vacuum fluorescent displays allowing for detailed graphics in bright colors. The heyday of LED and VFD would last until the early 80s, when LCD technology became cheap and durable enough to be a viable alternative.
Gaming on home computers
While the fruit of development in early video games appeared mainly (for the consumer) in video arcades and home consoles, the rapidly evolving
home computers of the
1970s and
80s allowed their owners to program simple games.
Hobbyist groups for the new computers soon formed and game software followed.
Soon many of these games (at first clones of mainframe classics such as Star Trek, and then later clones of popular arcade games) were being distributed through a variety of channels, such as printing the game's
source code in books (such as David Ahl's
Basic Computer Games), magazines (
Creative Computing), and newsletters, which allowed users to type in the code for themselves. Early game designers like Crowther, Daglow and Yob would find the computer code for their games published in books and magazines, with their names removed from the listing. Early home computers from
Apple,
Commodore,
Tandy and others had many games that people typed in.
Another distribution channel was the physical mailing and selling of floppy disks, cassette tapes and
ROM cartridges. Soon a small
cottage industry was formed, with amateur programmers selling disks in plastic bags put on the shelves of local shops, or sent through the
mail.
Richard Garriott distributed several copies of his
1980 computer role-playing game Akalabeth in plastic bags before the game was published.
The first home video games (1972-1977)
See also: History of first generation video game consoles1972 also saw the release of the first
video game console for the home market, the
Magnavox Odyssey. Built using mainly analog electronics, it was based on Ralph Baer's earlier work and licensed from his employer. The console was connected to a home television set. It was not a large success, although other companies with similar products (including Atari) had to pay a licensing fee for some time. It wasn't until Atari's home version of
Pong (at first under the Sears Tele-Games label) in Christmas of
1975 that home video games really took off. The success of
Pong sparked hundreds of clone games, including the
Coleco Telstar, which went on to be a success in its own right, with over a dozen models.
Early 8-bit home consoles (1977-1983)
See also: History of second generation video game consolesIn the earliest consoles, the computer code for one or more games was hardcoded into microchips using discrete logic, and no additional games could ever be added. By the mid-1970's video games were found on
cartridges. Programs were burned onto
ROM chips that were mounted inside plastic cartridge casings that could be plugged into slots on the console. When the cartridges were plugged in, the general-purpose
microprocessors in the consoles read the cartridge memory and ran whatever program was stored there. Rather than being confined to a small selection of games included in the box, consumers could now amass libraries of game cartridges.
The
Fairchild VES was the world's first cartridge-based video game console. It was released by Fairchild Semiconductor in August
1976. When Atari released their VCS the next year, Fairchild quickly re-named it to the
Fairchild Channel F.
In
1977, Atari released its cartridge-based console called the
Video Computer System (VCS), later called
Atari 2600. Nine games were designed and released for the holiday season. It would quickly become by far the most popular of all the early consoles.
In
1978 Magnavox released its cartridge-based console, the
Odyssey 2, in the United States and Canada.
Philips Electronics released this same game console as the Videopac G7000 in many European countries. Although it never became as popular as Atari, it managed to sell several million units through 1983.
In
1979,
Activision was created by disgruntled former Atari programmers. It was the first
third-party developer of video games. Many new developers would follow their lead in succeeding years.
The next major entry was
Intellivision, introduced by Mattel in
1980. Though chronologically part of what is called the "8-bit era", the Intellivision had a unique processor with instructions that were 10 bits wide (allowing more instruction variety and potential speed), and registers 16 bits wide. The system, which featured graphics superior to the older Atari 2600, rocketed to popularity.
Unique among home systems of the time was the
Vectrex, the only one to feature
vector graphics.
1982 saw the introduction of the
Colecovision, an even more powerful machine. Its sales also took off, but the presence of three major consoles in the marketplace and a glut of poor quality games began to overcrowd retail shelves and erode consumers' interest in video games. Within a year this overcrowded market would crash.
The popularity of early consoles was strongly influenced by their ports of arcade games. The 2600 was the first with
Space Invaders, and the Colecovision had
Donkey Kong.
Early cartridges were 2KB ROMs for Atari 2600 and 4K for Intellivision. This upper limit grew steadily from 1978 to 1983, up to 16KB for Atari 2600 and Intellivision, 32KB for Colecovision.
Bank switching, a technique that allowed two different parts of the program to use the same memory addresses was required for the larger cartridges to work.
In the game consoles, high RAM prices at the time limited the
RAM (memory) capacity of the systems to a tiny amount, often less than a
Kilobyte. Although the cartridge size limit grew steadily, the RAM limit was part of the console itself and all games had to work within its constraints.
By 1982 a glut of games from new third-party developers less well-prepared than Activision began to appear, and began to overflow the shelf capacity of toy stores.
In part because of these oversupplies, the video game industry crashed, starting from Christmas of 1982 and stretching through all of
1983. See the main article:
Video game crash of 1983.
In the early 1980s, the computer gaming industry experienced its first major growing pains. Publishing houses appeared, with many honest businesses (and in rare cases such as
Electronic Arts, successfully surviving to this day) alongside
fly-by-night operations that cheated the games' developers. While some early 80s games were simple clones of existing arcade titles, the relatively low publishing costs for personal computer games allowed for many bold, unique games, a legacy that continues to this day. The primary gaming computers of the 1980s emerged in 1982: the
Commodore 64 and
ZX Spectrum.
The
Golden age of arcade games reached its full steam in the 1980s, with many technically innovative and genre-defining games in the first few years of the decade.
Defender (1980) established the
scrolling shooter and was the first to have events taking place outside the player's view, displayed by a radar view showing a map of the whole playfield.
Battlezone (1980) used wireframe
vector graphics to create the first true three-dimensional game world.
3D Monster Maze (1981) was the first 3D game for a home computer, while
Dungeons of Daggorath (1982) added various weapons and monsters, sophisticated sound effects, and a "heartbeat" health monitor.
Pole Position (1982) used sprite-based,
pseudo-3D graphics when it pioneered the "rear-view racer format" where the player's view is behind and above the vehicle, looking forward along the road with the horizon in sight. The style would remain in wide use even after true
3D graphics became standard for racing games.
Pac-Man (1980) was the first game to achieve widespread popularity in mainstream culture and the first game character to be popular in his own right.
Dragon's Lair (1983) was the first
laserdisc game, and introduced to video games.
With
Adventure establishing the genre, the release of
Zork in
1980 further popularized text adventure games in
home computers and established developer
Infocom's dominance in the field. As these early computers often lacked graphical capabilities, text adventures proved successful. When affordable computers started catching up to and surpassing the graphics of consoles in the late 1980s, the games' popularity waned in favor of
graphic adventures and other genres. The text adventure would eventually be known as
interactive fiction and a small dedicated following has kept the genre going, with new releases being nearly all free.
Also published in 1980 was
Roberta Williams'
Mystery House, for the
Apple II. It was the first graphic adventure on home computers. Graphics consisted entirely of static monochrome drawings, and the interface still used the typed commands of text adventures. It proved very popular at the time, and she and husband Ken went on to found
Sierra On-Line, a major producer of adventure games.
Mystery House remains largely forgotten today.
In August of
1982, the
Commodore 64 was released to the public. It found initial success because it was marketed and priced aggressively. It had a
BASIC programming environment and advanced graphic and sound capabilities for its time, similar to the
Colecovision console. It would become the most popular home computer of its day in the USA and many other countries and the best-selling single computer model of all time internationally.
At around the same time, the
ZX Spectrum was released in the
UK and quickly became the most popular home computer in most of Western Europe, and later the
Soviet bloc due to the ease with which clones could be produced.
SuperSet Software created
Snipes, a text-mode networked computer game in 1983 to test a new PC based computer network and demonstrate its capabilities. Snipes is officially credited as being the original inspiration for
Novell Netware. It is believed to be the first network game ever written for a commercial personal computer and is recognised alongside 1974's
Maze War (a networked multiplayer maze game for several research machines) and
Spasim (a 3d multiplayer space simulation for time shared
mainframes) as the precursor to multi-player games such as
Doom and
Quake.
The true modern adventure game would be born with the
Sierra King's Quest series in
1984. It featured color graphics and a third person perspective. An on-screen player-controlled character could be moved behind and in front of objects on a 2D background drawn in
perspective, creating the illusion of pseudo-3D space. Commands were still entered via text.
Lucasarts would do away with this last vestige feature of text adventures when its
1987 adventure
Maniac Mansion built with its
SCUMM system allowed a
point-and-click interface. Sierra and other game companies quickly followed with their own mouse-driven games.
For more on the history of adventures games, see Adventure games, history ofWith
Elite in
1984,
David Braben and
Ian Bell ushered in the age of modern style 3d graphics in the home, bringing a convincing vector world with full 6 degree freedom of movement and thousands of visitable planetary systems into the living room. Initially only available for the
BBC Micro and
Acorn Electron, the success of this title caused it eventually to be ported to all popular formats, including the
Commodore 64,
ZX Spectrum,
Commodore Amiga,
Atari ST and even the
Nintendo Entertainment System, although this version only received a European release.
The
personal computer became a competitive gaming platform with
IBM's
PC/AT in
1984. The new 16-color
EGA display standard allowed its graphics to approach the quality seen in popular
home computers like the
Commodore 64. Sound however, was still only the crude bleeps of
PC speakers. The primitive 4-color
CGA graphics of previous models had limited the PC's appeal to the business segment, since its graphics failed to compete with the C64 or Apple II.
The
Apple Macintosh also arrived at this time. It lacked the color capabilities of the earlier
Apple II, instead preferring a much higher pixel resolution, but the operating system support for the
GUI attracted developers of some interesting games (e.g.
Lode Runner) even before color returned in 1987 with the Mac II.
In computer gaming, the later 1980s are primarily the story of the
United Kingdom's rise to prominence. The market in the U.K. was primely positioned for this task: personal computer users were offered a smooth scale of power versus price, from the
ZX Spectrum up to the
Amiga, developers and publishers were in close enough proximity to offer each other support, and the NES made much less of an impact than it did in the United States, being outsold by the
Master System.
The arrival of the
Atari ST and
Commodore Amiga in 1985 was the beginning of a new era of 16-bit machines. For many users they were too expensive until later on in the decade, at which point advances in the IBM PC's open platform had caused the
IBM PC compatibles to become comparably powerful at a lower cost than their competitors. The
VGA standard developed for IBM's new
PS/2 line in
1987 gave the PC the potential for 256-color graphics. This was a big jump ahead of most 8-bit
home computers but still lagging behind platforms with built-in sound and graphics hardware like the Amiga, causing an odd trend around '89-91 towards developing to a seemingly inferior machine. Thus while both the ST and Amiga were host to many technically excellent games, their time of prominence proved to be shorter than that of the 8-bit machines, which saw new ports well into the 80s and even the 90s.
AdLib set an early defacto standard for sound cards in
1987, with its card based on the
Yamaha YM3812 sound chip. This would last until the introduction of
Creative Labs'
Sound Blaster in
1989, which took the chip and added new features while remaining compatible with
AdLib cards, and creating a new defacto standard. However, many games would still support these and rarer things like the
Roland MT-32 and
Disney Sound Source into the early 90s. The initial high cost of sound cards meant they would not find widespread use until the 1990s.
Shareware gaming first appeared in the late 1980s, but its big successes came in the 1990s.
Bulletin Board Systems and early online gaming
Dialup
bulletin board systems were popular in the 1980s, and sometimes used for online game playing. The earliest such systems, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, had a crude plain-text interface, but later systems made use of terminal-control codes (the so-called
ANSI art, which included the use of IBM-PC-specific characters not actually part of an
ANSI standard) to get a
pseudo-graphical interface. Some BBSes offered access to various games which were playable through such an interface, ranging from text adventures to gambling games like blackjack (generally played for "points" rather than real money). On multiuser BBSs (where more than one person could be online at once), there were sometimes games allowing the different users to interact with one another; some such games of the fantasy role-playing variety were known as
MUDs, for "multi-user dungeons". Today, a popular game in this category is
Urban dead.
Commercial online services also arose during this decade, starting with a plain-text interface similar to BBSs (but operated on large mainframe computers permitting larger numbers of users to be online at once), and moving by the end of the decade to fully-graphical environments using software specific to each personal computer platform. Popular text-based services included
CompuServe,
The Source, and
GEnie, while platform-specific graphical services included
Quantum Link for the
Commodore 64,
AppleLink for the
Apple II and
Macintosh, and
PC Link for the
IBM PC, all of which were run by the company which eventually became
America Online; and a competing service,
Prodigy. Interactive games were a feature of these services, though until 1987 they used text-based displays, not graphics.
Handheld LCD games
Nintendo's
Game & Watch line began in 1980. The success of these LCD
handhelds spurred dozens of other game and toy companies to make their own portable games, many being copies of Game & Watch titles or adaptations of popular arcade games. Improving
LCD technology meant the new handhelds could be more reliable and consume less batteries than
LED or
VFD games, most only needing watch batteries. They could also be made much smaller than most LED handhelds, even small enough to wear on one's wrist like a watch.
Tiger Electronics borrowed this concept of videogaming with cheap, affordable handhelds.
8-bit era, or 'Post-crash/Late' 8-bit era (1985-1989)
In 1984, the computer gaming market took over from the console market following the crash of that year; computers offered equal gaming ability and since their simple design allowed games to take complete command of the hardware after power-on, they were nearly as simple to start playing with as consoles.
In
1985, the North American video game console market was revived with Nintendo's release of its
8-bit console, the
Famicom, known in the United States under the name
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was bundled with
Super Mario Bros. and suddenly became a success. The NES dominated the North American market until the rise of the next generation of consoles in the early
1990s. Other markets were not as heavily dominated, allowing other consoles to find an audience like the
PC Engine in Japan and the
Sega Master System in Europe, Australia and Brazil (though it was sold in America as well).
In the new consoles, the
gamepad took over
joysticks,
paddles, and
keypads as the default
game controller included with the system. The gamepad design of an 8 direction
D-pad with 2 or more action buttons became the standard.
The
Dragon Quest series made its debut in
1986 with
Dragon Quest, and has created a phenomenon in Japanese culture ever since. Also at this time,
SquareSoft was struggling and
Hironobu Sakaguchi decided to make their final game, titled
Final Fantasy (1987), a
role-playing game (RPG) modelled after
Dragon Quest, and the
Final Fantasy series was born as a result.
Final Fantasy saved Squaresoft from bankruptcy, and would later go on to become the most successful RPG franchise. At around the same time, the
Legend of Zelda series made its debut on the NES with
The Legend of Zelda (1986).
Hideo Kojima's
Metal Gear series also made its debut with the release of
Metal Gear (1987) on the computer, giving birth to the
stealth-based game genre.
Metal Gear was ported to the NES shortly after. In 1989,
Capcom released
Sweet Home (1989) on the NES, which served as a precursor to the
survival horror game genre.
In
1988 Nintendo published their first issue of
Nintendo Power Magazine.
If the 1980s were about the rise of the industry, the 1990s were about its maturing into a Hollywood-esque landscape of ever-increasing budgets and increasingly consolidated publishers, with the losers slowly being crushed or absorbed. As this happens, the wide variety of games that existed in the 1980s appears to fade away, with the larger corporations desiring to maximize profitability and lower risk.
With the increasing computing power and decreasing cost of processors like
Intel 386,
486, and
Motorola 68000, the 1990s saw the rise of
3D graphics, as well as "
multimedia" capabilities through
sound cards and
CD-ROMs.
In the early 1990s,
shareware distribution was a popular method of publishing games for smaller developers, including then-fledgling companies such as Apogee (now
3D Realms), Epic Megagames (now
Epic Games), and
id Software. It gave consumers the chance to try a trial portion of the game, usually restricted to the game's complete first section or "episode", before purchasing the rest of the adventure. Racks of games on single 5 1/4" and later 3.5"
floppy disks were common in many stores, often only costing a few dollars each. Since the shareware versions were essentially free, the cost only needed to cover the disk and minimal packaging. As the increasing size of games in the mid-90s made them impractical to fit on floppies, and retail publishers and developers began to earnestly mimic the practice, shareware games were replaced by shorter
demos (often only one or two levels), distributed free on CDs with gaming magazines and over the Internet.
Shareware was also the distribution method of choice of early modern
first-person shooters (FPS) like
Wolfenstein 3D and
Doom. Following Doom, the retail publishers and developers began to earnestly mimic the practice of offering demos, which had the effect of reducing shareware's appeal for the rest of the decade. During this time, the increasing computing power of
personal computers began to allow rudimentary
3D graphics.
1993's Doom in particular was largely responsible for defining the genre and setting it apart from other first-person perspective games. The term
FPS has generally come to refer to games where the player has full control over a (usually humanoid) character and can interact directly with the environment; almost always centering around the act of aiming and shooting with multiple styles of weapons and limited ammunition.
See main article: First-person shooters, history of.1992 saw the release of
real-time strategy (
RTS) game
Dune II. It was by no means the first in the genre (that being 1983's
Stonkers for the ZX Spectrum), but it set the standard game mechanics for later blockbuster RTS games like
Warcraft and
Command and Conquer. The RTS is characterised by an overhead view, a "mini-map", and the control of both the
economic and
military aspects of an army. The rivalry between the two styles of RTS play - WarCraft style, which used
GUIs accessed once a building was selected, and C&C style, which allowed construction of any unit from within a permanently visible menu - continued into the start of the next millennium.
Alone in the Dark (
1992) planted the seeds of what would become known as the
survival horror genre. It established the formula that would later flourish on CD-ROM based consoles, with games like
Resident Evil and
Silent Hill.
Adventure games continued to evolve, with
Sierra's
King's Quest series, and LucasFilms'/
LucasArts'
Monkey Island series bringing graphical interaction and the creation of the concept of "point-and-click" gaming.
Myst and its sequels inspired a new style of puzzle-based adventure games. Published in
1993, Myst itself was one of the first computer games to make full use of the new high-capacity
CD-ROM storage format. It went on to remain the best-selling game of all time for much of the decade. Myst, along with
Star Wars: Rebel Assault and
Trilobyte's
The 7th Guest, were among the "
killer apps" that made CD-ROM drives standard features on PCs. Despite Myst's mainstream success, the increased popularity of action-based and real-time games led adventure games and
simulation games, both mainstays of computer games in earlier decades, to begin to fade into obscurity.
It was in the 1990s that
Maxis began publishing its successful line of "Sim" games, beginning with
SimCity, and continuing with a variety of titles, such as
SimEarth,
SimCity 2000,
SimAnt,
SimTower, and the wildly popular day to day life simulator,
The Sims in 2000.
In 1996,
3dfx released the
Voodoo chipset, leading to the first affordable
3D accelerator cards for
personal computers. These devoted 3D rendering daughter cards performed most of the computation required for rendering higher-resolution, more-detailed three-dimensional graphics, allowing for more-detailed graphics than would be possible if the CPU were required to handle both game logic and graphical tasks. First-person shooter games (notably
Quake) were among the first to take advantage of this new technology. While other games would also make use of it, the FPS would become the chief driving force behind the development of new 3D hardware, as well as the yardstick by which its performance would be measured, usually quantified as the number of frames per second rendered for a particular scene in a particular game.
Several other, less-mainstream, genres were created in this decade.
Looking Glass Studios' Thief and its sequel were the first to coin the term "first person sneaker", although it is questionable whether they are the first "first person stealth" games. Turn-based strategy progressed further, with the
Heroes of Might and Magic (HOMM) series (from 3DO) luring many main-stream gamers into this complex genre.
The 90s also saw the beginnings of Internet gaming, with MUDs (
Multi-User Dungeons) in the early years.
Id Software's
1996 game
Quake pioneered play over the Internet in
first-person shooters. Internet multiplayer capability became a defacto requirement in almost all FPS games. Other genres also began to offer online play, including RTS games like
Microsoft's
Age of Empires,
Blizzard's
WarCraft and
StarCraft series, and
turn-based games such as
Heroes of Might and Magic. MMORPGs (
Massively Multiplay Online Roleplaying Games), such as
Ultima Online and
EverQuest freed users from the limited number of simultaneous players in other games and brought the MUD concept of
persistent worlds to graphical multiplayer games. Developments in
web browser plugins like
Java and
Macromedia Flash allowed for simple
browser-based games. These are small single player or multiplayer games that can be quickly downloaded and played from within a web browser without installation. Their most popular use is for puzzle games, classic arcade games, and multiplayer card and board games.
Gamers in the 90s began to take their fates into their own hands, with the creation of modifications (or "mods") for popular games. It is generally accepted that the earliest mod was
Castle Smurfenstein, for Castle Wolfenstein. Eventually, game designers realised that custom content increased the lifespan of their games, and so began to encourage the creation of mods. Half-Life spawned perhaps the most successful (or, at the very least, one of the most widely played) mods of all time, with a squad-based shooter entitled
CounterStrike. Since CounterStrike, many games have encouraged the creation of custom content. Other examples include
Unreal Tournament, which allowed players to import 3dsmax scenes to use as character models, and
Maxis's
The Sims, for which players could create custom objects.
Few new genres have been created since the advent of the FPS and RTS, with the possible exception of the
third-person shooter. Games such as
Grand Theft Auto III,
Splinter Cell,
Enter The Matrix and
Hitman all use a third-person camera perspective but are otherwise very similar to their first-person counterparts.
Decline of arcades
With the 16-bit and 32-bit consoles, home video games began to approach the level of graphics seen in
arcade games. By this time,
video arcades had earned a reputation for being seedy, unsafe places. An increasing number of players would wait for popular arcade games to be ported to consoles rather than going out. Arcades had a last hurrah in the early 90s with
Street Fighter II and the one-on-one
fighting game genre. As patronage of arcades declined, many were forced to close down. Classic coin-operated games have become largely the province of dedicated hobbyists. The gap left by the old corner arcades was partly filled by large amusement centres dedicated to providing clean, safe environments and expensive game control systems not available to home users. These are usually based on sports like skiing or cycling, as well as
rhythm games like
Dance Dance Revolution, which have carved out a large slice of the market.
Handhelds come of age
In 1989, Nintendo released the
Game Boy, the first
handheld console since the ill-fated
Microvision ten years before. The design team headed by
Gumpei Yokoi had also been responsible for the
Game & Watch systems. Included with the system was
Tetris, a popular puzzle game. Several rival handhelds also made their debut around that time, including the
Sega Game Gear and
Atari Lynx. Although most other systems were more technologically advanced, they were hampered by higher battery consumption and less third-party developer support. While some of the other systems remained in production until the mid-90s, the Game Boy remained at the top spot in sales throughout its lifespan.
1994* Nintendo released the
Super Game Boy, an adapter for the Super NES which allowed Game Boy games to be played in the console.
16-bit era (1989-1994)
The North American market was dominated by the
Sega Mega Drive/Genesis early on after its debut in
1989, with the
Nintendo Super NES proving a strong, roughly equal rival in
1991. The
NEC TurboGrafx 16 was the first 16-bit system to be marketed in the region, but did not achieve a large following, partly due to a limited library of English games and effective marketing from Sega.
The intense competition of this time was also a period of not entirely truthful marketing. The Turbographx 16 was billed as the first 16-bit system but the central processor was an 8-bit
HuC6280, with only its
HuC6260 graphics processor being a true 16-bit chip. Sega used the term
Blast Processing to describe the simple fact that its CPU ran at a higher clock speed than the SNES (7.67
MHz vs 3.58 MHz).
In Japan, the
PC Engine's (Turbografx 16)
1987 success against the
Famicom and
CD drive peripheral allowed it to fend off the
Mega Drive (Genesis) in 1988, which never really caught on to the same degree as outside Japan. The PC Engine eventually lost out to the
Super Famicom, but retained enough of a user base to support new games well into the late 1990s.
CD-ROM drives were first seen in this generation, as add-ons for the PC Engine in 1988 and the Megadrive in 1991. Basic
3D graphics entered the mainstream with flat-shaded polygons enabled by additional processors in game cartridges like
Virtua Racing and
Starfox.
SNK's
Neo-Geo was the most expensive console by a wide margin when it was released in
1990, and would remain so for years. It was also capable of 2D graphics in a quality level years ahead of other consoles. The reason for this was that it contained the same hardware that was found in SNK's arcade games. This was the first time since the home Pong machines that a true-to-the-arcade experience could be had at home.
32-bit / 64-bit era (1994 - 1999)
In
1994-
1995, Sega released
Sega Saturn and Sony made its debut to the video gaming scene with the
PlayStation. Both consoles used
32-bit technology; the door was open for 3D games, though the
Sega Saturn launch in the US started with a controversial advert launch which saw a
PlayStation console being thrown out of a window of a tower block in an attempt to appeal that the
Sega Saturn was much better than the
PlayStation.
After many delays, Nintendo released its
64-bit console, the
Nintendo 64 in
1996, selling more than 1.5 million units in only three months. The flagship title,
Super Mario 64, became a defining title for 3D platformer games.
PaRappa the Rapper popularized
rhythm, or music video games in Japan with its
1996 debut on the
PlayStation. Subsequent music and dance games like
Beatmania and
Dance Dance Revolution became ubiquitous attractions in Japanese arcades. They became known as
Bemani games, the name derived from
Beatmania. While
Parappa,
DDR, and other games found a cult following when brought to North America, music games would not gain a wide audience in the market until the next decade.
Other milestone games of the era include
Rare's Nintendo 64 title
GoldenEye 007 (
1997), which was critically acclaimed for actually being a good movie-licensed game as well as the first good FPS on a console.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (
1998), Nintendo's 3D debut for the
Legend of Zelda adventure game series, is often regarded as the greatest game of all-time by various critics. The success of
Metal Gear Solid (1998) for the PlayStation established
stealth-based games as a popular genre.
Nintendo's choice to use cartridges instead of CD-ROMs for the Nintendo 64, unique among the consoles of this period, proved to have negative consequences. In particular,
SquareSoft, which had released all previous games in its
Final Fantasy series for Nintendo consoles, now turned to the PlayStation;
Final Fantasy VII (1997) was a huge success, establishing the popularity of
role-playing games in the west and making the PlayStation the primary console for the genre.
By the end of this period, Sony had dethroned Nintendo, the PlayStation outselling the Nintendo 64. The Saturn was successful in Japan but a failure in North America, leaving Sega outside of the main competition.
Sixth generation era (1998 - 2006)
1998* Sega released the
Dreamcast in Japan. It would come out in the US in 1999.
*
Dance Dance Revolution is released in Japan.
* Nintendo released the
Game Boy Color.
*
Connectix Corporation released the
Virtual Game Station, a successful PlayStation
emulator. Sony went to fight the system, but Connectix won. The
Bleem company released
Bleem!, another PlayStation emulator.
2000* Sony released the
PlayStation 2.
*
The Sims was released. It was an instant hit and became the best-selling computer (non-console) game of all time, surpassing
Myst.
2001* Nintendo released the
GameCube and the successor to the Game Boy Color, the
Game Boy Advance.
*
Microsoft entered the videogame console industry by releasing its home console,
Xbox. Its flagship game,
Halo: Combat Evolved, is also available at the system's launch.
* Sega announced they would no longer manufacture hardware and discontinue the Dreamcast. However, from that time through 2006, the DC has seen continued publication of hardcore games like arcade shooters, graphic adventures, and homebrew software.
*
Final Fantasy X was released. It was the first Final Fantasy game on the PS2.
*
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was released after unprecedented hype and anticipation. It was the first
Metal Gear game on the PS2.
2002* Sega became a third-party developer for primarily Nintendo, but also Sony, and Microsoft.
2003*
Infogrames, owner of the
Atari intellectual properties, changed its name to Atari.
* Nintendo released the improved
Game Boy Advance SP in March.
*
Nokia entered the handheld market with its N-Gage game-phone
hybrid on October 7.
* PS2 Linux Kit is launched
2004 Resident Evil 4 for Nintendo GameCube becomes the most critically acclaimed game of the year, due to innovative gameplay and state-of-the-art cinematics and set pieces.
Halo 2 becomes the best selling Xbox game.
Half-life 2 has gone gold.
Doom 3 has gone gold.
*
Sony released the
PlayStation 2 Slim in November
2005 God of War went gold.
*
Microsoft Game Studios release the highly anticipated
Forza Motorsport.
2006 * Sony announces
PSOne manufacturing ending in March
* Reggie becomes President of Nintendo of America on May 25, 2006
*
PlayStation is the first console to sell 103 million consoles as of March
Seventh generation (2004 - present)
2004* Nokia releases a re-tooled N-Gage, the
N-Gage QD.
* Nintendo released the
Nintendo DS in the U.S. on November 21.
* Sony released the PSP in Japan on December 2nd
2005* Sony
PlayStation Portable (PSP) is released to the U.S. market on March 23.
* Nintendo reveals early details of their next-generation video game console, the
Wii (then codenamed Nintendo Revolution) during E3. At TGS Nintendo reveals their "revolutionary" controller. It includes tilt, position and movement sensors, and is one-handed (though an attachment can occupy the other hand for some games.)
* The
Hot Coffee Mod is found on all versions of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas which includes a "sex minigame." The game's rating is raised to AO, which removes it from virtually all mainstream stores. Rockstar Games rereleases the game without the hidden content, bringing it back to an M rating.
*Sony demonstrates the
PlayStation 3 during a pre-E3 press conference. Anticipation for the console's release grows steadily until it suspected that the system will, while being hands-down the fastest home console ever released, have an estimated MSRP of either $600 or $700 USD, possibly depending on the included accessories.
* Nintendo reinvents the Game Boy Advance yet again to make the
Game Boy Micro on October 2.
* Nokia announces the N-Gage will be discontinued until at least 2007 in November.
* Microsoft releases their second video game console, the
Xbox 360 on November 22, with a rare simultaneous release in both America and Japan. It is well received in America, with resold units going for much higher than MSRP on the secondary market but suffered in the Japanese market, with many retailers having to go to extreme measures just to get them off the shelves. Although widely regarded as a superb console, stock shortages as well as prevalent rumors of system instability or poorly manufactured systems have marred this otherwise-successful launch.
* The video-game
Spore is shown at the GDC, and is received well, due to its
procedural generation and
Massively Single-Player style.
2006* The Nintendo DS Lite is announced on January 26, with a Japanese release set for March 2nd, 2006. It is a redesign of the Nintendo DS; it's 42% smaller, 21% lighter and with a brighter screen. It also features some cosmetic changes, including a repositioning of the speakers, microphone and some of the face buttons. All stores stocking the DS Lite were sold out within minutes of opening.
* Nintendo announces Wii on April 27, 2006. Wii (pronuonced "we") features a new controller with an unorthodox, remote control-like shape which is based around the concept of direct motion control.
* Again, Sony demonstrates the PlayStation 3 at a pre-E3 press conference. First- and third-party games are revealed. The redesigned controller is said to have tilt-sensitivity, looks more like the dualshock controllers, and has lost rumble functionality. It is confirmed that there will be two packages. One will be about $499 with a 20GB hard drive, and the other will be $599 with 60GB. The system will launch in Japan on November 11, 2006 and in both Europe and North America on November 17.
* Envizions Computer Entertainment announced , a "next generation media hub" that "allows customers to pause, rewind and record live TV, store family photos, play 3D PC games, and access console like applications." Though noted as being a powerful system, its pricetag is higher than that of any other console this generation; its RRP is set at 679.99 USD
* [
1]
* [
2]
* Day, Walter.
The Golden Age of Video Game Arcades (1998) - A 200-page story contained within
Twin Galaxies' Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records. ISBN 1887472-25-8
*
The Video Game Revolution (2004) is a documentary from
PBS that examines the evolution and history of the video game industry, from the 1950s through today, the impact of video games on society and culture, and the future of electronic gaming.
*
Video Game Invasion: The History of a Global Obsession (2004) (Documentary.
Press Release,
IMDb)
*
The First Video Game a description at Brookhaven National Laboratory
*
GameSpot's The History of Video Games*
Ars Technica's The evolution of gaming: computers, consoles, and arcade*
Golden age of arcade games*
Chronology of console role-playing games*
Computer and video games*
Home computing (the
8-bit era)
*
A Santa Clara University student's History of Video Games*
A History of Video Games with separate sections for Arcade games and home consoles and numerous photos
*
The Dot Eaters, a detailed history of various types of video games
*
PONG-Story, on the history of Pong and other early video games
