1975.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series

free999enigma (67)in #gaming • 8 years ago (edited)

This is the year when games not only became more accessible, with a brand new console, but they also got a few new representatives of genres that would soon become a driving force behind the industry for many decades.

1975 The year that the Vietnam War finally ended, only for a couple of new ones to start. But it was also a year of great joy in the world of technology and gaming, because this was when the engine that spearheaded both personal computing and home gaming was created. A small team of former Motorola employees lead by Chuck Peddle, managed to create the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor. This may not be a name that resonates with you as much as the Intel 8086, which would come in a few years, or as the Motorola 68000, that was still almost half a decade away. But without it, there would be no home computing. It was used for everything, from the Apple 2 to the Atari 2600 and even the Nintendo Entertainment System. Not only was it a powerful processor, for its time, reaching up to 3 MHz, but it cost only 25 dollars, at a time when the Intel 8080 that featured similar speed, cost in excess of 300 dollars. I can’t overstate the importance of this processor. There would be no personal computers without it and computing in general would continue to be reserved for people capable of spending thousands of dollars on an unproven machine with very little market share.

This was also the year when we got the first touch screen, the resistive kind, thanks to George Samuel Hurst. The first portable computer, in the form of the IBM 5100. A machine that cost back then between 9000 and 20000 dollars, and had a weight of 24Kg. I said it was portable, not practical. Microsoft was founded this year, its first task being porting BASIC to the Altair 8800. Unix hit the market, and Kodak developed the Digital Camera, didn’t really market it out of fear it would hurt its film sales. And so, within two three decades the company would fall into obscurity, putting an end to over a century of innovation.

Returning to the world of video games, in 1975 Pong became a housholed name. Almost. Atari entered into a partnership with Sears to sell a home version of Pong under the name of Sears Tele-Game. The console was built by Alan Alcorn, the creator of Pong, and two other Atari engineers named Harold Lee and Bob Brown. The partnership between the two companies wouldn’t really last, because next year Atari would go solo. And so would everyone else, with the many clones that would follow. The Magnavox Odyssey was discontinued this year, being replaced with the Odyssey 100 and 200, each with their different dedicated games that were still not all that evolved passed what the original had, but now with the ability to draw its own lines and bars, so there would be no need for an overlay.

Atari was responsible for a first this year. The first movie tie-in game. Jaws! Well, techically it was called Shark Jaws, because Bushnell couldn’t get the rights to Jaws, but the “shark” part wasn’t really all that visible on the arcade cabinet. This was in a way also among the first Horror Games, that being the brand under which Atari sold it, the basic idea being that you were supposed to catch a fish while avoiding being eaten by a large shark. Meanwhile, somewhere in Germany, a doctor of engineering named Reiner Foerst created the first first person driving game, named, what else, Nurburgring 1. Among the first air combat simulators came out this year, in the form of Taito’s Interceptor.

But the most important innovation in gaming would come again from university mainframes. This was the RPG revolution.

In 1975 we got not one, but four role playing games, in the sense that we know them today. Dungeon crawlers, games where you take the role of a hero with different stats, collecting equipment, gathering gold, killing monsters, buying things, selling them sometimes, traversing a labyrinth where death is certain. Among the first ones made was a game known as “pedit5”. It wasn’t the first one, that may be m199h, that was lost to time. “pedit5” had a proper name, that of The Dungeon, and it tasked with you with navigating through a dungeon, defeating your foes with might or magic, and usually making a brand new character, with better stats, just a few minutes later, because you were killed by a skeleton. The game was created by a man named Rusty Rutherford, at the university of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, on the popular PLATO network. And it wasn’t alone.

At the Southern Illinois University, Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood created dnd, an adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons, that was released the year before. Its full name was The Game of Dungeons, and unlike The Dungeon, it wasn’t just about running around getting, and then restarting, though Pedit5’s role as the precursor to the Roguelike can’t be understated. Dnd gave you an actual goal, that of collecting a pair of artifacts, an orb and a grail, as well as slaying a fierce dragon that is believed to be first boss ever to appear in a video game.

Also around that time there came the game entitled Dungeon, created by Don Daglow of the Claremont University Center, for the PDP-10. And then another one named Dungeon, developed by John Daleske, Gary Fritz, Jan Good, Bill Gammel, and Mark Nakada. It too was developed as an adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons, and seemed to stick very closely to the source material. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be available on the Cyber1 PLATO emulator anymore. It used to be there, but didn’t really work.

And if you found the whole naming scheme up until now too confusing, the next one will prove a bit easier to get. It was named Moria, and created by a few people also at the University of Illinois, mostly out of interest in the subject based on the work other people were doing on dnd. According to one of the creators of Moria, Kevet Duncombe, he had not actually played the pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons, or read Lord of the Rings. But someone working on it probably did. The game stood out because it featured a town to which you could return to in order to trade, and even haggle over prices with the shops, something you can’t really do with a lot of shop keepers in modern games.

All of these games were played by many, many people through the PLATO network, people that enjoyed them, people that wanted to improve them, people that would soon turn them into very different and innovative experiences, meant to improve society as a whole. More on that in a few weeks.

It’s hard to pin down exactly which one would be considered the game of 1975, since most of them were built atop of previous ones, or they were inspired by them. I would say that Moria was the most complete of them, the most competent, but not having had the ability to play Dungeon, I can’t say that for sure. So, just this time, I’m giving the title to all of them. Not to discount how important it was that Pong made it into the homes of people, but it’s been here two times already in one form or another. Come back next week, when the adventure truly begins. Goodbye.