1970-1971.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series

free999enigma (67)in #gaming • 7 years ago (edited)

1970-1971.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series - Because there weren’t really any games in 1970, this episode contains the year 1971 as well. In this edition we get the first glimpse at the possibilities that arcade games could offer, and see the rise of one of the most popular computer games ever made.

At the dawn of the 1970s the world was still enraptured by the Moon landing, and by the repeated attempts to return there. Some met with success, some were outright failures. And when it came to video games, things went in a similar direction.

On January 1st 1970, UNIX time began, 32 bit clock that’s been counting almost every second since that day, and will need to stop in 68 years due to the size of the number. That very same year also marked the opening of the Xerox PARC computer laboratory, in Palo Alto, California. A place that would very soon change the world. It was also the year that Niklaus Wirth released the Pascal programming language, and the year that IBM released the System Mode 145 Mainframe Computer, the first to use integrated circuit memory, instead of core memory, which was constructed from wires intersecting through magnetic rings.

Although I am quite sure that there were games developed in the year 1970, that somewhere a programmer, a hacker, a curious student wrote a few lines of code that can be interpreted as a game, none of them survived to this day.

So we move on to 1971. The year when Disney World opened for the first time, a gigantic human trap operated by a mouse.
A few people were already trying to make their way into the still unproven segment of personal computing, with machines like the Kenbak-1. A personal computer that predated such modern concepts like a CPU, and had very limited uses. Only 50 of them were created, and thus failed to achieve much. However, The Computer Terminal Corporation created that very same year the Datapoint2200 programmable terminal. Although it was meant to act as a companion to a mainframe to which it could connect, it was capable of doing tasks on its own. Which made it more a PC, than a simple terminal. It came with a keyboard, a display, and was meant to support hard drives, printers, even modems. You may think of it as a blueprint for the idea of today’s computers. More so because Intel was tasked with creating a CPU for it, one that would conform to a specific set of criteria and capable of executing a certain set of instructions. But Intel didn’t manage to construct their CPU in time, having to contend with creating the Intel 4004 CPU instead, the first commercially available CPU, which was used for calculators at the time. Yet, when Intel did complete the task set to it by the Computer Terminal Corporation, to replace the circuitry of the Datapoint2200 with a dedicated CPU, it created the Intel 8008, the foundation of the x86 architecture we still use today.
It was in this year that we also got the first laser printer. We would have gotten it earlier, but even though Gary Starkweather invented it in 1967, Xerox didn’t think much of it, so it sent him to the Palo Alto PARC laboratory, where he developed it without their interference. Only then did the company actually take note of it. You will be seeing a trend in that regard from Xerox over the next few years.
And if you ever sent an e-mail, you’ve got Ray Tomlinson to thank for that, as in 1971 he sent the first one, over ArpaNet, having developed the underlying technology for it, as well as establishing the “@” character as the standard for it.

In 1970 we didn’t have any games, that I know of. But 1971 was a very different animal. One of the most popular PC games ever created was released this year. Oregon Trail. Meant as a teaching tool, created by a teacher named Don Rawitsch, with the help of Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, as a tool to better educate students about the arduous process of colonizing the west. It is a game that has withstood the test of time, and could be considered as a precursor of Rogue, due to failure being highly probable and random conditions having a large part of the outcome. It had a sense of engagement to it, beyond merely its educational properties. It offered challenged and a sense that the right planning and decision making would lead to a favorable outcome, where the least number of people died of dysentery.
We even had the first adaptation of Star Trek in the form of a video game. Made by a highscool student named Mike Mayfield and a few friends, with an account on the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe of the University of California Irvine that they shouldn’t have had access to. It put you at the command of the starship Enterprise, two years after the show itself was canceled, and gave you the objective of hunting down enemy klingon vessels. The game was very popular, being distributed through newsletters, improved upon, enhanced and flourishing over the next decade.

Remember Spacewar? The popularity of the game did not dwindle over the years, and it left many people wondering what would happen if they made it mode accessible to the general public. Nolan Bushnell and Jim Stein were such people. Together they formed Syzygy Engineering, and with the help of Nutting Associates developed Computer Space. A stand alone version of Spacewar that was meant to be coin operated, allowing anyone to play it with pocket change, and not a mainframe that cost several thousand dollars. It wasn’t a perfect copy of Computer Space, because the hardware of the stand-alone machine wasn’t that good. It was a singleplayer affair, where the player would compete against computer run ships for score, with no central gravity well and lacking some of the charm of the original.
This was criticized by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck, two people that came up with their own idea of adapting Spacewar, but using more powerful hardware. It was called Galaxy Game. Bushnell had actually hoped that they could borrows some hardware ideas from them, in order to allow Computer Space to truly flourish. However, what they saw was not exactly what they expected. Pitts and Tuck had actually set up a coin operated terminal running Galaxy Game from a PDP-11 that was stuck somewhere in an attic and connected together with a 30 meter cable. As you can imagine, the PDP-11 was a very expensive machine, and not really something that could be housed in an arcade, which is why Galaxy Game never went beyond that initial machine. Though a second screen was added to it, because people loved watching others play
But Computer Space, due to its lower cost and simpler hardware, did go on to have a moderate success. Over 1000 units being sold over the next five years. Not exactly what they had hoped, or what Nutting Associates expected. The reason was quite simple. Up until this day, coin operated games, like pinball or simpler mechanical and electronic arcade cabinets were usually meant for places like bars. Not the very best place to put such a game, because the people that went there really weren’t in the mood to learn to play it. The ones placed closer to universities campuses proved to be a lot more popular. So Syzygy Engineering and Nutting Associate parted ways, with Bushnell promising to not make the same mistakes with his next idea for an arcade game. The one that would be seen by most as the foundation of the gaming industry. But we’ll get to that one next week.

Even though Computer Space was the game that would go one to make the most money in 1971, and it set the stage for what would soon become the video games industry, I would say that the game that best fits the year 1971 was Oregon Trail. Why? Because people still play it now. More or less in the same form it was conceived in. It has withstood the test of time and brought millions into gaming in a way that few other games can say they have.

And so ends another year. Next week, everything changes.