1974.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series
1974.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series - We are now starting to get in the thick of it. Games are coming left and right, new genres are sprouting up, new platforms, new consoles. Everyone wants a piece of the action and games aren’t going to take a back seat to other forms of entertainment anymore.
I would be remiss if I did not take the opportunity to correct an omission in last week’s show. 1973 marked the introduction of the Xerox Alto. A computer built by the people at Xerox PARC, an expensive one, absolutely, but a decade ahead of its time. It had a monitor, it had a mouse driven user interface and operating system with a true desktop metaphor. It was still an imperfect machine, certainly, but compared to anything else that existed on the market, the Alto was a marvel. And it was sadly not fully embraced by Xerox. Had it been, we would now be on a different branch of history, perhaps one where screens are vertical by default. And if you’re wondering why it was like that, it’s so an A4 sheet of paper would be accurately represented with no wasted space.
Now let’s move on to 1974. The year when the Rubik Cube was invented. The year when the MRI scanner was developed. When a small electronics component company called Foxconn was founded, which now has factories that span several cities. The year when the Altair 8800 first went on sale, and would soon offer a unique opportunity to a few certain people to enter the computer business. It was the year when the late, great Gary Kildall created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research. In the process, he also gave even more opportunities to those certain people to steal ideas and mooch of someone else’s work and then be heralded as heroes and visionaries. If you don’t remember what CP/M was, it would soon be the most popular computer operating system for a few years. Also, MSDOS was based off of an unlicensed clone of it.
In non technical events, PepsiCo became the first US company to sell its products in the USSR, spreading the threat of softdrinks to new places. And this year Abba became a worldwide sensation, after winning Eurovision with Waterloo. That may or may not be good news, depending on how tired you are of Abba. But in gaming, the non-electronic kind, a great event did indeed occur Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax published Dungeons and Dragons. The seminal game that turned tabletop RPGs from a niche hobby for enthusiast to… still a niche hobby, but for a broader and growing segment of the population. The same segment that was really into computers.
In the world of video games, we got a new video game console. Or at least the Italians did, in the form of the Ping-O-Tron, made by Zanussi, a company more famous for its line of washing machines and referigirators. 1974 marked the entrance of Namco in the gaming market, by buying the Japanese division of Atari and establishing its own presence that would only grow over the next few decades. Magnavox was also bought by Philips, meaning that the Odyssey would be around for a while.
Remember Taito? Well, they had started making video games, quite a few. Like a basketaball game named... Basketball that Midway brought to the market in the US. It was an early example of sprite based graphics and probably the first Japanese game to be licensed in the US. Taito also released a racing game named Speed Race, an early example of the scrolling screen effect, giving a better sense of speed and movement than some other racing games, such as Atari’s own Gran Trak 10, that feature a top-down approach and no opposition, just the player’s own skill put to the test trough a winding track with the occasional oil slick. And through its acquisition of Kee Games, Atari brought us a game simply called Tank. Where two players would pilot their war machines through a maze, with the aim if blowing up their opponent. It can be seen as a precursor to many tank battle games, from Battle City to maybe even World of Tanks.
An important thing to note is that by 1974 university networks had become a lot more complex, with mainframes capable of sustaining thousands of terminals, all with graphics capabilities, running together in the PLATO network, allowing access for even more students to technology, and of course, games. One such student was Jim Bowery, at the University of Illinois. Inspired by Empire, the space game we discussed a few weeks ago, he set out to create a similar game with a different perspective, the first person perspective. And so we got Spasim, short for Space Simulator. Much like Empire, it was a multiplayer game, capable of supporting 32 players split into four teams, each fighting for control of a few solar systems. It hat two versions in 1974. The first was built more as a straight up shooter, with the help of other pioneers, like John Daleske, of Empire fame, and was without a doubt one of the seminal works that pioneered the first person shooter genre, along with Maze War. The second was a bit more complex, developed by Bowery alongside a fellow student named Frank Canzolino, and it wasn’t as reliant on combat. It focused on cooperation, on trading much like Dave Kaufman’s Space Trader, that although was made in 1973 didn’t truly see the light of day until its source code was published in 1974. Both of these games allowed for more versatility than just about blowing up things. In that way, Spasim and Space Trader became the foundation of what we know now as the Space Sim genre. And we’ll have plenty more to talk about it in the coming weeks and months.
The PLATO network also housed m199h. What is considered to be the first computer roleplaying game, developed sometime around this time. There isn’t much known about it, or it’s creator, other than it inspired games. Games that would next year start a revolution.
The game of the year would have to be Spasim. When you look at it, you can see the seeds of things like Elite, the basic elements that would bring us a lot of beloved space adventures in the years to come. Not that the racing and driving games wouldn’t eventually get to offer players experiences that can be just as enjoyable, but with the snags that the actual space race was hitting in the real world, it was always nice to be able to explore space at least in the virtual world.
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Awesome video. Seems like you could have made a show about each individual topic, but like you mentioned it would be impossible to do so. One thing I'd like to add is that there was no intention at Xerox PARC to get into computing because they really didn't see the consumer market. Its a shame because they invented the GUI and the mouse, but again way to early. Remember that Apple tried to push it out with the the 10K Lisa and it flopped. As consumers we are lucky that Apple and MS "stole" those ideas from Xerox because it literally created the industry we all love. Keep up the good work