History of Computer games: Part I 1950 – 1970s

Nineteen fifty one
As early as 1951, Ralph Baer (AKA the father of video games) a young television technician came up with the concept of playing games through your television set, however his boss at Loral failed to understand this idea and these concepts were never developed.  Bears however would go on to develop his ideas further in 1966

Nineteen fifty two
Before this however, A.S Douglas, a university student at Cambridge who completed his thesis on human and computer interaction was required to produce an example to prove his theories, this resulted in the first game of tic tac toe in 1952. An EDSAC vacuum-tube computer comprised of 35x16 dots was used to display a game of noughts and crosses. This was the first game known to exist and was played against the computer which used algorithms wherever possible to win against the player.

Nineteen fifty eight
After this the next significant playable game was ‘Tennis For Two’ the first game, developed by Willy Higginbotham, where two players could play against each other.

As you can see from this video the game was played using handheld controllers. This game was very simple to play, on the controller was a knob and a button. The knob is used to control the angle of the swing and the button to determine when the ball would be hit. The game was played on a oscilloscope screen, the ball which is brightly lit and uses realistic ballistic physics is hit over a 2d playing field hit by invisible rackets.

Nineteen sixty one
SPACEWAR! This game, on the PDP-1, was created by Steve Russel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The gameplay consisted of 2 spaceships trying to destroy each other whilst under the suns gravitational pull sucking them into the middle of the screen. When developing this game the debugger program generated unwanted random pixels throughout the screen, which the developers liked because they looked like stars.  Spacewar became a massive hit around the MIT campus, however would not be able to make any money from this as it couldn’t be marketed. The only computers that could run such games could only be found in universities.

Nineteen Sixty Six
 in 1966 Ralph Baer continued his work from 1951 to produce a series of seven games which could be played on a console through a television set. These games included  a ‘chase’ game, Ball & Paddle games, Target Shooting games, and more. After starting his work in 1966, Baer had a working prototype known as the”brown box” which was completed two years in 1968, the first ever games console. This consisted of the console, two controllers, a light gun, and switches on the system to choose which game you wanted to play.

 The brown box would later be put into commercialisation by Magnavox in 1972 under the name ‘Odyssey’

Nineteen Seventy One
Based on Steve Russels ‘Spacewar!’ The coin operated ‘Galaxy Game’ was installed at the student union of Stafford University. This is one of the earliest recorded coin operated machines, created two months before the release of Computer Space, another coin operated rig based on spacewar! (everyone loves spacewar!)

Nolan Bushnell, the creator of Computer space, saw great opportunity within video gaming, and his team at Nutting Association would be the first to take this to market. However it was considered a fail at its time. This was due to controls which were too complicated to grasp quickly, although it received a good reception at college campuses, at bars and other venues it didn’t do as well

 - "Sure, I loved it, and all my friends loved it, but all my friends were engineers. It was a little too complicated for the guy with the beer in the bar." - Nolan Bushnell

Nineteen Seventy Two
This year began the first generation of home consoles. In 1972 Magnavox released the Oddessy, developed from Baers Brown Box prototype. Few things were changed from the original prototype, the circuitry system remained virtually the same between the two consoles, however  the sixteen game selection switches were replaced with separate plug-in programming cards and a few more added games than the original.

Although from this commercial, all the games look the same. Demonstrated on May 24^th, and released August later that year, Magnavox were selling the first ever home gaming console. However due to much confusion

Nineteen Seventy Eight
This is the year where video gaming reached widespread success with the release of space invaders.  Created in Japan by Tomohiro Nishikado, the arcade game is held in the Guinness book of world records as the highest ranked arcade game.’ Space invaders’ was one of the very first shooting games, where the play had to destroy waves on alien ships earning as many points as possible.  If you’ve ever wondered, here’s what space invaders REALLY look like

Earlier versions of space invaders used enemies such as tanks and planes, however Nishikado was not satisfied with the enemies movements from side to side as this did not simulate flying. He drew inspiration after watching Star Wars and decided to use the space theme. The enemies are based on the aliens from H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.