A History of Video Games Part II.
Welcome back! (This is part II of my history of video games, so if you haven’t read part one please click here.) I enjoy visualisations of data, it makes things more interactive and at least for me, more memorable. The below chart paints the picture of our journey so far and where we will be wondering next.
In part I., I spoke about the first games coded onto computers, how games like Spacewar! inspired the creation of the arcade cabinet and how the home console brought the arcade into the living room. Join me this time as we delve into the fierce competition of the console wars, the genre setting genius of the growing PC game market!
So it begins, the Console Wars.
Each console built off of existing technology in an evolutionary arms race to please that special type of consumer, the gamer. These generations each had at least one distinctive technological advancement that would shape and influence how they were marketed. These epochs are loosely defined, so don’t be surprised if you come across other video game historians with slightly different groupings of each generation.
First generation. When supply kills demand.
In part I. we were introduced to the Magnavox Odyssey that had a tennis game (along with 11 others) and Atari’s HomePong (which was legally proved to be the inspiration for Pong). In 1976 a toy company called Coleco (think Cabbage Patch Dolls) launched its own home console Telstar that could play Pong, but they didn’t make their own hardware, that was thanks to a third-party company called General Instrument. What seemed like a great idea at the time for Coleco as their console rocketed to number one in sales, turned out to be their Achilles heel.
General Instrument didn’t sell the hardware exclusively to Coleco and within a year there were millions of cheap Pong clones flooding video game markets in the U.S. Europe and Japan. This over supply led to the first console market collapse in 1977 in the United States and the first of many major casualties in the console wars with Coleco admitting its first defeat in the home console market.
E.T. killed home. The Second Generation and the 1983 Market Crash.
Fairchild semiconductors came out of the gates first in 1976 with their Channel F console, changing the game by using Read Only Memory or ROM cartridges. This was a technological and cultural shift as Magnavox and Atari ditched the pre-programed games of the first generation to release their own systems that would work with cartridges. The most memorable being the 1977 legendary Atari 2600 in 1977 (otherwise known as the Video Computer System or VCS). Magnavox which was now owned by Philips launched the Odyssey 2 in 1978 and although it wasn’t as popular in the U.S. it did find success in Europe. Filling the toy company gap was Mattel (of Barbie fame) which released their Intellivision in 1980. The Intellivision provided more of a competition to Atari then the Odyssey 2 due to its superior graphics and introduction of sports titles like Major League Baseball, NFL Football, NHL Hockey, and NBA Basketball; franchises that would become huge in the decades to come.
Nolan Bushnell and Atari had made a deal they would come to regret however, a Faustian bargain some would say. In order to get the Atari 2600 to market and compete with the likes of the Channel F, Atari needed investment to fuel production. Warner Communications bought Atari in 1976.
Atari launched conversions of their popular arcade titles such as Asteroids as well as launching the third party killer app of the time Space Invaders through Taito. Atari tried to capitalise on this success with the launch of their VCS upgrade, the Atari 5200 (get it… double 2600). The importance of a game library became apparent when there weren’t enough 5200 games and consumers couldn’t play their existing 2600 games on the new console because it wasn’t backwards compatible. The disappointment of the 5200 wasn’t Atari’s only issue as Nolan Bushnell and Joe Keenan left the company in 1978. The year after developers were fleeing Atari. Some of their best developers formed Activision (today one of the largest publisher developers in the world) because they could make more money as a third party developer, releasing games like Kaboom! (1981) and Pitfall! (1982).
But not all the third party developers had the same dedication to quality as Activision and in 1983 the market was flooded by third party developers releasing poor quality games for the second generation consoles. Despite the amount of terrible games the most infamous belonged to Atari and their E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — the video game. After signing the rights to adapt Spielberg’s movie they had only 5 weeks to rush the game through development and production in time for the Christmas season. The game was so bad that it has become a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to rush the development of a game or other commercial software (just see for yourself).
Retailers were left with huge stocks of game cartridge’s some rumoured to resorting to burying thousands of unwanted stock in the desert. The home console’s rapid decline in 1983 also coincided with the rise of home computers and that famous 1984 Apple advert.
Personal Computers. Bedroom coding and the birth of new genres.
I won’t go into so much detail with the PC hardware as I have with the consoles (though I could possibly do a separate post on this at a later date). A few honourable mentions though would be the Commodore 64, the Apple II, IBM PC 5150 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (that’s already a lot of names, but a history of personal computers this is not sadly). The bedroom coding revolution, that’s what was unleashed by these machines and coding language innovation (like the BASIC programming environment).
The emergence of new formats and genres soon opened what video games could be. In 1978 a game developed by students at the University of Essex became the first MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). Their game Multi-user Dungeon (MUD) was connected to ARPANET the educational network that would evolve into the internet. Perhaps surprisingly the origins of the LAN party was to be found in 1983 after MUD. SuperSet Software launched its game Snipes which allowed for a competitive multiplayer between different devices (as opposed to the home console that had two joysticks connected to one device).
PC gaming began to integrate more console gamers with the IBM 5150 and its optional joystick port that could play games like the 1979 Microsoft Adventure. Peripherals aside, the contentious DLC or expansion pack has its origins in this dawn of PC computing with the 1981 Upper Reaches of Apshai, the expansion content for the 1979 game Temple of Apshai. The Boulder Dash series earned its place in video games history by pioneering modding, with the fourth installment of its series, the 1986 Boulder Dash Construction Kit which gave players the ability to create and modify their own levels.
It wasn’t just the games themselves that were breaking convention but also the way the games were being sold. Before the 1980 role-playing video game Akalabeth: World of Doom was published properly, you could find Richard Garriott’s game on the shelves of local shops in plastic bags (very entrepreneurial). The indie developer-preferred method however became the direct to consumer method of shareware, or sending copies of the game on floppy disk through the mail.
Consoles couldn’t be kept down forever though. Join me next time for Part III where I explore how consoles made a comeback and how the 90's took gaming into another dimension.
