Reading 01: In the beginning
Early video games were all about what’s the most you can do with the least amount of resources. As we discussed in class, the very first games were all done with hardware only. The development of games were used as a way to bring computers to more people and show that these systems could be used for more than just the math and science universities were focused on. And I single out universities in particular because they, and the huge tech companies of the time, were the only ones that could afford and house these giant machines. But for the people that had access to them, they could explore problems in different ways, and model more real behaviors, and make their work easier with new programs, and take a break from the normal work they were doing to make something new.
These people were able to express themselves in brand new ways and figure out how this technology that they knew was the future could be expanded even more. That may have been the biggest hinderance to the video game industry in the beginning. The public’s perception of what these machines could do, and the fact that you had to be a giant corporation or university to even have one. Once computers could shrink down to the size of cabinets and arcade size machines, they really started to take off. They could be seen at conventions and the public could get to know their real potential as well. Once there were consoles that could just plug into your TV video games spread even wider.
The first commercial games were very focused on team sports like tennis and hockey, and game-ified versions of the problems scientists and developers were working on like missile launch games. This is pretty similar to current games, there are huge markets for sports games like Madden and FIFA that most gamers have played. These were the basis for the modern games, which we have just been able to build more controls and complexities into to make them more realistic and life like.
Speaking of complexity of gaming, these early consoles that the games were coming out on were extremely limited in the input forms that they could handle. A lot of them were just handled with two different potentiometers that controlled movement in the x and y direction and a button or two. This vastly limits what people can realistically mimic and is probably one of the main reasons that the simple concepts the games had dominated the market. So developers were tied by the limited functions that the systems could handle, and they couldn’t really develop for other systems, but they were exploring and making something new all the time.
However, there were so many systems available once the tech got to a console level, that they flooded the market and it caused a problem for the consumer. This was a big disadvantage because since there were so many different consoles, developers didn’t bother to try to make games available on all of them. They would work for one company and make the games for that one company and that was it. If you were a gamer you had to go out and buy a ton of different consoles if you wanted different experiences or to branch out from the limited selection that a company offered to you. You were also limited by the capabilities of the system that the developers were tied by as well, but I bet it was still really exciting to see this new technology develop.
