Video gaming is a multi billion pound industry with possibly the largest group of customers ever. Back in the days of 8 bit colour making games was difficult but now making a game is like producing a movie, it takes a lot of time and even more money.
Video games orginated from computer systems used in the cold war to simulate war games. In 1958 a nuclear physicist, William Higginbotham, who had worked on the first atomic bomb turned two lines and a bouncing ball into the worlds first interactive form of entertainment on a computer “Tennis for two”. He used a scilloscope, one of the most expensive pieces of equipment at that time, to create his game.
In the early sixties programmers with an interest in the space race began to make use of the first computers, a programmer named Steve Russel figured out that with a computer he could create to spaceships that would fire missiles at each other, unfortunatly the computer used at the time, a PDP-1, cost around $120,000. He found his game boring and people asked him if he could make something blow up. So he did, he created a game where two ships shoot missiles at each other AND blow up. This was the most popular computer game for about two years, but only because it was the only one. The code for the “Spacewars” program was passed around from programmer to programmer and soon anywhere with a PDP-1 computer had Spacewars.
Ralph Baer created the first home video game console, the Magnovox Odyssey aka. the brown box. Ralph started working on this idea in 1966 and it was eventually released in 1972.
In the late sixties and early seventies Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, realised that war games weren’t going to be very popular. The time of peace and love. Hippys! He had an idea to create Pong, inspired by a game that he had played on the Manavox Odysey. Nolan Bushenell was the first person to think he could make money off of video games and launched the video game industry. The programmer who programmed Pong, Al Alcorn, had it working, with sound, in just three days. Pong was released in 1972 as an arcade game and the video game industry was born. The odd thing about pong was that it was a two player game, it required two people to play, unless you wanted to be playing against yourself. Suprisingly the game was played more by women than men, simply because they were better at it.
Filed under: Games research
Pong – the arcade game – was created by Alan Alcorn because Nolan Bushnell played the ping-pong game on a Magnavox Odyssey game system at a Magnavox products presentation in Burlingame CA on May the 27th, 1972. He played the ping-pong game hands-on after having signed the visitors register, a reproduction of which you can see in my book “Videogames: In the Beginning”. He then hired Alan Alcorn who designed and built the Pong arcade game.
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Ralph H. Baer