Game Studies - History of Video Games Before The Crash in '83

For this module we have been sorted into groups of five or less, to produce a presentation on a subject chosen from the list provided by our lecturer Phil Morris. My teams chosen subject is The History Before The Crash, if you hadn't already gathered that from the title of this post. In our team we ground the subject down into five bite sized chunks, each of us choosing an era to focus our research on. The idea is then to unite all of our research and organise the presentation, with each of us a little more clued in on the subject.

So what is the "Crash"? The crash is a period in which the games industry went through quite a devastating recession. This was due to a few factors, not just the horrible E.T. game by Atari. The market was flooded with too many consoles of all shapes and sizes. This made it difficult to create multi-platform games and had consumers a little confused on which console to purchase, apparently they chose not to buy one at all. All of this was not aided by games companies making terrible decisions, such as ordering far too many units than they were possibly going to sell. Then comes the games them selves. Don't get me wrong, there were some brilliant games around at the time but they were swamped by poorly designed disappointments. The disappointing games were usually to do with the fact that the games companies were rushing the design of there games, in order to keep up with the amount of money that they were loosing, it is a very vicious cycle.

The era that I have chosen to focus on is 1970 - 79, so we should get started on that right?

The first notable game of the 70's was Computer Space, it was of course an arcade game released in 1971 and the system looked as expected for a futuristic design in the 70's. Now this was not your average arcade game, this was the first ever arcade game and set a standard that all future arcade systems would soon follow. The game was simple, you control a rocket ship and attack some flying saucers. You must outscore the flying saucers in hits to continue playing and increase your score.

So you know how it goes, you start working for a company, they ask you to prove yourself in a training exercise and then you make the game that changes the face of the game industry. At least that is what happened with Allan Alcorn when he created Pong for Atari in their training program. The game went through a few changes with some extra mechanics added before production in 1972 but before you know it Pong was a house hold name across the globe.


In 1974 the first first-person shooter was created, it was called Maze War. I always wondered where Call of Duty originated. This is the game that we can thank for all of those stress releasing moments, blasting the hell out of people that we do not know online. It is strange when you look back and see how things began and how far we have come in such a short space of time. I wonder if Jim Guyton and Bruce Malasky, the coders of Maze War, ever imagined a first-person shooter as complex as we see today. Perhaps they were just constrained by the technology at the time, having to create a simple wire-frame world rather than what was in their imagination.

1975 was the year that we started to see consoles creep into the homes of the public across the globe when Atari released pong on a home system. This home system was controlled by the most powerful microchip ever used in a consumer product at the time! And so an army of expert Pong players rose up and destroyed the world! No no wait that didn't happen but I do remember an iconic episode in That 70's Show, where Kelso re-engineered the console to produce smaller paddles because the game was becoming too boring. Perhaps this is why games became more complex over the years, because people did not have to go to the arcade to play them. People could play the games to their hearts content at home, making them seem repetitive and boring.

In 1977 Don Woods produced the text based adventure game adventure, no I don't have a stutter, the game was called Adventure. It was a text based role playing game and could possibly be the source of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game genre. The game was based on Dungeons and Dragons but it was single player.

The last great game of the 70's, Space invaders, was released in 1978. This is the game that had people of all ages glued to the arcade machines. I have to admit that this was one of my guilty pleasures when I was younger, such simple but addictive mechanics. The game was produced by Midway and was the first arcade game to track and display high scores. This may have been the main contributing factor to the success of the game, everyone trying to get their name on the scoreboard for all to see.

And that is the end of the 70's......

Actually that's not true, a few more consoles were released along with some good and bad games which did not make the lime light. I would love to mention every game of the 70's but you would probably fall asleep before the end of this post ;-). That's it from me this afternoon, I hope you enjoyed reading my post and have a good one.

                                                                                                                                                                    

Bibliography

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Correspondent, A. (2014) 42 interesting facts about the hit arcade video game Pong. Available at: http://www.mid-day.com/articles/42-interesting-facts-about-the-hit-arcade-video-game-pong/15795171 (Accessed: 30 September 2015).

DigiBarn Games: Maze War Retrospective (no date) Available at: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xerox-maze-war/ (Accessed: 29 September 2015).

Donovan, T. (2010) Replay: The History of Video Games. United Kingdom: Yellow Ant.

Edwards, B. (2011) Computer Space and the Dawn of the Arcade Video Game. Available at: http://www.technologizer.com/2011/12/11/computer-space-and-the-dawn-of-the-arcade-video-game/ (Accessed: 29 September 2015).

Jerz, D. G. and Hill, S. (1997) DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original Adventure in Code and in Kentucky. Available at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html (Accessed: 29 September 2015).

Murphy, C. (2015) The 10 Greatest Arcade Games of the 1970s | Big Fish Blog. Available at: http://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/the-10-greatest-arcade-games-of-the-1970s/ (Accessed: 29 September 2015).

Oxford, N. (2011) Ten Facts about the Great Video Game Crash of ’83. Available at: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2011/09/21/ten-facts-about-the-great-video-game-crash-of-83 (Accessed: 29 September 2015).

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(no date) Available at: http://images.techhive.com/images/article/2012/10/guilde-100006853-large.png (Accessed: 29 September 2015).

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(no date) Available at: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/TeleGames-Atari-Pong.png/220px-TeleGames-Atari-Pong.png (Accessed: 29 September 2015).

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