A Chronicle of the Earliest Video Games
A downloadable interactive history
Disclaimer: unlike the other projects on this page, this is not an original piece of software. Itch.io requires marking as a download, but the entire thing is on this page so there isn’t anything actually attached. The only original work involved here is in the combination of outside elements and how the historical facts are presented.
Trying to determine what to mark as earliest video game is nigh-impossible. Much of the time, the beginning of the timeline begins with the arcade video games and home consoles of the 1970s, but this leaves out the decades of technology and design history which built up to those games.
These early, practically pre-historic games generally didn't even have video screens, and they were generally intended as mere simulations or for demonstrative purposes rather than for real fun. They usually ran on colossal mainframe computers relegated to universities and exclusive research centers. Over time, as these early electronic games gradually evolved, they inched closer and closer to what we can classify now as a video game.
The earliest known example of a game using any kind of video game is the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device. Conceived at DuMont Laboratories by physics professor Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann, the device plays a simple accuracy-based war game, functionally similar to a radar display. The targets are disconnected from the underlying electronics completely, being represented using decals on top of the device itself. The player has to adjust the dials and buttons on the side to line up the "blast" with wherever the decals are placed, under a 30-second time limit.
However, calling it a video game is a bit of a stretch. First, the device runs entirely on analog electronics, so it does not contain any type of computer. Since the only electronic component is the screen, the win-lose condition of the game comes from the interaction between the dot and the decals on top, rather than originating completely from the video component.
But also, the only lasting evidence of the game we have is the patent filed by Goldsmith and Mann. Since the device is never publicly distributed, the only form it ever takes is a single hand-made prototype, and it never has any lasting impact.
Patent schematics of the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device.
Link to: Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device simulator.
Canadian engineer Josef Kates builds a specialized computer intended to showcase the power of the Additron, a special miniature vacuum tube he invented, at the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, Canada. To attract attention from attendees, the computer is built to play a version of tic-tac-toe with a display using lightbulbs shaped like X's and O's. The machine, called Bertie the Brain, is the first known use of a computer running a game using a visual display.
Bertie the Brain on display.
1951 marks an unusually eventful year for early game programs, mostly due to the new wave of mainframe computers beginning to crop up in universities in the US and, especially, the UK. In particular, the engineering firm Ferranti works throughout the year with the University of Manchester to develop the Manchester Mark I, and, later, the Ferranti Mark I, some of the first computers capable of running any type of real game. Over in the US, the Whirlwind computer is developed by MIT for the US Navy, with even more rudimentary capabilities.
Someone else enters the scene this year as well: a television engineer working for Loral Corporation, Ralph Baer is hired to design a high-class television set for the company. It is here that, according to Baer, he has the idea to add some kind of interactivity- although not necessarily a game- into the set as an extra feature.
...Unfortunately, the costs of putting a system like this into a television set are still very high, and the project is running behind schedule, so the company never goes through with the idea. For now, early computer game development continues on specialized machines in universities and research labs.
January
Computer scientist Christopher Strachey first goes to the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, where he is introduced to the Pilot ACE, one of the earliest computers ever built.
February
Over in the US, a group of students at MIT taught by Charles Adams begin creating a simulation of a bouncing ball for the university's Whirlwind I computer.
The same month, the University of Manchester gets its own new computer from Ferranti.
April
MIT's bouncing ball program is completed. The physics simulation shows a side view of a ball bouncing several times across the screen. It's not until later- it's not clear exactly when- that a game component is added. A modification most likely from Jack Gilmore, it adds a line shooting across the screen right before the ball sets off, representing the floor. There's a small gap in the line, representing a hole in the floor, giving the player the objective to line up the ball so that it falls into the hole. It doesn't take very long to complete, and it's hard to call it particularly fun, but it's the first computerized game with visuals that update in real time. Notably, it's also not based on a pre-existing board game or sport, which most of the games around this period were.
Link to: Whirlwind Bouncing Ball simulator.
May
Christopher Strachey uses the NPL's Pilot ACE computer to create a version of the game of draughts (checkers) to run on the machine, working on the program in his spare time throughout the summer
At the same time, the Festival of Britain is going on. Ferranti brings a specially built computer to the festival to showcase the engineering potential of their line of computers. Called the Nimrod Digital Computer, it allows attendees to play a version of the game of Nim against the computer, using a small array of light bulbs as a visual display.
July
Strachey completes his game of draughts, and on the 30th of the month, attempts to run it. However, the program has too many errors for the game to be played. The game pushes the Pilot ACE's tiny memory to its absolute limit, and so Strachey needs a more powerful computer for a functional version of the game to run.
October
Strachey hears about the University of Manchester's new computer, and considers it as a good candidate to retry his draughts program. He gets a manual from Alan Turing and gets to work adapting his code to run on the machine. Strachey is also a pianist, and as he gets used to working with the Ferranti computer, he takes advantage of its sound capabilities to play music, the first time a computer has ever been programmed to do so. The music program is played again later in the year and recorded by the BBC in the first recording of a computer playing music. In the audience is Alan Turing, who describes it as a "good show."
A recording of the computer playing three extremely out-of-tune songs.
November
While Strachey is working on his checkers program, Dietrich Prinz works with Alan Turing to code a version of chess running on the Ferranti Mark I, which they call Mate-In-Two. Although they have the game up and running, it has no visual component, instead played entirely through text.
It takes Strachey until the summer of 1952 to get his game running on the University of Manchester's computer. Called A Game of Draughts, it displays the game of checkers on the computer's rudimentary black-and-white screen.
A Game of Draughts pictured in what is possibly the first screenshot of a video game.
Later that year, Stanley Gill creates an original game on the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. Called Sheep and Gates, it displays a dot, meant to represent a sheep, going through one of two holes in a line, which represent gates. It uses the light beam of the machine's paper tape reader as a control method, with the player sticking their hand in the way of the beam to control which gates are opened.
Around the same time, Alexander "Sandy" Douglas creates a different game on the University of Cambridge's EDSAC. A version of tic-tac-toe deemed A Game of Naughts and Crosses, or later, simply OXO, it uses the computer's electronic screen to display its visuals, rather than needing a custom-built display screen like earlier tic-tac-toe computers.
A 1951 film demonstrating the EDSAC, with voiceover from 1976. Sandy Douglas shows up at 4:15, with Stanley Gill entering at 5:11.
Over at the University of Michigan, William George Brown and Ted Lewis create a simulation of the game of Pool on the university's MIDSAC computer. By far the most sophisticated game created to date, it is a fairly accurate simulation of the game, with graphics on all balls updating in real time, although the speed slows down significantly when several of the balls are moving at once- making it the first game to drop frames. Reports from the time don't show annoyance at the slowdown though, instead finding it interesting that it lets the movement physics be observed in more detail than they would in a real-life game.
Link to: MIDSAC Pool simulator.
A student playing MIDSAC Pool on its original hardware.
William Higinbotham, a physicist who had helped develop the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos, discovers that the Brookhaven National Laboratory's mainframe computer was capable of simulating trajectories with realistic physics, he designs an adaptation of table tennis to run on the machine, building it with technician Robert Dvorak.
Tennis For Two is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it's For Two- it is the first game on this list intended to be played by more than one player; even the conversions of two-player games like tic-tac-toe and checkers were played against the computer.
Second, it's the only computer game so far to be intended solely for fun right from the start, not to be a simulation or to show off the hardware power it runs on. Set up for only three days at the laboratory's annual public exhibition to entertain the attendees, visitors end up lining up for a turn to play. At the end of the exhibition, it gets dismantled and forgotten about for the next 15 years.
Link to: Higinbotham Tennis For Two simulator.
Footage of a reconstructed version of the game being played.
Created by Lincoln Laboratory, one of the same labs behind the Whirlwind I, the TX-0 mainframe computer is capable of using transistors, rather than the earlier vacuum tubes. One of the programs created for the TX-0 is Mouse In The Maze, letting the user create a maze from horizontal and vertical lines, fill it with cheese, and then drop in a virtual mouse, which then traverses the maze to get the cheese. Later, versions were created replacing the cheese with martinis, making the mouse more and more tipsy as it went on. Although the program is often called a video game, the only degree of user interaction is in creating the maze, which the artificial intelligence is then meant to solve. Nevertheless, the low-resolution screen is able to display a fairly recognizable piece of cheese and mouse, which could be considered the first video game character.
The game's mouse character, showcasing the TX-0's mind-boggling effects.
Link to: Mouse in the Maze TX-0 emulator.
The TX-0 in action. Mouse in the Maze appears starting at 0:40. Please be warned that the TX-0's display flashes rapidly, so this video is strongly not recommended for anyone sensitive to flashing lights.
Link to: an MIT memo describing the program.
Later that year, the newly formed computer manufacturer DEC modifies the design of the TX-0 to create a much more streamlined version, called the PDP-1. Significantly smaller than any other mainframe computer, the PDP-1 becomes the first minicomputer- which is somewhat of a misnomer, considering it's still several times larger than a human being. Nevertheless, its architecture is better suited to creating games than anything before it, and the PDP line becomes the center of game innovation over the following years.
After the PDP-1 minicomputer makes its way to MIT, a group of students decide to use it to create a space flight program, inspired by the Soviet Union and then United States' space programs succeeding in putting a human being into orbit the previous year. Led by "Slug" Russell, the group create Spacewar!, with two spaceships flying around space shooting each other while avoiding gravity from the star. The game is significantly more complex than anything made previously, and requires hundreds of hours of work by several people to create- Dan Edwards is credited with coming up with the game's gravity calculations, “Shag” Graetz with the explosions, Bob Saunders with testing, and with Peter Samson, Wayne Wiitanen, and Alan Kotok as contributors as well. The game spreads to universities all over the country, becoming extremely popular with those who have access to computers that can run it, which is still a very exclusive group at this point, as only 55 PDP-1 computers are ever sold.
To start the Spacewar! emulator, hold left CTRL and press enter, then wait about 20 seconds for the program to load. To control this two-player game, use the arrow keys for player 1 and ESDF keys for player 2. For directions or more info, check the original source here.
Slug Russell discusses the creation of Spacewar! in a documentary clip. Note: one commentator describes the PDP-1 as a microcomputer, which is incorrect; these are a different type of computer that come significantly later than minicomputers like the PDP-1.
Footage of Spacewar! being played.
Spacewar! lead developer Slug Russell sitting next to a PDP-1.
The Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Westchester County, New York and IBM hold a joint research project, investigating the idea of computer-based simulations in schools. As a part of the project, they create The Sumerian Game, programmed by William McKay and written by Mabel Addis, a fourth-grade schoolteacher, for an IBM mainframe computer. Intended to teach Sumerian economics, it puts students in the role of the ruler of the Sumerian city of Lagash, making decisions about quantities of grain to allocate throughout harvest season over the course of three rounds. Although it originally has no visual element whatsoever, it has various credits as the first strategy game, the first simulation game, the first educational game, the first game with a female designer, and the first computer game with a narrative.
After two groups of around 30 students play the game, its code is no longer kept around, and the only lasting records of the game come from reconstructions based on descriptions of the game.
The Sumerian Game is one of the earliest examples of a computer game used for teaching purposes. As mainframe computers spread around universities, some instructors expose them to younger learners to give them a head start in their education. To get these kids interested in the boring computers, educators present material in the form of game, either to teach programming and computer skills or general educational material.
Link to: a reconstructed version of the Sumerian Game. Free download, but requires a Steam account.
Ralph Baer now works at defense contractor Sanders Associates, as the lead of the Equipment Design division. On August 31, during a business trip to New York, he sits outside a bus terminal, waiting to go to a meeting. As he waits, he mind drifts back to the idea he had a decade and a half before of an interactive television set, and he jots down an idea in a small spiral notebook of playing games on a home television set.
The next day, he turns those notes into a full proposal, bouncing the idea of a "game box" around the Sanders Associates Research & Development division. The project is quickly given the go-ahead, and by December, Baer and his team successfully create a prototype of a line moving on a screen.
Baer's four-page proposal, dated September 1, 1966.
Spacewar! makes its way to Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where it runs on a PDP-6 computer and becomes a favorite among the university's students.
One of these students is Bill Pitts, who is not a part of the Artificial Intelligence Project at all. Instead, he breaks into the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory building for fun, without knowing what it is, while exploring tunnels underneath the campus. After seeing Spacewar! in action, he convinces the project lead to give him access to come back and keep playing. After playing a game with fellow student Hugh Tuck, he comments that if someone could get the game to run in a coin-operated arcade cabinet, it would probably be very successful. But, unfortunately, the hardware costs of running the game are still far too high to mass-produce.
Hugh Tuck talks about seeing Spacewar! for the first time. Tuck says the game runs on a PDP-10, which is what it switches to a few years later.
Baer brings on technician Bill Harrison to work on their "TV Game" project. They are extremely secretive about the project, working in a small room which is kept locked at all times. In May, the system handles two-player games, with Harrison beating Baer in their first game. In June, they present a prototype of the project to the entire board of directors of Sanders Associates, with a full seven games shown off. Most of the executives are not particularly impressed, but nonetheless, they give the go-ahead to develop the technology into a commercial product. The prototype continues development for the next several years, with another engineer, Bill Rusch, joining shortly after.
The first prototype, called TV Game #1.
Ralph Baer discusses the creation of the prototype in a documentary clip.
DEC employee Doug Dyment gives a presentation at the University of Alberta on the role of computers in education. After the talk, a woman who'd seen the Sumerian Game approaches him to see if he'd heard of it, and when he is unfamiliar, gives him a description. Based on nothing more than this description, Dyment creates a version of the game, with only a single round, for the PDP-8. This version, variously called The Sumer Game, King of Sumeria, or Hamurabi, becomes widespread in the programming community.
Doug Dyment discusses the Sumer Game’s rise in popularity.
Link to: the reconstructed Sumerian Game, which also includes the 1968 version. Free download, but requires a Steam account.
On January 15th, Ralph Baer and Bill Rusch file a patent for the technology of the Brown Box prototype. The patent describes a home video game console, although that terminology has not yet come into use.
Early in the year, Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison complete their TV Game prototype, named the "Brown Box" after to its wood-grain casing. However, the finished machine is too expensive for Sanders Associates to sell, so they make the decision to license the technology to a television manufacturer. The cable company TelePrompTer had backed out of a deal already, but negotiations progress with RCA Corporation for months until the deal falls through.
Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison play the Ping Pong game as part of a demonstration of the Brown Box prototype’s capabilities.
The Brown Box prototype. The big gun peripheral in the front is used for a light-based accuracy game.
The same year, the California-based electronics company Ampex hires a new group of engineers in its Videofile Information Systems Division. New college graduate Nolan Bushnell is hired early in the year, where he meets new officemates Larry Bryan and Samuel Dabney Jr, nicknamed Ted. Later in the year, two students at UC Berkeley, Steve Bristow and Al Alcorn, are hired as well. The group become friends, playing games like chess and Go together. Bushnell bounces around an idea he has to start a pizza parlor with things like pinball games and talking barrels, but doesn’t do anything with it at the moment.
Later, shortly after the Apollo Lunar Module lands on the moon, high school student Jim Storer creates a program on the high school's PDP-8 computer called Rocket, a text-based simulation of the landing. His computer teacher submits the game to the DEC users' newsletter, where its source code is distributed to subscribers under the name Apollo.
Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell, and Larry Bryan are sitting around in Dabney's house, when Bushnell brings up an idea he has to take the idea of Spacewar!, but put it in the format of an arcade machine. They agree to form a partnership to make a prototype of the idea. To come up with a name for the partnership, Bryan cracks open a dictionary, and lands on "Syzygy." The three agree to put in $100 as an investment- except for Bryan, because he doesn’t have $100 to spare.
Arcade games are already globally widespread at this point- it's just that they're electro-mechanical arcade games, like pinball. In the US, big companies like Bally, Midway, and Ramtek are well-established in making arcade games. However, putting a computer inside of one of these machines is almost completely unheard of.
Larry Bryan is able to get a program working of a version of Spacewar! in this format, but the three run into the same problem as before: the cost of a computer to run the game is simply too high to be able to mass-produce the machine. Bryan leaves the partnership soon after.
Dabney and Bushnell discuss the birth of Syzygy and their approach to the idea.
As this is happening, Sanders has finally found a licensee for the Brown Box. Even though their deal with RCA had fallen through, one of RCA's executives, Bill Enders, had left the company to work at one of its competitors, Magnavox. He is enthusiastic enough about the project to convince Magnavox's other executives to sign on, and so the two companies negotiate throughout the year for a licensing agreement.
Sometime around here, school districts in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania hold Project SOLO, an initiative to teach high school students foundational coding and computer skills. Students in Bud Valenti’s class create Hide and Seek, a text-only conversion of the playground game, on a PDP-10.
January
The Syzygy Company is established by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Bushnell is handling the business end, while Dabney is engineering their prototype. Bushnell has an idea to take advantage of the TV screen’s vertical hold adjustment- which is entirely analog- and asks Dabney if it can be manipulated intentionally. Dabney works in his daughter’s bedroom to get it working, and comes up with a prototype able to move a dot around the screen.
Bushnell and Dabney discuss their breakthrough.
March
Magnavox and Sanders Associates complete their deal, licensing Ralph Baer and Bill Rusch’s patents to Magnavox to turn the Brown Box prototype into a widely distributed product.
Nolan Bushnell leaves his job at Ampex to go to the unfortunately-named Nutting Associates, where he’s contracted to create a coin-operated arcade version of Spacewar!, which they soon give the name Computer Space. Ted Dabney leaves Ampex to join him shortly after.
June
Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck form Mini-Computer Applications. After hearing about the new PDP-11, released the previous year, Pitts realized his idea of getting Spacewar! to run in a coin-operated arcade cabinet might actually be feasible. Although the PDP-11 is still extremely expensive compared to the average arcade cabinet, it's a fraction of the cost of earlier models, and Pitts and Tuck consider the cost reasonable enough to at least try making a prototype. This makes two different groups- Mini-Computer Applications and Syzygy- both working on making a coin-operated version of Spacewar! at the same time- and they're both within about ten miles of each other.
July
Magnavox sets up the Brown Box prototype at its first test market. The demo is a hit, encouraging Magnavox to go ahead to other test markets.
August
Syzygy come up with a prototype of Computer Space, and sign an agreement with Nutting Associates, giving them the manufacturing and distribution rights for the game. The prototype is installed at Dutch Goose bar, near Stanford, for market research.
Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck are nearly finished with their Spacewar! prototype, which they've renamed to Galaxy Game in response to the climate around the Vietnam War. They get permission to set up the machine at Stanford's student union building once it’s completed.
When Nolan Bushnell finds out, he's concerned that the pair may get a version of the game to the market before Syzygy. So, Bushnell calls up Tuck and Pitts to ask how they figured out a way to make the game cheap enough to be mass-produced, and is disappointed to find out that they hadn't figured it out yet at all- the game's charge of 10 cents per play is nowhere near enough to cover the costs of the PDP-11 hardware.
When Tuck and Pitts see Computer Space, however, they're impressed with its hardware, although they feel that their conversion of the game is the superior one. With Computer Space lacking the gravity mechanics and the ability to play with multiple players, Galaxy Game is mechanically much closer to the original.
September
Tuck and Pitts complete the first version of Galaxy Game, and gear up to have it set up in the following months.
October
The Brown Box is opened up to a second test market, now with the working title “Skill-O-Vision.” This test is very successful as well.
At the Music & Amusement Machines Exposition in Chicago, a convention dedicated to things like jukeboxes and pinball machines, Nutting Associates reveal Computer Space to the public for the first time.
November
Don Daglow, an English major studying playwriting at Pomona College, walks into his dorm's computer room. By pure chance, he finds that undergraduates are permitted to use the PDP-10, a very lucky situation when most universities only allow graduate students or researchers to use the hardware. Daglow starts making a tribute to the digital psychologist simulation program ELIZA, which he calls ECALA.
Galaxy Game is displayed for the first time at Stanford University's student union building. Set up on the second floor, a huge cable goes up into the attic to connect to the PDP-11 running the game. It is extremely popular on campus, attracting crowds of people to play the game.
Press the 5 key to insert a coin in the Galaxy Game emulator. For directions or more info, please check the original source here.
A paper advertisement for Galaxy Game, taken out in the campus newspaper.
Mere days apart, Nutting Associates ships Computer Space. It is the first mass-produced, coin-operated video game.
Computer Space fails to take the world by storm. It’s not a complete failure, but its success is not enough to match the expectations of Nutting Associates. This is usually attributed to its complexity- where the design of Spacewar! appealed to its audience of computer engineers in top universities with extra spare time, the average person walking past an arcade cabinet does not want to invest the time and effort to engage with this type of game, especially considering much of its intended audience had never even seen a computer before.
Nolan Bushnell discusses Computer Space and its shortcomings.
December
The original version of Oregon Trail is presented to an eighth-grade history class by Don Rawitsch, using the Minneapolis school district's minicomputer connected to a teleprinter. Its format is similar to the Sumerian Game, presenting a fully text-based simulation intended for educational purposes. However, students in the class are so interested in the game that they stay after school and line up outside the door to play the game. After the semester ends, the source code is printed out and deleted from the computer, not to be copied into a computer again for several years.
Don Rawitsch speaks about Oregon Trail at the 2017 Game Developers Conference.
A much later re-release of Oregon Trail. For directions or more info, please check the original source here.
Shortly before Christmas break, Don Daglow realizes that much of the same code he's using for ECALA could be used to create a baseball game instead. As a result, he codes his first game, Baseball, which he would steadily add to over the next nine years. Although it only uses text, it is the first interactive baseball game on a computer.
Don Daglow discusses the circumstances leading to his creation of Baseball.
May
At the Magnavox Profit Caravan press event in New York, the Magnavox Odyssey is revealed to the world, the final version of the Brown Box prototype. The press is abuzz about this new mystery product; since nobody in attendance has seen anything quite like it, those present are given the chance to play the system’s games hands-on. One particular name in the guest book for the event stands out: Nolan Bushnell. Although Bushnell claims he is not impressed, the system’s table tennis game clearly leaves some kind of impression on him.
Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell talk about the event.
June
Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck set up a second version of Galaxy Game, this time with a way to run multiple sessions of the game at once. Although it isn't unpopular, it doesn't match the crowds of the first version, and Pitts and Tuck never find a way to make the machine profitable enough for a wide release.
Bushnell & Dabney aren’t happy with Nutting’s handling of Computer Space, but they still want to try making video games using the technology Dabney had designed, so they make the decision to leave the company. They sign a contract with Bally, an arcade game manufacturer, to make two games: one pinball game, and one video game (the first known use of the phrase). They go to incorporate as a company, but find that the name Syzygy is already taken in California, forcing them to find a new name. The one they land on, taken from the game Go, is “Atari.” For the time being, though, they’re still doing business as Syzygy.
Link to: the articles of incorporation for Atari, dba Syzygy.
The first step for Syzygy’s next game is to actually figure out what to make. Bushnell bounces around an idea for a driving game, and pitches a hockey game to Bally, but after they’d already copied the design of Spacewar!, there isn’t much else to take inspiration from. Dabney is an engineer, not a game designer. While he’d been hired as an engineer, Bushnell is, above all else, a businessman. So, for the time being, Bushnell decides to replicate the Magnavox Odyssey’s Table Tennis game, as nothing more than a training exercise, until they came up with something better.
Dabney is put on to make the pinball game, so for the video game, they take on Al Alcorn, an old office mate from Ampex, as hired help. Alcorn isn’t told he’s working on a training exercise- as far as he knows, they have a contract with General Electric (who aren’t really involved at all) and need the game done within six weeks.
Alcorn and Bushnell recount building the first prototype of the game.
August
Alcorn gets the prototype complete and playable, adding a few touches. The game now automatically keeps score, with two huge numbers on the top sides of the screen. The physics have been altered as well; a feature in Magnavox Odyssey Table Tennis letting the player “add some English” to throw curveballs is gone, but the direction of the ball can still change based on how close to the center of the paddle players hit the ball. The game has sound now, too. Bushnell asks if Alcorn can reproduce the cheering roar of a crowd- the best Alcorn can manage is a couple of short beeps.
Dabney and Alcorn are excited to move ahead and release it. Bushnell pushes back, wanting to move on and make the driving game he had in mind instead, but the group are having so much fun with the game they convince him to release it. So, Syzygy install their prototype at a test location, the nearby Andy Capp's Tavern, and give it the name Pong.
A day after the unit is installed, they’re called back in to fix a technical problem. Upon investigation, Alcorn finds the issue: so many people had played the game that the coin box had filled up with quarters, to the point that no more would fit into the machine.
Alcorn and Bushnell talk about Pong’s installation at Andy Capp’s Tavern, and show off the first prototype.
A clip of interviews about the Pong prototype’s technical issue.
September
The Magnavox Odyssey is rolled out for wide release in the US, making it to the UK and Europe the next year. In order for the machine to be cheap enough to mass-produce, its capabilities have to be very limited, and the only images it can produce are two dots and one line. However, the console squeezes as much gameplay as it can out of those dots. It comes with 11 different “game cards”- similar to ROM cartridges, but not quite- which let the console play different games by simply changing the behavior of the dots and line. The game count was inflated further with the included overlays, plastic sheets with images of things like sports fields, which would be placed on top of the TV screen to give the illusion of better visuals. Sometimes, different games would use exactly the same game card but use a different overlay, requiring quite a bit of imagination, but plenty can be played without any overlay at all.
The base set of the Magnavox Odyssey, with the Tennis overlay set up on the TV behind it.
A clip showing Ralph Baer playing the Odyssey and its peripherals.
Magnavox Odyssey emulator. For directions or more info, please check the original source here. The emulator actually runs a DOS emulator with a Magnavox Odyssey emulator nested inside, so it may be more difficult to get it working.
The Magnavox Odyssey’s manual, including all the base games of the American version.
The vast majority of the Odyssey’s games attempt to adapt pre-existing games, generally board games or sports games. Some of them are fairly original, though, and a plethora of different home console game genres find their beginnings here. The Magnavox Odyssey is the first home console, but considering its age, it’s surprisingly sophisticated. Hard-wired into the console are two controllers (or “player control units”), with a simple control scheme of two dials, similar to an etch-a-sketch.
- Table Tennis uses Game Card #1, without any overlay. As the console releases, Syzygy is busy developing their clone of this game.
- Tennis, Hockey, and Football uses Game Cards #3 and #4, with different overlays. Along with Table Tennis, these are the first sports games on a home console.
- Haunted House uses Game Card #4, with a special overlay, as well as a set of extra physical cards used as peripherals. This is the first horror-themed game on a home console, although much of the game takes place without the console itself, and it’s hard to call it particularly scary either way.
Thanks to the console’s ability to play different game cards, Magnavox is able to sell more games separately, outside of the base set. Most require multiple players, but the first single-player experiences are sold this way. Several different versions of the console are produced, often with different sets of games, adding up to a total library of around 30 games.
- Wipeout, using Game Card #5 and a special overlay, is the first racing game on a home console. Only a single player controls the “car” (a dot), although another player is needed to act as referee, since the console has no way of telling when the player runs off the track.
- Invasion uses several different game cards, requiring a few extra peripherals as well. Most of the game is played on the peripheral game board, but it is the first strategy game and the first tactics game to involve a home console.
Game Cards #9 and #10, each with several games, use a separate light gun peripheral, based on a fairly common type of electro-mechanical arcade game. These games were popularized in part by Periscope, the first successful arcade game produced by the Japanese-American arcade company Sega Enterprises, a few years earlier. According to some sources, however, Magnavox collaborates with a particular Japanese toy company on the Odyssey peripheral. A designer named Gunpei Yokoi had recently designed a light gun toy called the Kôsenjû SP, and so Magnavox recruits the company, called Nintendo, to design and manufacture the peripheral. The games using the Odyssey’s light gun are the first ones on a home console to involve shooting.
The Odyssey’s base set with all its overlays.
A commercial for the Magnavox Odyssey, advertising its family-friendly fun.
The same month as the Odyssey’s release, the 1972 Music & Amusement Machines Exposition is held, one year after Computer Space had been revealed at the same show. Nutting Associates is present at the show, presenting Computer Space again. Nolan Bushnell is also present, and tries to bring Nutting on board to manufacture Pong, with no luck.
October
Back in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project building, a group of students hold the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics. Spacewar! players from all over show up to compete, making it the first formal video game competition.
Bruce Baumgart grinning after winning the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics.
Syzygy gears up to release Pong, aiming to build 50 cabinets for release. To ramp up production, they bring on Ted Dabney’s brother Douglas to help build the machines, and their old Ampex officemate Steve Bristow is brought on part-time as a machine servicer.
November
Around the 15th, Pong formally releases in North America, with Syzygy selling twelve cabinets to distributors around California. The game starts selling much more quickly than Computer Space ever did, taking orders for 300 units of Pong by the end of the month, several times more units than the company had in stock. To ramp up production, Syzygy takes out a loan from the bank and starts hiring people to build cabinets. Needing extra floor space to house the cabinets, Bushnell knocks down the side wall into the neighboring space without asking permission from their landlord.
Pong is not the first video game by any means, nor even the first arcade video game. But, it is the first one to be truly, globally popular, and its success paved the way for the arcade video game industry, and eventually the home console industry, to take off.
This success stems from the simplicity of its design. Where Computer Space had been much better suited for computer labs than the arcades, Pong is just the opposite. As Table Tennis on the Magnavox Odyssey, it had lacked the depth and longevity to be rewarding as a home console game, but in the arcades, it has a kind of mass appeal which attracts players and gets them hooked on the game nigh-instantly. Nolan Bushnell sums up this takeaway as the aphorism “Bushnell’s law,” describing the ideal video game as “easy to learn, difficult to master.”
A gif of Pong in play.
Link to: circuit-accurate Pong simulator.
It does not take long after its release for Pong to become a worldwide phenomenon. Early in the year, the game makes its way to Japan, where a cabinet is picked up by the electro-mechanical arcade game manufacturer Taito. The company finds its technology promising, so they assign engineer Tomohiro Nishikado to reverse-engineer the system, as he is one of their only employees with any sophisticated electronics experience.
Thanks to this success, Syzygy is growing rapidly. They bring on a new secretary-treasurer, Fred Marincic, and open up an “amusement arcade” in a Los Angeles Mall with cabinets of Computer Space and Pong.
The leadership of Syzygy, shortly after the release of Pong. From left to right is Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell, Fred Marincic, and Al Alcorn.
A clip from the 1973 documentary Games Computers Play, filmed shortly after the release of Pong.
February
The third issue of the People’s Computing Company Journal is published, including the full source code to several games. The size of these games is so small that the magazine’s subscribers are expected to copy it down by hand, painstakingly typing it into their own machines. By this point, games were written in the programming language BASIC, which had an active community of programmers thanks to its compatibility with a variety of different computers.
Among the games in this issue are Hurkle, and a sample of Mugwump, both credited to Bob Albrecht. Both are hide-and-seek games, originating from Project SOLO’s Hide and Seek, which had become a minor subgenre of BASIC games.
One reader of the magazine, Gregory Yob, is unsatisfied with the lack of creativity among these hide-and-seek games. In each of them, a creature is randomly hidden on a 10x10 grid, with the player having to use clues to hunt it down.
April
Soylent Green, a dystopian science fiction movie starring Charlton Heston, releases in theaters, including a short scene showing a Computer Space cabinet for about 15 seconds.
Computer Space, pictured in Soylent Green.
May
Syzygy sets up a subsidiary to export its games internationally, aiming to expand into Europe, and later Asia. As the company grows, the leadership move their headquarters from Sunnyvale to Los Gatos, California. As Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell are driving back from choosing the new office, their reality sets in. Bushnell asks what life will be like once they’re rich, but Dabney is not as excited. According to Dabney, “That moment Nolan became his money. Once he did, there was no reason to hang around with him anymore…once it all becomes money, it’s just not worth anything.”
Ted Dabney recounts the moment.
Back in the computer labs, games are still developing on mainframe computers. Written by John Daleske with some help from Silas Warner, Empire is created as part of coursework for one of Daleske’s education classes. The game is built on Project PLATO, one of the first systems to support multi-user computing, which gives it the capability for something completely new in computer games thus far: networked multi-player. There’s no internet to play over, but players can dial in to the PLATO system and battle in spaceships to take over the galaxy as alien races taken from the TV show Star Trek. The game gains quite a bit of popularity, with various offspring popping up under the names Conquest, trek83, Xtrek, Netrek, and Galactic Attack.
John Daleske talks about Empire and the PLATO community.
Galactic Attack, a 1980 remake of the game for the Apple II computer.
July
Syzygy release their next arcade video game, Space Race, the result of the driving game idea Bushnell had wanted to make instead of Pong. Designed by Ted Dabney, it is a space-themed driving game where two players race to reach the top of the screen while avoiding obstacles. The game isn’t boring, but it’s vastly eclipsed by Pong’s success. Advertisements for the game, however, contain the first use of the company’s new logo, reflecting their official name change: Syzygy is now Atari.
An advertisement for Space Race. At the bottom is Atari’s iconic “Fuji” logo, designed by George Opperman.
Space Race in action. Note the similarities to both Computer Space and Pong.
Over in Japan, Tomohiro Nishikado had finished reverse-engineering Pong, enabling Taito to create Elepong with the technology, a clone of the game. Nishikado is enamored with the arcade video game format, and starts thinking of other games that could be built with the technology.
A graphic for Elepong.
Tomohiro Nishikado discusses the difficulties of making arcade video games in this era.
Another Japanese arcade game company, Sega, release their own Pong clone around the same time, called Pong-tron. Along with Elepong, the two Pong clones are the first arcade video games to be produced in Japan, as well as the first video games from their respective companies.
A promotional image of Pong-tron.
Outside the arcades, the book 101 BASIC Computer Games is published by Digital Equipment Corporation. It is the culmination of the efforts of David Ahl, gathering a huge range of text-based computer games, which, like before, readers would have to copy down into their own computers by hand. The BASIC programming language is so young that the majority of games written in the language are found in the book. Although many are nothing more than conversions of sports or board games, a number of important computer game genres are popularized by games found in this book.
- Super Star Trek is a version of the earlier Star Trek, written by Mike Mayfield, which was an attempt to convert the gameplay of Spacewar! into a purely text-based format, compatible with computers using teleprinters. It’s also an early fangame, using names based on the TV show of the same name.
- Hamurabi is a conversion of The Sumer Game, translated by David Ahl into the BASIC programming language.
- Lunar and LEM are versions of Rocket, the Lunar Landing game originally written by Jim Storer several years prior, converted into BASIC by David Ahl.
- Gunner, originally by Tom Kloos, is an early artillery game, requiring the player to adjust their gun to hit an enemy target before the enemy hits them.
- The hide-and-seek games Hurkle and Mugwump, both just a few months old, are found in the volume too.
101 Basic Computer Games. For directions or more info, please check the original source here.
Link to: a browser emulator of 101 BASIC Computer Games.
August
Atari arrives in Japan, establishing Atari Japan in Tokyo and releasing Pong in the region soon after. However, the market for the game is not as wide open as expected, as they’re surprised to find that Elepong and Pong-tron had beaten them to the market months prior.
September
Kee Games is formed by Joe Keenan, the next-door neighbor of Nolan Bushnell, advertising itself as a small start-up competing with Atari. Several ex-employees of Atari, labeled by Kee Games as "defectors", are hired to work at the company. In reality, Kee Games is a subsidiary of Atari, and these employees had been assigned to work at Kee Games. The move is an attempt to keep hold of Atari’s dominance over the market, giving distributors the illusion that they’re working with Atari’s competitors, when in reality, it’s all Atari.
November
Hunt the Wumpus, coded by Gregory Yob, is published in the People's Computer Company newsletter, selling tapes of its BASIC source code through mail order. for mainframe computers. Set in a system of caves, the player must hunt down a creature called the Wumpus, using clues to move from cave to cave. The game builds on the formula of hide-and-seek games, arranging each chamber in the caves in a squashed dodecahedron shape, rather than the typical grid format, chosen because it is Yob’s favorite platonic solid. The game becomes very popular in the early programming community, with its Wumpus creature referenced frequently in certain early video games.
Play Hunt the Wumpus on an emulator. For directions or more info, please check the original source here.
Taito releases Soccer and Davis Cup in Japanese arcades. Both developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, Soccer is a multiplayer game allowing both players to control a forward and a goalkeeper, whereas Davis Cup is a clone of Pong altered to play doubles. As it is the first video game in the region to not be a Pong clone, Soccer is considered the first original video game created in Japan.
Atari has grown quite a bit profiting off the runaway success of Pong, but by 1974, this growth slows dramatically. First, much of Pong’s popularity has actually been in the form of Pong clones, and with all sorts of arcade game companies jumping on the bandwagon, only a fraction of cabinets playing a form of the game actually come from Atari. On top of that, none of Atari’s other games are doing anywhere near as well- it may seem strange, but Pong had not made the public particularly hungry for more video games. People aren’t really thinking of Pong as a video game at all- Pong is just Pong.
At the same time, tensions within the company are beginning to escalate. The company has a new president in the form of John Wakefield, a corporate psychologist…who also happens to be Nolan Bushnell’s brother-in-law. This pisses off Ted Dabney quite a bit, who finds Wakefield and many of the other new hires completely incompetent. Dabney sits down with Bushnell at a pizza parlor, and the two have a serious talk. Dabney thinks the company is going down the wrong path, and wants the new leadership gone. Bushnell resists- he sees the new hires as his friends, and doesn’t want to have to fire them. The disillusioned Dabney becomes much less involved with the company, although he’s still on the board of directors.
These are the least of Atari’s troubles, however. With the global spread of Pong, it was only a matter of time until Ralph Baer got wind of it, and when he does, he is not happy. Despite the slight differences between the two games, it’s not hard for Baer to tell it comes from the Table Tennis game he’d designed. Magnavox still has the patents for Baer’s Brown Box design, tracing back almost a decade prior by now, so Magnavox begins gearing up for legal action.
January
Created by Dave Kaufman, Star Trader is published for mainframe computers as BASIC source code in the People's Computer Company newsletter. Through the text interface, players trade goods and resources in space to accumulate as much money as possible.
Star Trader’s text interface, including its map system made of text symbols.
A much later, graphical version of Star Trader. For directions or more info, please check the original source here.
February
Atari's 40th employee is hired, a computer technician from the area named Steve Jobs. Al Alcorn is impressed enough to hire him based on the circuit board Jobs brings down to the office, a version of Pong’s board which Jobs says he had built himself. What Alcorn doesn’t know is that the board was actually built by Jobs’s friend, Steve Wozniak.
A version of Maze War is created in MIT's computer lab. Originally created by Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, and Howard Palmer the year prior, the multiplayer game lets players move around a grid, shooting each other from a pseudo-3D perspective. Over at MIT, Greg Thompson and Dave Lebling port to the game to the university’s PDP-10, adding a plethora of features- a scoring system, a level editor, and support for up to eight players over the ARPANET. It is the first game with a 3D first-person perspective, the earliest first-person shooter game, and the first of either to playable multiplayer over a network.
An early version of Maze War, running on its original hardware.
March
Very close to when this version of Maze War is completed, Spasim is created by Jim Bowery. The second game to use a 3D perspective, teams of players in spaceships fly around shooting each other. Built on the PLATO system, it also supports network multiplayer, but this time with up to 32 players, making it the earliest first-person shooter with team-based multiplayer. The game becomes popular on PLATO system, where it inspires Silas Warner, a programmer in the community who had previously been involved with Empire, to create the game Airace, a similar game using some of Spasim’s code.
Spasim’s creator, Jim Bowery, playing an emulated version of the game. Note that Bowery erroneously calls it a virtual reality game, which doesn't correlate to the actual game,
After Airace, Brand Fortner and Kevin Gorey create Airfight based on the game. Becoming one of the most popular PLATO games, Airfight leans much more into the flight simulation aspect, laying down the foundation for future flight simulators decades later.
Brand Fortner speaks about Airfight.
A slow-paced game of Airfight.
Meanwhile, as Ted Dabney becomes increasingly disillusioned with Atari, Nolan Bushnell pressures him into leaving the company. It’s not that he doesn’t want Dabney around- it’s that he wants Dabney to sell his 40% stake of ownership in the company. First, Bushnell threatens Dabney with the prospect of transferring all of Atari’s assets to another corporation, leaving him with nothing, unless he sells out all his shares. Then, Bushnell gets Dabney to spill the beans about Kee Games to people who weren’t supposed to know about it, which gets Dabney kicked off the board of directors. A fed-up Ted Dabney leaves the company entirely, feeling that preserving his friendship with Bushnell is more important than fighting for the company.
Ted Dabney discusses why he left Atari.
April
In Japan, Tomohiro Nishikado is coming up with more sports video games, this time a basketball game. It is the first arcade video game to be based on the sport, and also Nishikado's first to include full sprite graphics. Taito goes to Midway Manufacturing to distribute the game overseas, making it the first Japanese video game to be released outside Japan.
TV Basketball played on an emulator, with first-ever full sprite graphics.
Magnavox cracks the whip on Atari, filing suit for patent infringement against them and several distributors in US district court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. They’re going after Pong, but not for infringing on Magnavox Odyssey Table Tennis- they’re suing Atari for infringing on their patent for video games in general. In retrospect, owning the concept of a video game seems equally as ridiculous as owning books or owning movies, but in a time when the number of total video games in existence had barely progressed past double digits, Magnavox genuinely believes that Ralph Baer’s patents hold a genuine claim to video games as a medium. If they win the case, Magnavox will own all video games. Anyone who wants to make one will have to go through them, by making a deal to license Baer’s patents.
A large portion of the case is dedicated to agonizing over what constitutes a video game, not only to determine whether an arcade video game falls under the definition, but also to determine whether the Brown Box was actually the first- if someone had made a video game before Baer, then it would put his status as the inventor into question. Thomas Goldsmith Jr, the inventor of the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device, is called in as a witness. So is William Higinbotham, the creator of Tennis For Two, which is of particular interest since it’s a tennis game, very similar to Table Tennis and Pong.
Nolan Bushnell discusses the nature of ideas.
June
Atari had been struggling even before the lawsuit, but now it reaches a point where they need to downsize. They announce a “significant reduction in personnel,” firing John Wakefield, and several other members of the leadership shortly after. Replacing Wakefield as president is: Nolan Bushnell, who is also the chairman of the company, giving him almost complete control over the company.
July
While Atari is doing badly in the US, this is nothing compared to how bad Atari Japan has it. Employee theft is cited as a factor, but the company is also struggling for many of the same reasons Atari in the US is, piled on top of the fact that Atari simply didn’t know how to break into the Japanese market. Once it gets to the point that the branch president simply stops showing up to work, Atari decides to sell the branch. Their first picks for buyers are Taito and Sega, but neither are interested in salvaging the dumpster fire it had become, and they land on Nakamura Manufacturing instead. As part of the agreement, Nakamura Manufacturing becomes the sole distributor of Atari's games in Japan for the next ten years, and becomes responsible for all the operations that Atari Japan had handled.
September
Atari can no longer support the ruse of Kee Games, and, faced with financial struggles in both companies, it reabsorbs the company as a subsidiary. In its new life as a subsidiary, it is tasked with creating new arcade video games for Atari, basically functioning much how a second-party development studio would.
October
Atari releases the arcade game Touch Me. Unlike the rest of Atari’s offerings, it’s not actually a video game- completely lacking a video screen, it instead has a row of four lit-up buttons. The lights flash in a random order, with the player needing to memorize the order and re-input it, vaguely similar to the playground game Simon Says.
A Touch Me cabinet, with the exceedingly uncomfortable title “touch-me” visible above the row of lights.
The same month, they release Gotcha, in both a monochrome version and a second, limited-release color version. Designed by Al Alcorn, its gameplay isn’t much to write home about , but its limited release is the first known video game to use color.
The inscrutable gameplay of Gotcha, in all its full-color glory.
November
Taito releases Speed Race in Japanese arcades, by Tomohiro Nishikado. It is Nishikado’s first game to use scrolling graphics, an innovation which greatly widens the possibilities of video game design. As the first racing video game in Japan, it becomes popular enough to make its way to the US, where it is known by the names Racer and Wheels.
The Western release of Speed Race, played with its steering wheel control scheme.
In the US, Atari releases Tank, the first game to come from its new subsidiary Kee Games. Steve Bristow, the creator of the game along with Lyle Rains, had been with the company stretching all the way back to their days at Ampex, and had helped with the production of Computer Space shortly before its release. He’d found the controls of Computer Space too difficult to control, though, and liked the idea of changing them to simple tanks, switching the game back to a multiplayer format. Ironically, the “Tank controls” he comes up with, intended as a simpler and easier-to-understand control scheme, are eventually known for being slow and hard to use.
A slightly later version of Tank. For directions or more info, please check the original source here. The unintuitive default controls use E/D for the left track, U/J for the right track, and the left CTRL key to shoot.
December
Sega holds the “TV Game-ki Zenkoku Contest”, a nationwide competition of their Table Hockey game, a Pong clone with a shorter, horizontal screen. It is the first large-scale video game competition. Sega’s growing notoriety during the competition drives them to increasingly pivot from electro-mechanical arcade games and towards video games.
Competitors playing Table Hockey, with Sega’s logo at the time visible on the back wall.
The medal for the winner of the competition, ultimately awarded to Osamu Kuroda.
Dungeons & Dragons, the first role-playing game, had released early in 1974, and quickly spread to popularity. It’s a tabletop game, not a video game, but it doesn’t take long for fans of the game to experiment with making computerized versions.
One of these is built on the PLATO system, called dnd after the abbreviation of the game’s name. It contains a single dungeon, named “Whisenwood” after the names of the game’s creators, Ray Wood and Gary Whisenhunt. A surprisingly sophisticated program, it uses rudimentary visuals of the dungeon’s levels, and even contains a boss- the first known occurrence of one in a video game. A very similar game on PLATO, created by Rusty Rutherford and variously called pedit5, orthanc, and The Dungeon, would spring from dnd in its early development stages.
dnd played on an emulator, with the game’s sprites shown on PLATO’s orange display.
Around the same time, Don Daglow codes his own conversion of Dungeons & Dragons using Claremont College’s PDP-10, where he started Baseball some years prior. Called simply Dungeon, the game has complexities like artificially intelligent NPCs, lines of sight, and full-fledged melee combat, although it’s played entirely through text.
Along with dnd, the PLATO system has a second Dungeons & Dragons conversion running on it in 1975, also called Dungeon. This one is created by several people, including John Daleske, the programmer behind the original version of Empire. Although it’s not clear which came first, dnd and the two Dungeons are the first RPGs to run on computers.
The title screen of an emulated version of Dungeon on PLATO.
However, back in the arcades, video games are on the decline. The Pong craze is at its tail end, and there isn’t much in the way of innovation. Arcade video games are completely saturated with Pong clones, and most of the games deviating from that formula are simply conversions of other sports.
Many of the large arcade game manufacturers can simply go back to games like pinball, but video games are Atari’s whole deal. Their lawsuit with Magnavox is still going on, and things are starting to look more and more in favor of Magnavox, who bring in a Pong arcade cabinet, open it up, and dissect its circuitry for the court. Their conclusion, that it uses effectively the same technology as that of the Magnavox Odyssey, is a fairly convincing case that Atari is the infringing party.
But as this is going on, Atari are working on a home console of their own. Several competitors have been working on Pong machines, sticking the arcade game into a dedicated machine which plays the singular game on a home TV screen. Despite how it will look in court, Atari moves ahead to create a Pong machine of their own.
January
Early this month, the Altair 8800 microcomputer hits the market. Even more compact than a minicomputer, a microcomputer is finally small and cheap enough for personal use, rather than just at businesses and universities.
The Altair 8800 is new and exciting enough to be advertised on the cover of Popular Electronics Magazine. As soon as programmer Paul Allen sees the magazine, he rushes back to show it to his friend from high school, another programmer named Bill Gates.
Around this time, Gates had been contracted by Atari to work on a compiler of the programming language BASIC. However, the project stalled, with Gates missing deadline after deadline, to the point that Al Alcorn decides to fire him. Gates and Allen start to bounce around ideas to take advantage of the microcomputer’s potential.
The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics Magazine. For more info, check the source here.
April
By April, Paul Allen and Bill Gates found a software company, Microsoft. They release its first product on the same day, an interpreter for the BASIC programming language which is compatible with the Altair 8800 microcomputer. It would take a few years for microcomputers to take off, but Microsoft would be there for it.
Two young programmers, Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
July
Over in Japan, Magnavox had continued their business relationship with their light gun partner, Nintendo, licensing the company to distribute the Odyssey in Japan. This has emboldened Nintendo to enter the world of video arcade games, which they do with EVR RACE, their first title. Created by Genyo Takeda, it is a competitive horse racing game which uses a convoluted videotape method to display a high-definition image on the video screen.
EVR race in action.
Sega, meanwhile, is doing very well after putting out a string of several hockey video games. With wide success in Japan, they decide to expand into the US, opening a sales and manufacturing branch with the name Sega of America.
September
Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado and released by Taito, Western Gun is released in Japan. A multiplayer Wild West-themed game, it is the first game to depict guns and murder. It is renamed Gun Fight in the US, where it is distributed by Dave Nutting Associates, a company started by the brother of Bill Nutting, who’d distributed Computer Space four years before.
The American release of Western Gun. For directions or more info, please check the original source here. Press 5 to insert a coin, and use the arrow keys and left CTRL key for player 1.
A Japanese retrospective of Western Gun.
October
In the US, Atari begins selling "Home Pong," converting the game into a home console format. However, they are not the first to do so- there are dozens of imitators with Pong machines on the market already who far surpass the prevalence of Atari’s version. It becomes clear to Atari that they came with too little, too late- if they want success in the home console business, they’ll have to have something more than just Pong.
Home Pong, released under the TeleGames brand.
Nolan Bushnell discusses Home Pong and its setbacks. Note that what he attributes to the Magnavox Odyssey is better attributed to Pong clones as a whole.
Atari and Magnavox continue to battle it out in court well into 1976. When it becomes increasingly clear that Atari can’t win the court battle, the two agree to settle out of court, with Atari paying a huge amount of money to license Ralph Baer’s patents. Since it isn’t in court, it doesn’t set a clear court precedent, but it leads Magnavox to begin a chain of legal battles going after every major video game company until the patents finally expire in the 1990s. Magnavox wins every case, although they aren’t able to enforce ownership of video arcade games, only home consoles.
Shortly after the Magnavox v Atari case is settled, Atari is sold to Warner for a hefty sum of money. Under their leadership, Atari is brought back from the brink, and puts out a string of pioneering video arcade games. When they release their second home console, the Atari 2600, it becomes far more popular than the Magnavox Odyssey ever was, inspiring a string of successors.
Nintendo continues to make arcade games. In 1976, some of them are even distributed internationally by Sega. They use what they learned working with the Magnavox Odyssey, and eventually decide to make their own home console, and when they release it in the US, they make sure to license Magnavox’s patents.
Tomohiro Nishikado and his team continue to make arcade video games for Taito. He soon moves away from sports games to come up with a string of innovative video games, which inspire numerous other companies in the region to start making their own video games. His games play a major part in establishing Japan as a major producer of arcade video games, and, eventually, as the center of the worldwide video game industry.
Atari Japan continues to operate under Nakamura Manufacturing Company. Using the experience it gained managing the branch, the company decides to enter the video game market in 1977, which is also when it officially shortens its name, from Nakamura Manufacturing Company, to Namco.
The PDP line and PLATO system are slowly phased out, succeeded by the nascent microcomputer. Silas Warner, a contributor to several PLATO games, goes on to create Castle Wolfenstein. The game lays the foundation for the first-person shooter, which has its start in many of the 3D multiplayer shooters Warner was involved with.
After the lawsuit, Ralph Baer sees a cabinet of Atari’s Touch Me at a trade show. Believing the idea has potential outside the format of an arcade game, he creates Simon, a version of the game converted to a electronic handheld format. Ultimately, he gave Atari a taste of their own medicine, with Simon finding immense popularity vastly eclipsing that of the original Atari game.
An emulated version of Simon, a distant predecessor to handheld video games. For directions or more info, please check the original source here.
After Simon, Baer goes on to build new home consoles for Atari’s competitors. He campaigns for years to be recognized for his contributions to the Magnavox Odyssey, and, in 2006, is awarded the National Medal of Technology by president George W. Bush in honor of his work. He dies in 2014, at the age of 92.
Ralph Baer receiving as award for "groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games."
Al Alcorn leaves Atari in 1981, becoming involved in a series of startups around the Silicon Valley area. In 2008, he gets a chance to play Magnavox Odyssey Table Tennis for the first time on an emulated replica of the Brown Box, which he’d only heard descriptions of while building Pong. Playing against Ralph Baer, he’s able to beat the creator at his own game.
Ralph Baer and Al Alcorn facing off with a replica of the Brown Box’s Table Tennis game.
After selling Atari to Warner, Nolan Bushnell founds Pizza Time Theater, based on the pizza parlor idea he had back in 1970, before starting Syzygy. Thanks to Pizza Time Theater, video arcade games come to found in pizza parlors just as much as dedicated video arcades, and the company rebrands itself a few years later after its mascot, Chuck E. Cheese. Bushnell gets extremely rich off of his businesses, enabling him to buy the historic Folger Mansion, where he raises six children with his second wife.
Bushnell remains an active businessman to this day, as well as a prolific speaker, often giving talks about entrepreneurship and his time at Atari. He’s been criticized for magnifying his own achievements and minimizing those of others, and consistently avoids acknowledging the Magnavox Odyssey, in 2010 describing Ralph Baer as “at most a pain in the ass.” He now capitalizes on his association with Atari and Pong to sell blockchain-related projects and crypto scams.
Nolan Bushnell’s answer to the question of whether success changed his life.
After leaving Atari in 1974, Ted Dabney makes his best efforts to preserve his friendship with Nolan Bushnell. He invents the automated ticket number system used at Chuck E. Cheese for Bushnell, and creates an electromechanical quiz game for the establishment as well. He cuts off involvement with Bushnell’s ventures after a dispute over $90,000, soon leaving the video game industry for good to work at a string of technology companies.
Ted Dabney recounts a story about he and Bushnell’s relationship after leaving the company.
Dabney watches the video game industry grow from a grocery store in northern California, which he manages with his wife until around 2006. He remembers watching his grandchildren play video games and getting to tell them about how he’d helped invent them. His grandchildren are not impressed, but confused: “because if I helped invent video games, why wasn't I more known, like Walt Disney or Steve Jobs?"
In March 2018, a group of seven people from the Smithsonian Institute travel to California to interview Dabney on his role in Atari’s founding. Dabney is taken aback at the scale of the operation- he genuinely never considered that so many people were interested in him and his work. Ted Dabney dies of cancer two months later, on May 26, 2018, at the age of 81.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.