The History Of Computer Games. Part 2. 1970-1990.

The 1970s are often referred to as the golden age for video arcade games. The arcade machines were the first commercial exploitation of computer games. It also saw a large rise in the Home video game consoles. In this Golden Era of Video Games, games were designed in a wide variety of genres, and this saw the rapid spread of video arcades and gamerooms across North America, Europe and Japan. Video games began appearing in supermarkets, restaurants, bars, pubs, liquor stores, gas stations, bowling alleys and other retail establishments looking for an increase in income and customers. 

In 1971 Ralph Baer, sold the "Brown Box" video game console prototype to Magnavox, and it was remamed the Magnavox Odyssey. Released to the public in 1972, it was the first home video gaming console for televisions. The earliest known coin-operated video arcade game was the "Galaxy Game" in September 1971 at Stanford University. The game remained popular on campus but did not gain recognition.

Two months after the "Galaxy Game", the first mass produced video game had been made by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, Computer Space. It was an arcade version of Spacewar! by Steve Russell in the 60s who introduced Bushnell to computer game programming. It was not a commercial success due to its steep learning curve but Bushnell and Dabney did not give up. They founded Atari and developed the game Pong in 1972 which was a huge commercial success.

Pong was a tennis sports video game featuring simple 2D graphics. The actual game was created by Allan Acorn from ideas by Bushnell who was influenced by an electronic ping-pong game already on the market in Magnavox's Odyssey home console game. Bushnell told Alcorn three months into development that he wanted the game to feature realistic sound effects and a roaring crowd. After inspecting some circuits Alcorn discovered he could use digital circuits to generate different tones for the game's sound effects. He then constructed the prototype out of a black and white television set, a 4 foot high wooden cabinet, and soldered the wires into boards to create the necessary circuitry. They tested the prototype in a local California bar, and it was an instant success. By 1973 Atari had filled over 2,500 orders, and in 1974 sold more than 8000 units. Many imitations were produced by competitors and many gaming expects consider Pong to be the starting point of the "arcade phenomenon".

Atari's PONG arcade machine was so popular that Atari decided the market the game as a home console in 1975. It was a duplicate of the arcade version, except scaled down and used a home television set instead of having a built in TV.  That year Magnavox decided to improve its Odyssey system and released two different improved versions of the original console the Magnavox Odyssey 100 and 200. From 1976 onwards, a series of Magnavox Odyssey consoles were produced. Each new console was only slightly better than the previous one. Atari came up with new consoles such as the Atari 2600, Video Pinball and Stunt Cycle to compete with Magnavox. New companies such as Fairchild, RCA and Coleco rose, creating their own consoles.The Odyssey 500 in 1976 was very advanced for its time, using simple colour graphics rather than black and white. Then the Atari 2600 in 1977 is the first successful video game to use plug-in cartridges instead of having on or more games built in. 

In 1974 Maze Wars was created, which was believed to be a pioneer for first-person shooters. In Maze Wars players wander round a maze, being capable of moving backwards or forwards, turning right or left in 90-degree increments and peeking through doorways. The game also uses simple tile-based movement, where the player moves from square to square. The other players are seen as eyeballs and when a player sees another player they can shoot the player and gain points. They gain points for shooting other players and lose them for being shot. Another significant game of the 70s was Gun Fight, released 1975, an on-foot, multi-directional shooter. It depicted game characters, game violence and human-to-human combat, controlled using dual-stick controls.

The arcade game industry really saw its 'Golden Age' in the late 70's and early 80's, with introductions of classic video arcade machines like Asteroids, Space Invaders, Galaxian, Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. The release of Pac-Man by Namco in 1980 was such a massive success that the game itself entered into mainstream popular culture. It is considered a classic and it is the only video arcade game from the era that is still in production today. We've reached the era of games so many of our generation can remember from our childhoods. Pac-Man was primarily developed by a young Namco employee Toru Iwatani, employing a nine-man team. The original title was pronounced Pakku-Man. Pac-Man introduced an element of humour into video games which designers sought to imitate and appealed to a wder audience than teenage boys. Pac-Man quickly became more popular than anything seen before in the game industry up to that point. It became an icon of video game culture during the 1980s.

In 1984 the computer gaming market took over from the console market, as computers offered equal gaming ability and their simple design allowed games to take complete command of the hardware, so they were as simple to start playing with as consoles. The Commodore 64 was a computer system released in 1982 which had a basic programming environment and advanced graphic and sound capabilities for its time. It also utilized the Atari 2600 controller ports, so gamers could use their old joysticks with the system. It became very popular computer of its day in the USA and many other countries. In the UK and in many areas of Europe the Sinclair ZX Spectrum because the most popular home computer around the same time. Then from 1984 onwards more and more computers came out with different capabilities with their graphics, colour, sound etc. 

1985 onwards so a rise in 'third-generation' consoles. Nintendo released an 8-bit console, the Famicom, known outside Asia as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). In its original release it came bundled with Super Mario Bros, and was an immediate success. They had new gamepads with the directional-pad rather than joysticks or turning knobs. This changed the way in which games could be played. Nintendo also introduced the Game Boy in 1989 as the first handheld gaming system. It came bundled with the game Tetris that made it very popular. Between 1986 and 1990 The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear and Sweet Home came out. Some of these games are still incredibly popular franchises today.

Metal Gear

http://www.bmigaming.com/videogamehistory.htm
http://www.squidoo.com/games-from-all-the-time
http://www.squidoo.com/historyofgameconsoles
http://www.cs.uu.nl/docs/vakken/b2go/docs/history_of_games.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games

Meanwhile in Life Drawing...

The History Of Computer Games: Part 1. Pre-1970s

The history of games is an incredibly long one. Really, games started at the beginning of time, before civilized societies, where life itself was a competition for survival. It is however computer games that we are looking at and that couldn't come about until we had advanced far enough in technology. It is hard to pin down who exactly invented the first computer as different people of different countries have biased claims to who came up with it first. Many believe the first freely programmable computer came about in 1936. It was called the Z1 and invented by Konrad Zuse. He was a construction engineer for an aircraft company in Germany at the beginning of the Second World War and he created a series of automatic calculators which were to help him with his lengthy engineering calculations. With the Z2 in 1939 he had completed the first fully functioning electro-mechanical computer, and by 1941 he had completed the Z3, which contained almost all the features of a modern computer as defined by John Von Neumann in 1946.

People have varied opinions on what the first 'video game' actually was. Many believe that it started with the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, which was developed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Settle Ray Mann for US missile defense systems in 1947. It was never marketed or sold to the public, but was patented in 1948. Whether this was the beginning  is debatable as the device was purely electromechanical and did not use any memory device, computer, or programming, however it could be looked at as the conception of the arcade device, as the game involved shooting a target using knobs and a button.

Img from http://pongmuseum.com/history/_picts/NIMROD-players.jpg

The first actual gaming computer was the NIMROD, created by the major UK electrial engineering and equipment firm, Ferranti International, for the purpose of playing the game Nim. This was significant as the first ever instance of a digital computer, designed specifically to play a game. It was a simple game, where you start with a number of piles of tokens - traditionally matches. Each player takes turns taking one or more tokens from anyones pile and the game continues until the last token is taken from the remaining pile. This was a game that had been played using physical versions for a very long time before it was programmed into machine version.

In 1952, a man named Alexander S. Douglas created OXO, a computer program for Noughts and Crosses. It was the first digital graphical simulation game, and ran on the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) computer which was produced by Maurice Wilkes and his team at The University of Cambridge. The EDSAC was one of the world's first 'stored-program' computers, and OXO is often sited as the first true computer game, as the player played against the computer. It did not obtain popularity however as it was limited to the computers in Cambridge.

A video game called Tennis for Two was developed by an American physicist, William A. Higinbotham in 1958. It ran on an analog computer and simulated a game of tennis or ping pong on an oscilloscope. It was one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display, rather than a simple panel of lights, and it is widely regarded as the predecessor of Pong, which was one of the first and most recognized video arcade games of all time. In this game a blip of light (the tennis ball), bounces off a horizontal line at the bottom of a 5-inch diameter oscilloscope screen, with a vertical line in the middle representing the net. The game was controlled by the players with a small handheld metal box equipped with a dial and push button. This was also significant as these were the very first video game controllers.

The next year, another version of Noughts and Crosses, along with a collection of other interactive graphical programs, including Mouse in the Maze, were created on the TX-0 experimental computer at Massachusetts Institute of technology. These games incorporated the use of a light pen. In Mouse in the Maze, players used a light pen to place maze walls, dots that represented bits of cheese and a virtual mouse, also represented by a dot, was then released out into the maze.

The 1960s saw a large rise in computer game development, firstly with the game Spacewar! 1962, written by Steve Russell, on the DEC PDP-1 (a new computer at the time). Two players would each control a spacecraft, capable of firing missiles at each other, with a star in the center of the screen creating a hazard for the crafts. This was complemented by the PDP-1, which had the first operating system capable of allowing multiple users to share the computer simultaneously. Steve Russell never profited from Space Wars, and he introduced computer game programming and Spacewar to Nolan Bushnell, who went on to write the first coin-operated arcade game and start Atari Computers.

Then with Ralph Baer, who dreamed of bringing an interactive game to the TV and came up with the idea for an interactive video game machine. This led him to start and lead the development of the "Brown Box", in 1966. This was the very first home video game console and video game system. He also created a game named Corndog, which became the first video game ever to display on a standard television set. The next year, he assisted Bill Harrison, who created the first light gun and developed several video games with Bill Rusch. Then Ralph Baer went on to demo the first playable video game on a TV set, The Chase Game, which consisted of two squares chasing each other. Then in 1968 the first video console game prototype that was able to run several different games in to one unit was completed., and players could play games such as table tennis and target shooting.

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa050298.htm
http://www.bmigaming.com/videogamehistory.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_video_games
http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventions/a/Spacewar.htm

Wheelie Bins and Drawings

You can't imagine the kind of looks people gave me as I dragged a wheelie bin out into a space, and started taking photographs of it from different angles and sides. People must have thought I was a little bit weird, but actually no. I was just gaining reference for my new 3ds Max project: Project Wheelie Bin. I have continued to struggle and be frustrated with 3ds Max, but I am still learning more and more everyday about it. From this I've learnt how to texture, and it is so much harder than I expected it to be, but then I don't really know what I expected.
This is what my wheelie bin turned out like:

It may not be totally photo realistic but I am quite pleased with the outcome. I didn't realize how fast things progress on this course and I love it! Its amazing how much I can do already after just a few weeks of using the software, and it can only get better!

Meanwhile I have produced more drawings of buildings around the city. Firstly the arch. This was quite a difficult task because of the weather, I had to go back a few times as it would start raining on me. The thumbnails aren't that great but I was really pleased with my final outcome.

The next one I drew was the SU. This was interesting as I had to think about the 2 point perspective. With this one I found it a lot easier to get the relevent thumbnail sketches and find the perspective, but actually drawing the thing was incredibly hard. There was a lot of detail to think about, and although my final outcome is fairly good I think with more time I could have done better. This is the one so far I'm least happy about.

Daleks and Canals

So I've started the course and I'm both nervous and excited. I've already cried over 3ds Max. I've decided it is the devils program, and I'm pretty confused with it all but I'm trying to be patient with it. I've decided I must really care about getting the hang of it if it can frustrate me this much.
Here is the Dalek I made in the end:

I'm not entirely happy with it as I've clearly gone way above the tri limit with all of the spheres, and I should have used the reference images more as it isn't quite right, but I'm pleased with my progress so far as I've gone from crying in the bathroom to actually making something that looks like a Dalek. Perhaps 3ds max isn't that bad.

As for the drawing, we had to go out and draw one of the bridges at the canal. I really enjoyed my time sitting at the canal and drawing. It was very peaceful.

Here are some thumbnail sketches of the canal, I'm not sure I've got it right as I got carried away with detail on most of them, next time I'll work more on the perspective:

Here is my final drawing:

So here goes...

The first thing I should probably mention is that this blog is not really about space so if you're expecting a real space journal, I would leave the page now because you will probably be disappointed.
This blog is about my journey to becoming a games designer. My name is Carrie Rose, I'm a Game Art Design student at DMU, and someday I'd like to be a concept artist for video games, but we'll see.

So a bit about me... I'm from a little town called Westbury in the countryside of Wiltshire. I say I'm from there because I've lived there since I was 1 but I was was born in Budapest, Hungary and am half Hungarian and half English. As both of my parents were computer programmers, I've never been entirely sure where my creativity came from (pretty sure I know where my love for technology comes from though). I've always loved art and music; I sing, play the guitar, cello and piano. Things I also mention are my addictions to cheddar cheese and video games (big surprise).

The reason I chose to do Game Art Design is because I love the idea of bringing my drawings to life and the chance that I could someday digitally create the crazy world in my head. Before this I was on a Graphic Design course (with Photography), but life drawing is what I considered one of my stronger points and recently I've actually really enjoyed drawing architecture, which initially I was worried about. The game production sides of things is what is going to be a challenge for me, as I have absolutely no experience with 3D modelling. Hopefully this course will help me learn these new skills needed to becoming a successful Game Designer.