Computer gaming history, part 1: From oscilloscopes to Pac-Man (1952 to 1980)

I want to write about the history of computer games, and I want to do it properly. From the mid 80s onward I'll go year by year, because that's when I was there myself, sitting in front of a screen. But the story didn't start there, so this first post covers everything up to 1980. It's a lot of ground to cover in one post, but I want to start from the beginning. I started playing games in the mid 80s, so I'll go into more detail from there. Video games, along with books, have always been a huge part of my life.

Before anyone called them games

The first computer games weren't really meant to be games. They were demonstrations, experiments, ways to show off what these enormous and very expensive machines could do.

In 1952, A.S. Douglas wrote a version of tic-tac-toe called OXO on the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge. You played against the machine and the board was shown on a small screen. It's a milestone, but hardly anyone played it. The EDSAC was one machine in one lab.

In 1958, physicist William Higinbotham built Tennis for Two at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US. The lab had an annual open house for the public, and he wanted something more fun to show visitors than the usual displays. He used an analog computer and an oscilloscope, and the result was a side view of a tennis court where two players could hit a ball over the net with homemade controllers. People lined up to play it. After two years of exhibitions it was taken apart and more or less forgotten.

What strikes me about these early games is that nobody saw them as the start of something. They were more a way to show what a computer could do.

Spacewar! (1962): the first game that spread

This is where I think the real story starts.

In 1962, a group of students and hackers at MIT, with Steve Russell doing most of the programming, wrote Spacewar! on a PDP-1 computer. Two players each controlled a spaceship, dogfighting around a star whose gravity pulled them in. There was thrust, fuel, torpedoes, and physics. It's a real game. I may actually write my own version of it one of these days and add it here.

What made Spacewar! different wasn't just that it was fun. It was that it spread. The code was shared freely, copied to other universities that had the same kind of computer, and modified by people who wanted to add their own ideas. That pattern of sharing, hacking and improving each other's work would define computer gaming for the next twenty years.

Games on big machines (the 1970s)

Through the 70s, computers were still something you found at universities, research labs and large companies. But the people who had access to them kept writing games, and some of them were far more advanced than you might expect.

PLATO

PLATO was an educational computer system based at the University of Illinois, with terminals spread across many sites. It was built for teaching, but its users quickly figured out it was perfect for games. And since everyone was connected to the same system, those games could be multiplayer.

In 1975 came dnd, one of the first computer role-playing games, inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. In 1977 came Oubliette, a first-person dungeon crawler with a town and shops above and a dungeon below. If that sounds like Wizardry, that's not a coincidence: Oubliette is widely considered a big influence on it. Then in 1979 came Avatar, a group dungeon game written by high school students, which became the most played game on the whole system.

So networked multiplayer games were already around in the mid 70s, decades before most of us had heard of the internet.

Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork

Around 1976, programmer and caver Will Crowther wrote Colossal Cave Adventure on a PDP-10. It was a text game where you explored a cave by typing commands like GO NORTH and TAKE LAMP. The cave was based on a real one, part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky, which Crowther had explored himself. In 1977, Don Woods expanded it with fantasy elements, puzzles and a scoring system, and the game spread across the ARPANET, the network that would later become the internet.

When Adventure reached MIT in 1977, a group of students played it and then decided they could do better. The result was Zork. Its creators later founded Infocom, which became the name in text adventures during the 80s.

Adventure also inspired Scott Adams, who released Adventureland in 1978, one of the first adventure games you could buy for a home computer. And it got Roberta Williams hooked, which led to Mystery House in 1980, the first graphical adventure game, and to the company that became Sierra.

MUD

In 1978, Roy Trubshaw, a student at the University of Essex in England, started writing a multiplayer adventure game. He called it MUD, short for Multi-User Dungeon, as a tribute to Zork. Richard Bartle, another Essex student, joined in and took over development in 1980. Several people could explore the same world at the same time, talk to each other, and compete. Every online world since, from text MUDs to World of Warcraft, can trace its family tree back here.

Meanwhile, out in the real world

While all of this was happening on university computers, ordinary people met video games in a completely different way.

In 1972, two things happened. Magnavox released the Odyssey, the first home video game console, designed by Ralph Baer. It even had a light gun accessory for a shooting game. And Atari released Pong in the arcades. Pong was simple, but it was a huge hit, and it proved that people would pay to play games.

Then, in 1976, the company General Instrument released a chip called the AY-3-8500, often called "Pong on a chip". It contained six games: tennis (basically Pong), football, squash, a practice mode, and two shooting games for use with a light gun. Suddenly anyone could build a cheap home Pong console, and hundreds of companies did. Millions of these chips were sold, and they ended up in boxes under TVs all over Europe, sold under dozens of brand names. My grandfather owned one of these, and it was my first exposure to gaming, even though I wasn't born yet when the chip came out.

Computers come home (1977 to 1980)

1977 was the year the personal computer arrived for real. Three machines launched that year: the Apple II, the Commodore PET and the Tandy TRS-80. For the first time, you could buy a complete computer, take it home, plug it in and start using it. And of course, people started writing games for them.

The games were often sold in the simplest way possible: a cassette or floppy disk, a photocopied manual, all in a plastic bag hanging on a hook in a computer store.

In 1979, Atari released the Atari 400 and 800, home computers built by a company that knew games. They had graphics and sound far beyond most competitors, and games like Star Raiders showed what they could do.

And here in Sweden, we had our own machine. The Luxor ABC 80 was launched in August 1978. It was designed by the Swedish company Dataindustrier AB and built by Luxor in Motala, a company better known for making TVs and radios. Early models even used a modified Luxor TV as the monitor. It was built around a Z80 processor and had a fast BASIC, and it was mainly sold in Sweden. It's a small footnote in the global story, but I think it's a pretty cool one. I actually remember reading a reader question in a magazine in 1987 or 1988 about which computer to buy, where they recommended an ABC computer over the C64 as the more future-proof choice...

Akalabeth and the birth of a legend

A teenager in Texas named Richard Garriott was obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and Tolkien. He had been writing D&D-inspired games on his school's computer for years, and when he got an Apple II, he rewrote his 28th attempt into a game with graphics. He called it Akalabeth.

He was working at a ComputerLand store at the time, and his boss suggested he sell it in the shop. So Garriott spent around $200 on Ziploc bags and photocopied manuals, with cover art drawn by his mother. He sold only about a dozen copies in the store. But one of them found its way to a publisher, California Pacific, which released the game properly in 1980. It sold around 30,000 copies, and Garriott got $5 for each one.

The publisher also suggested he use the name "Lord British". And his next game was called Ultima. But that's a story for a later post.

The arcades explode (1978 to 1980)

At the end of the decade, the arcades went from popular to enormous.

In 1978, Taito released Space Invaders, and suddenly everyone wanted to shoot aliens. Then in 1980, Namco released Pac-Man, the biggest arcade game of the year and a character that almost everyone on the planet would recognize within a few years. The same year, Nintendo launched Game & Watch, designed by Gunpei Yokoi. They were small handhelds with one game each and a built-in clock, and the first one, Ball, came out in April 1980.

None of these were computer games. But they were the doorway into gaming for millions of people, and they shaped what people expected from games on every platform, computers included.

Where we are in 1980

By 1980, everything that would shape the next decade was in place: home computers, the first real game companies, role-playing games, adventure games, online worlds on university networks, and arcades full of people. A whole generation was about to discover that the TV could be played, not just watched.

That generation includes me. In the next part, I'll look at the early 80s: the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, the NES, Ultima and Wizardry, the handheld boom, and the years when bedroom coders started turning into game studios. It's also where my own memories start, so things will get a bit more personal.