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A New Era Of Entertainment October 2000 • Vol.8 Issue 10 Page(s) 6-9 in print issue |
Past To Present The History Of Electronic Entertainment | ||
 Electronic entertainment products, such as arcade games, home console games, and computer games, have grown from a garage business to a multibillion dollar industry. It didn't happen overnight, and it certainly didn't happen by accident. The jury is still out regarding who was the first to invent an electronic game, but all the research points to William Higenbotham, who in 1958, turned an oscilloscope into a primitive Pong game while working at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Calling it Tennis Programming, Higenbotham was undoubtedly aware of the commercial potential of the device he had. However, he never tried to capitalize on it or secure any patents. It's also unlikely that Tennis Programming inspired any other game developers; the game was located in a secure facility and demonstrated to only a few people. To find the first truly influential electronic game, we have to fast-forward to 1962, when Spacewar!, which is generally regarded as the first computer game, hit the scene. Developed by Steven Russell, Martin Graetz, Peter Samson, and Dan Edwards, Spacewar! featured two competing spaceships that had to fight each other while avoiding a gravity well located in the center of the screen. Compared to a game like Pong (which came later), the game gave players a tremendous amount of control by letting them maneuver left and right, fire, and use their thrusters to jockey for position and prevent their ships from being sucked into the center of the playfield and destroyed. Spacewar! had an obvious impact on many classic games that followed, such as Asteroids and the popular Star Control series.
The 1970s. One of these pioneers (and entrepreneurs) was Ralph Baer, who designed the first home videogame console in 1966. Dubbing the system the Odyssey, Baer convinced Magnavox to produce his creation, and the first systems hit store shelves in 1972. It was the first time home users could get something akin to an arcade experience in their homes, although the video display relied on plastic overlays to provide much of the system's graphics. Regardless, the Odyssey was a popular system that proved a market for home videogame systems existed. Home computers were pretty much a dream in the early 1970s, available only in kit form and of limited use for gaming. Arcade games, however, were a different story. The same year the Odyssey debuted, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari. While most people associate Atari with home consoles, the company got its start selling immensely popular arcade machines. Bushnell and Dabney had created an arcade version of Spacewar! in 1971. The game was called Computer Space, and it was the first video arcade game, but the controls proved too complex for most people. After forming Atari, Bushnell focused on designing a much simpler machine with the help of programmer Alan Alcorn; the result was Pong. Atari may not have been the first to create an electronic game based loosely on tennis (even Baer's Odyssey came with one), but Pong's impact exceeded that of any game that came before it. When the first machine malfunctioned after only one day at Andy Capp's bar in Sunnyvale, Calif., Bushnell went to check it. The only thing wrong with the unit was that it was stuffed to overflowing with quarters. Thus the video arcade industry was born. Other companies sprang from the woodwork and began selling knock-offs of Pong to cash in on this new fad. By 1975 Atari had produced a home console version of the game that set sales records and prompted a flood of imitators to create Pong-like games for home users. Of course, many people during this period were figuring out that a system that came with multiple games (such as the Odyssey) was superior to one that played a single game, and it wasn't long before home consoles that used cartridges were entering the market. One of the first was Fairchild's Channel F, released in 1976. With the Channel F, users could purchase new games without having to buy an entirely new system and simply pop in a different cartridge when they wanted to play a different game. Atari, teetering on the brink of financial disaster because of all the Pong competitors, followed suit by launching the cartridge-based Atari VCS (a.k.a. Atari 2600) in 1977. The Atari VCS blew the lid off the home video game market, eventually becoming a victim of its own success. The $200 systems flew off store shelves, and Atari (along with other developers) made even more money by selling software cartridges for the new system. Programmers who wrote games for the Atari VCS created many computer game companies that are strong today, such as Activision. The Atari VCS wasn't the only new system on the market in 1977. Apple Computer was hawking its new $1,300 Apple ][ home computers, which had several times more RAM (random-access memory) than a home console and eventually became a great games machine. Commodore started selling its PET computer, a $600 system that established the company's reputation as a low-cost, high value outfit. In 1978 Intel's famous 5MHz (megahertz) 8006 processors were on the market, further separating the home computer market from the console market in terms of raw performance. Home computers were encroaching on the videogame console market by the 1980s, although the early years of the Big Hair decade mainly represented the glory days of the arcades. The year 1980 saw the release of Battlezone, one of the earliest first-person perspective games. Defender and Missile Command, both of which became instant classics, were also released that year. Once Namco unleashed the unbelievably popular Pac-Man in 1980, the industry was never the same. Pac-Man inspired a slew of sequels, a hit song, a few television series, and more marketing tie-ins than any other game had up to that point. Toy giant Mattel leaped into the home console market in 1980 with its Intellivision, which was superior to the Atari VCS in every way except the one that counted: popularity. The text-based adventure Zork was released for home computers in 1980, and lucky Apple ][ owners were able to use the power of the system to play the first adventure game to use graphics, Sierra On-Line's Mystery House. By 1981 IBM was selling its first PCs, equipped with 5MHz Intel 8088 processors and 4KB (kilobytes) of RAM. These were heady system specifications for the time, and the $3,000 price kept the machine out of most homes. In 1982 Coleco's ColecoVision console was coming close to reproducing the arcade experience at home, especially Nintendo's popular Donkey Kong title, but the end of the home console market was near. By 1984 there was so much bad software on the market from companies trying to make a quick buck that customers were fearful of buying anything. People also were starting to eschew dedicated gaming consoles in favor of home computers that were much more versatile. For these reasons and more the video game market crashed between 1982 and 1984, with Atari losing more than $500 million in 1983 alone. Everything changed in 1985 when Nintendo launched the $199 NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), a console that almost single-handedly revived the home video game market . Ironically, Nintendo had wanted to partner with Atari to sell the units in the United States, but Atari would have nothing to do with them. While the NES was technically inferior to some competing products, such as Sega's Sega Master System, the software for the NES was so good that Nintendo dominated the industry. This was the era of Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda: classic games that spawned many sequels and imitators. Nintendo's reign ended when Sega released the revolutionary 16-bit Genesis console in 1989, which Nintendo didn't counter until 1991 when the 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was brought to bear. Then came 1989; this was also the year of the handheld systems, as both Atari's Lynx and Nintendo's Game Boy were released. The Lynx sported a full-color screen, great sound, and a zippy processor. The Game Boy had a horrible green screen and bad sound and was inferior in every way but one: popularity. The Lynx died an agonizing death, and the Game Boy went on to become the best-selling video game hardware of all time. During the mid to late 1980s, home computers were becoming increasingly powerful, making them truly great gaming platforms. Commodore's Amiga 500, which was released in 1987, became legendary both for its low cost and its impressive gaming capabilities. Where a typical PC could display 16-256 colors at once and relied on PC speaker sound (without an expensive sound card upgrade), the Amiga delivered four-channel stereo sound and more than 4000 simultaneous colors out of the box. They also cost half to a third the price of a new PC. The Atari ST was released in 1985 and was famous for its gaming superiority. The 1980s closed with the introduction of Intel's 25MHz 80486 processors hitting the market. It put an unprecedented amount of computing power in the hands of home users. The 1990s. The 1990s got off to a great start in terms of electronic entertainment with the release of Origin Systems' Wing Commander. This space combat simulator became famous for prompting thousands of PC users to upgrade their hardware just so they could play the game, a process that is painfully familiar to any PC owner these days. The year 1990 also saw the inaugural Final Fantasy role-playing game that inspired the upcoming movie and over 10 sequels and offshoots. Many think the Nintendo 64 was the first 64-bit console, but that distinction goes to the ill-fated Atari Jaguar of 1993. Released with impressive specifications and very little software, the system quickly fell out of favor. The same fate befell the 3DO console released in 1993, which used a capacious CD-ROM drive but had few games and was pricey. The console market may have been dreary in 1993, but computer owners reaped a bounty of classic games. Doom appeared in 1993 and went on to become one of the most popular and influential games of all time along with its then-new shareware distribution strategy. Other favorites such as MicroProse's X-COM and Broderbund's Myst were also released, as was the most critically acclaimed game of all time, Sid Meier's Civilization (published by MicroProse). These games had a profound impact on future titles. It wasn't until 1995 that consoles made a comeback, as Sega launched its 32-bit Saturn system, and Sony dove headfirst into the market with its 32-bit PlayStation. The Saturn was a competent machine, but the PlayStation's multitude of games and better support for 3D graphics eventually gave it the edge it needed to trounce the Saturn in terms of market share. Sony's timing also gave them an advantage over industry juggernaut Nintendo, which didn't release the Nintendo 64 until 1996. Hampered by a cartridge format that didn't allow for much storage, the Nintendo 64 did not enjoy the same popularity with hardcore gamers that the PlayStation did. Sega struck back in 1999 with the impressive 128-bit Dreamcast, but their superiority likely will be short-lived with Sony's impending plans to release the PlayStation2. Nintendo's next-generation console is slated to appear early next year, and even Microsoft plans to release a powerful console in 2001 known as Xbox. As Nintendo 64 and PlayStation duked it out, PC hardware soared to unprecedented levels of power while prices plunged. Processor speeds climbed from about 25MHz in 1990 to nearly 1GHz by the end of 1999. Standard system memory leaped from 4MB in 1990 to 64MB to 128MB in 1999. Hard drive sizes expanded from hundreds of megabytes to tens of gigabytes. Specialized sound and video accelerators became standard equipment on nearly all home PCs. Best of all, the typical PC user paid less for a system at the end of 1999 than someone would have in 1990. PCs, properly configured, are currently the ultimate gaming rigs, and it's likely to stay that way for a while. By the end of 1999, console games, console hardware, and computer games achieved combined sales totaling more than $7.4 billion in the United States, according to figures released by PC Data. To put that in perspective, more than $7.3 billion in movie tickets were sold in 1999, according to ACNielsen EDI, Inc. Bear in mind that the PC Data figures don't include arcade totals, and it's obvious the electronic entertainment industry is showing no signs of slowing down.  by Tracy Baker
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