Reading 01: The Highs and Lows of Early Video Games

The earliest video games were designed to push their platforms' capabilities as far as possible. Their purpose was to demonstrate the power of the hardware, to impress their audience. This is inline with the hardware-centric perspective that pervaded the computing industry of that era. The nature of the beast limited the development opportunity to only a certain type of person: engineers. This is reflected in the nature of the games they made: Spacewar, a glorified physics demonstration.

Spacewar was a game made by and for engineers, steeped in science fiction and only a year after Alan Shepard entered low orbit. But the creators unknowingly seized a crucial opportunity; they'd crafted a narrative. They explained away the torpedoe's lack of gravitational influence with photons. They explained that the hyperspace engines had been rushed to production and presented risk with each use. This game wasn't simply a stress test for the PDP-1, it had context, humanity. It also struck up the long time love affair of space and video games. Perhaps it's just that gamers and space lovers have a large intersection, or the coincidence of the early days of video games and the space race. But I like to think that it's just human nature, staring into the blackness of a blank video screen, to imagine outer space. In what other context does man stare into the void? To have this first opportunity to mark man's place among the stars in a completely new way, a landmark installment in a budding art form, and wrap it up in a meaningless war. This is an early look into the way video games would make humanity introspect in completely new and sometimes jarring ways.

Nolan Bushnell and Ralph Baer took the next great challenge on: introducing the layman to the engineers' pet project. Bushnell's experiment with Computer Space proved general audiences would require a gentler introduction to video games; they didn't even have the vocabulary to describe the thing, much less participate in space-borne warfare. Baer's Magnavox Odyssey was even farther ahead of it's time; people weren't comfortable with the concept of television games, much less where they fit in in the home. So to meet the challenge the video game was distilled to almost the bare essentials, Pong!.

One ball, two paddles, two counters, one color. It's next to impossible to imagine a simpler game, and the brilliance of that is two-fold. Psychologically, if people couldn't wrap their heads around Pong!, there was not much hope for much else. Technologically, the simplicity should minimize costs. It was a great recipe for wildfire.

It's fascinating how quickly the technology behind video games splintered; in quick succession there had been one-off machines built for custom logic, software widely distributed and modified, mass-produced arcade machines, and early home console systems. Most impressive to me is the introduction of the home console; Baer was practically two steps ahead of the curve having bypassed the arcade machine. It's a visionary idea to reach into the television and control it yourself. It must have been an absolutely foreign concept in it's day so you can hardly blame customers for thinking it a sales gimmick.