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the history of video games : from ‘pong’ to ‘pac-man’..there was bell, there was edison, and then there was higinbotham .............................................
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the history of video games from ‘pong’ to ‘pac-man’ - september 2000 - --- by william hunter, curator of ' the dot eaters '. © the dot eaters for more info, links and videoclips: http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters --- 1 of 4 pages --- the paleolithic ‘pong’ in the beginning, there was nothing. well, actually, there was pinball, some shooting gallery games, a few nickel peep-show machines and those mechanical genies that would guess your weight and give a glimpse of your future. but it was probably pretty hard trying to beat your buddies at who weighs less. (there was bell, there was edison, there was fermi. and then there was higinbotham) --- 'tennis for two' on an oscilloscope working at brookhaven national laboratory, a us nuclear research lab in upton, new york, william a. higinbotham, a chain-smoking, fun-loving character and self-confessed pinball player, wants to develop an open house exhibit at bnl that will entertain people as they learn. his idea is to use a small analog computer in the lab to graph and display the trajectory of a moving ball on an oscilloscope, with which users can interact. missile trajectory plotting is one of the specialties of computers at this time, the other being cryptography. along with technical specialist robert v. dvorak who actually assembles the device, to create in three weeks the game system they name tennis for two, and it debuts with other exhibits in the brookhaven gymnasium at the next open house in october 1958. in the rudimentary side-view tennis game, the ball bounces off a long horizontal line at the bottom of the oscilloscope, and there is a small vertical line in the centre to represent the net. the game was simple, but fun to play, and its charm was infectious. http://www.pong-story.com/inventor.htm brookhaven national laboratory - www.bnl.gov tribute to william higinbotham, inventor of 'pong' - fas.org/cp/pong_fas.htm --- 'spacewar!' at MIT circa 1961 there's a group of hard core computer nerds calling themselves the tech model railroad club : wayne witanen and j. martin graetz, along with 25 year-old steve russell, they develop the idea to pit two spaceships with limited fuel supplies against each other in a missle duel. the program becomes 'spacewar !', the world's first fully interactive videogame, with russell as main programmer (1962). two spaceships called the wedge and the needle, according to their shapes, are rendered in rough outlined graphics. it causes a sensation at MIT's annual science open house, and a scoring system must be introduced to limit people's time at the control switches used to play. it is such a huge hit with the computer community that copies are quickly spread around to other educational facilities in the u.s. across the then burgeoning internet precursor ARPAnet. and once again, just like willy higinbotham, russell doesn't seek to copyright or patent his work. most likely because the system 'spacewar !' is running on is the size of a refrigerator and costs us$120,000. due to its public domain status, the game will end up being one of the most copied concepts in videogame history. 'spacewar !' ? http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar --- who really invented the videogame ? in 1949, a young engineer named ralph baer, was given an assignment to build a television set. in 1966 with the help of bob tremblay and bob solomon they are ready to demonstrate a system that allows spots to be moved around on a tv screen. in january of 1967 baer puts technician bill harrison to work to build the first multi-game unit. it plays 'chase' games, has a 'light gun' and a variety of other simple games. they call the system the ‘home tv game’. in early 1968 baer files for the first videogame patent, and by the end of that year they again demonstrate the system, capable of switching between ping-pong, volleyball, handball, hockey and even several shooting games to be used with a newly designed ‘light-gun’. during many years of litigation defending his patent, baer learns of higinbotham's creation, and he describes it as a simple, oscilloscope- based ballistics demonstration. unfortunately, the man at the centre of this controversy cannot speak for himself: william higinbotham, owner of 20 patents concerning electronic circuits, passes away on november 10, 1995, at the age of 84. after further developing the system was released as the first ever commercially available home videogame to magnavox dealers as the ‘odyssey’ in may of 1972. the graphics are so rudimentary that the system comes with a set of two sizes of colour mylar overlays to put on the television screen to represent the various playfields, including tennis and hockey. --- the arcade in the footsteps of pioneers william higinbotham, ralph baer and steve russel nolan bushnell, the zeus of the videogame industry, is about to create an entire entertainment industry, which in a few short years will eclipse even the 80 year old movie business. at 19 years old, he becomes convinced of the commercial viability of a videogame like 'spacewar', if only the system that ran it could be scaled down from university mainframes and into a more reasonably compact version. he begins an eight year odyssey to do just that: produce an arcade version of 'spacewar'. 1971 bushnell leaves ampex to work on the computer space game full time and when he finally completes it that year he finds a buyer in nutting associates, a manufacturer of coin-op trivia games. 1,500 of the units are built, with a futuristic design and fiberglass cabinet, but the game does not sell well. bushnell comes to the conclusion that the procedures of using various buttons for the thrusting and rotating of the ships are just too complicated for half-pissed bar patrons to comprehend. he becomes convinced that any successful video arcade game has to be extremely easy to understand from the get-go. at least the futuristic fibreglass cabinet is a hit... --- 'pong' released bushnell, cofounder of atari in 1972 (a term from the japanese game go, whose meaning is equivalent to "check" in chess.) bushnell hires al alcorn to program games. since alcorn is inexperienced, bushnell has him program a simple video tennis game as an exercise. they call the game 'pong', for two reasons: 1) 'pong' is the sound the game makes when the ball hits a paddle or side of the screen, and 2) the name 'ping-pong' is already copyrighted. 'pong' is but a polished variant of the game willie higinbotham displayed on his oscilloscope. --- ROM chips now the arcade is about to get a whole lot more crowded, between 1971 and 1973, 30 videogames are produced for the arcade by 11 manufacturers. in 1974 the company kee games, headed by joe keenan releases 'tank', designed by scott bristow. gameplay consists of two tanks facing off in a maze, while trying to avoid land mines scattered about. the game breaks new technical ground by incorporating ROM chips to hold graphics memory, enabling it to display more complicated detail on-screen than the simple blocks of 'pong'. 'tank' becomes the biggest hit of 1974, kee and atari 'merge' back into one company. --- 'pong' is a tv based game in 1974 atari employees bob brown and harold lee propose a home version of 'pong', able to be hooked up to any tv set. retailers are skittish over the short life of magnavox's tv-based 'odyssey' game and the system languishes in the atari labs. in 1975 they cut a deal to sell the system under the sears tele-games label. the order is for 150,000 units. bushnell has nowhere near the facilities to produce that many in the time sears wants them, so he taps a venture capitalist for a $10 million line-of-credit to expand. by christmas, atari's US$100 home 'pong' console becomes sears biggest selling item, with reports of people waiting outside stores for hours to get one. and once again dozens of manufacturers swarm out with myriad versions of home 'pong' games. almost all of these machines are based on the new 'pong-on-a-chip' circuit developed by general instruments. --- see the other pages
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 william a. higinbotham   'tennis for two', 1958 world's first videogame  steve russel, j.m.graetz, alan kotok  'spacewar!', 1962  ralph baer   'odessey', 1972  nolan bushnell   arcade version of 'spacewar', 1971  'pong', 1972  'pong' arcade 1972  tv-console, 1975 |
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--- comment Thank you for the walk down memory lane. In 1974 (or was it 1975?) I was a young account executive at the San Francisco office of the advertising firm of Bozell & Jacobs. Nolan Bushnell visited us and said "let me show you the future." Pong was a coin-op game at the time and Nolan had just private branded "Tele-Games" to Sears. The consumer division of Atari did not exist at this point. A small group of us brought Pong to market as Atari's consumer division was built. Gene Lipkin was the Coin-Op Marketing VP, of course Joe Keenan (Nolan's ex-next door neighbor) was President. Mike Shea was hired as the consumer division Marketing VP and Malcolm Kuhn became VP/Sales. The next 3 years were perhaps the most fun in my life as we introduced the concept of interactive consumer electronics to the world. Ahhh, the stories.......... I've got some original Pong memorabilia that was used to create product brochures and packaging. Perhaps I will offer some of it through your site. Here's one story that runs ancillary to all this.....one of Nolan's lifetime ambitions was to own a nationwide chain of video arcades. Someone had given Nolan a 6' stuffed rat that stood on its back two legs. Nolan had him in his office. One day we photographed Nolan for something we were doing in preparation to the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. When we were finished Nolan asked us to take a picture of he and his rat whom he had named "Rick Rat." We did it and that was that. A couple of years later I noticed a white-haired guy occupying a previously empty office in the consumer division. I asked who the old guy was and was told that his name was Gene Landrum and he was working on a pet project of Nolan's. Gene was developing Chuck E. Cheese's Pizzatime Theater and Nolan's stuffed rat became the symbol for the chain. So the trivia question is.............what was Chuck E. Cheese's original name? I don't have a print of that picture of Nolan and Rick but I sure wish I did. Glen Kronewetter |
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