In the early days of the 1970s, computer games were little more than a fantasy to most of the world’s population. Only the very few hardcore computer tech specialists had even the faintest inkling that computers could be used for more than calculating complex equations and filling huge rooms with noise, heat, and the faint stink of unwashed code math majors.
The Birth of PC Gaming
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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everything about computers was a fantasy to most people in the world.
My all time favorite Apple game was “Pinball Constructor Set”, which I first saw on an Apple II in, IIRC, 75. I still miss that sily game and wish someone would do a remake for the modern PC.
By the way, the Mac did not come with the first WYSIWYG word processor outside of PARC. That honor goes to Wang.
I think you mean ’85. Apple didn’t exist in 1975, let alone the Apple II. In 1975, we were all playing Lunar Lander on the Selectric console of an IBM 1130.
doh. it was before 81, and on the apple II. but i really don’t recal when between 75 and 81 it was.
by 75 we’d moved on the PDP 11s.
What a lame article. It’s almost all about the computers, not about games. They’d better call it “computers from the past”. And even worse, the author left out the Amiga in 1984 (a machine much more succesful for Games) and only mentioned the Apple (a machine which wasnt used for games much).
So true, I was expecting some things about how the Pong emerged or any game for that matter. There was a Discovery show about the dawn of the gaming industry covering everything from Pong,Asteroids,Space Invaders and Tetris not to mention Mario and Zelda on Nintendo. I remember when I was a kid that I used to play a lot of Space Invaders, few years later came Kong! Gosh,what times!
The Plato IV system built by the U of Illinois was the early home of a diverse set of computer games and one of the earliest online network communities.
Check out URL://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_System and the Innovations section in particular.
Edited 2006-07-22 19:21
My all time favorite Apple game was “Pinball Constructor Set”, which I first saw on an Apple II in, IIRC, 75. I still miss that sily game and wish someone would do a remake for the modern PC.
Actually, it was published in 1983 by BudgeCo and Electronic Arts. And yes, it was awesome (for the time, at least).
There was a PC version, but I don’t know if it would still run in Windows (or Linux, for that matter) under DOS emulation…I’m sure you could find it on Abandonware web sites, even thoug it was an EA title.
For me, the pinnacle of Apple II gaming in those days was Wizardry. I was a D&D player in those days and being able to go through a “3D” dungeon and fight monsters with my characters literally blew my mind.
I’m curious how people here were first exposed to personal computers (microcomputers as they were called then)…for me, it was a 1978 issue of the french magazine “Science & Vie”, which featured an illustration Acorn computer plotting mathematical curves on the cover. Even though I was only nine, I understood right there and then that this would change everything…
Well, to be fair the article is about “PC gaming”, not “Video Games.” Pong, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong, as arcade games, all fall in the category of video games (even though you can now play all of them through emulation on your PCs…)
I would have liked to hear more about the people who wrote those games, danced on the cutting edge and the sacrifices they made.
Well maybe vacuous is too harsh, more like, “needs character development”, no real hero in the story.
http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/spasim.html
Sanity.
“Hackers” by Steven Levy has a nice section on early game development. It’s a very nice book for people who like “computer history”. And no, it’s not related to the movie in any way.
At least it was very entertaining for me, and I wasn’t even born when most of the things he talks about took place.