JH’s Brief History Of Video Games

Introduction

I figure since I’m going to open the box on the whole gaming thing, which I really haven’t touched in terms of content creation in about 25 years, I should probably introduce myself in that context. Then I started writing and about eight hours later had a fairly cool and comprehensive article about the history of video games between 1975 and 1986, so I decided to go with it and do a multi-part project covering that history from my perspective as a gamer, and this is the first segment of that project.

This isn’t “the” history of gaming, it’s “my” history of gaming. This is what it looked like to me, as someone alive at the time, to the best of my memories. I’ve done significant work to ensure I’m not communicating any old urban legends or myths, but in the end this isn’t intended to be an objective article; it’s my subjective memories and opinions, augmented by research. Feel free to argue about it in the forum!

In this edition we’ll go from “In the beginning…” up to the calm before the Nintornado that blew through the industry in February of 1986. Note I’ve used the post splitter, so pay attention to that little navbar where the section title is, at the top and bottom of each page.

Early Days

I’ve been a gamer since before video games existed. Pong clones and two-word text parsers were hours of time spent before I was ten years old…and that was in 1980. We’re talking single-color monitors, 80×25 characters, and a “pixel” was roughly the size of your pinky nail.

Whether it was early consoles like those PONG clones, ante-computer-geek text games and bad, blocky knock-offs of then-currently popular arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, or just taking a screwdriver and shorting together the pins in the EPROMS on my VIC-20 while it was plugged in so I could see what it would do on-screen, I’ve always been deeply fascinated in computer imaging and gaming both.

Trivia point: the first thing I ever “hacked” was using what eventually became Norton Utilities to overwrite the contents of a floppy drive, directly to the disk as hexadecimal text input from the keyboard, to remove the copy protection and customize the load/splash screens on a bunch of old games like this. Then I’d take off to the local mall, go to the Radio Shack, load up a game on their demo box(es) and walk away. That was when I was probably 13, 14.

So yeah. I’ve been at it for a minute.

Over the last forty years or so of course video gaming has gone from a micro-niche targeted toward “kids” to become not just a multi billion dollar industry, but depending on your sources it’s arguably the largest sector of the entire global entertainment business. While one may quibble over methodology and rankings and calculations, certainly it can’t be argued that gaming has become an incredibly popular, and lucrative endeavor.

What’s your vector, Victor?

Around 1980 we started seeing some interesting innovations, beginning with “vector graphics.” This is a little different than the way we use the term today. In 2023, programs like Adobe Illustrator use “vector graphics” to draw scalable images that are defined by mathematical formulae in the rendering software. By contrast, “raster” graphic programs like Adobe Photoshop instead program an array of pixels with color and (in some cases) transparency information.

So a raw vector formula to create an “S” might (in the simplest implementation) describe mathematically a pair of sine waves, oriented vertically, calculated such that they intersect at each end of the “S.” A rastor formula for the same “S” on the other hand would basically be a small relational database or spreadsheet – a two-dimensional array – with each intersecting coordinate being described in terms of the levels of red, blue, green, and “alpha” (transparency) that each pixel will be programmed with.

The end result of this was no more blocky edges on diagonal lines traveling across horizontal CRT scanlines…but alas, still, no more curves at all.

Vector monitors (a whole different setup than your traditional CRT monitors and TVs, or modern LED displays) couldn’t draw circles either, but only straight lines between a series of points (think about the levels in the video game “Tempest,” which was one of the earliest memories I have of color vector graphics).

What made vector monitors sort of cool and different was that the lines were sharp. Where a CRT or television simply draws a series of horizontal lines that quickly “scans” from top to bottom, a vector monitor draws the lines directly from point A to point B. An old-school CRT draws a diagonal line as a series of horizontal lines with different characteristics at different points across the inside of the tube to create the illusion of a vertical line. Consequently – although it’s impossible to really show you here because you’re all not reading this on a vector graphic monitor – the resulting drawings are remarkably sharp and crisp when compared to traditional raster graphics.

Unfortunately limitations of computing power and the overwhelming prevalence of raster graphics in consumer products like TVs and (increasingly) computers made these games pretty limited in their ability to really capitalize on the improved visuals of vector monitors. Probably the peak of the field was the 1983 Star Wars arcade shooter, in which the player sat in as Luke Skywalker on a repeating three-level infinite adventure. (World record: five days on a single credit, played back and forth between two guys in the 80’s. Total score slightly over a billion points.)

Unfortunately as you can see from the image, this really didn’t get us to the sort of photo-realistic pinnacle of graphic art that we youngsters were hoping to reach, but in 1983 plenty of us spent many many dollars in quarters hearing “Red five standing by!” and “Use the force, Luke,” and my favorite line “Luke, let go!” The first was Actually Mark Hamill and the second and third Actually Alec Guiness. I don’t know if they recorded the lines specifically for the game, or if the audio was pulled from the film soundtracks – in fact I just tweeted Mark Hamill to ask, I’ll let you know if he offers a canonical answer. He might, he’s known for being pretty cool with stuff like that.

Color! And More…

Around the same time vector games were rising, we also saw the introduction of color into early eight-bit games.

The first “eight bit” game is generally recognized as “Gun Fight,” a 1975 arcade game by Taito (worldwide) and Midway (North America). The use of the phrase “eight bit” can be confusing because now most people related that to the graphics of the game itself, but in reality this was the bandwidth of the CPU. Prior to “Gun Fight,” video games were created with “discrete logic” electronics explicitly, physically created for the tasks at hand. When Midway licensed the game for the US, they ported it to run on an Intel 8080 CPU, making it the first CPU-based video game.

At this stage of the technology, using a CPU allowed game developers to begin true game programming – the creation of game software to run on hardware that is intended generally for “computing” rather than specifically “to be a video game cabinet.” In 1979, the game changed completely with the introduction of the Galaxian platform by Nintendo in Japan. With various leaps forward in processing techniques, Galaxian was the first truly modern video game, with the now familiar “Pac-Man” graphics. Trivia note: Pac-man was originally developed on Galaga hardware, as were several others like Galaga and (if I remember correctly) Jungle King).

This was the dawn of the first wave of modern video gaming. With hits like “Space Invaders,” “Galaxian,” and “Pac-Man” raking in billions of dollars in quarters, gaming had started to carve a niche in the culture. Although a certain Italian plumber would ultimately take the role, Pac Man in particular was the symbol of everything exciting about video gaming in 1981 or so…

Often called the “golden age of arcade gaming,” the period from 1980-1983 saw an explosion of arcade games, for the first time supplanting pinball machines as vice du jour for the nation’s misguided youth. This is where the classics really began – in basically a three year span you had Pac Man, Galaxian, Frogger, Space Fury (the actual first color vector game). In 1982 the first 16-bit CPU arcade game, “Pole Position,” was released by Atari, and with groundbreaking offerings like “Tron,” “Dragon’s Lair,” and “Space Ace” capping off the run toward the end of the wave, it was a pretty magical time to be a gamer.

This coincides roughly with the first real wave of home gaming consoles beginning with the Atari 2600 in 1977, which was the first “must have” home gaming console right up until they created a game so bad they had to bury it in an undisclosed desert location and it basically killed the platform.

The long version of the story is that Atari had been bought by Warner in 1979 and generated some 65%-ish of their 1982 profits…and then proceeded to lose about a half a billion dollars the next year, in part due to the failure of E.T. but also disappointing results from their port of Pac-Man – these two titles themselves owning about 85% of votes across the board for “worst video game ever.” Warner sold them off in 1983 and their steep decline continued. The brand has basically been used as a venture-capital electronics brand buoyed by its early 80’s reputation ever since, and by all accounts ceased being “the real Atari” in any way after being sold off by Warner.

Into the vacuum stepped a couple of quite decent contenders among a mess of nonsense like the Timex Sinclair. Although the Mattel Intellivision sported the first 16-bit processing in a home console and superior graphics and sound, a series of business missteps including the abominable attempt at creating an attachable keyboard that would convert the whole thing into a rudimentary home computer ended the Intellivision while the Colecovision – running on an 8-bit Z80 processor but coming out of the gate with the first home version of Donkey King that was ridiculously faithful to the original – started eating Atari’s console market share until similar missteps with their Adam ended that.

Fortunately for gaming, a revolution was around the corner.

And that’s where we’ll break it off for now. Stay tuned for part 2, coming soon!

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