Week Two - A dot, chasing another dot

Well usually when ever I think of the first games made, I just think of pong, and space invaders, oh how wrong I was. The obvious thing about early games was graphics were not what was important, how things seemed to have drastically changed, and when I read that the first concept was done on an oscilloscope I almost wet myself....almost. Although saying that in science at school when we got the oscilloscope we had tons of fun moving that dot around the screen. So this “first game” involved 8 crt's and allowed the user to change the trajectory of a missile by adjusting the dials, sounds fun. But after this people did start to play with the idea of games on computers, but these were only things such as tic-tac-toe and checkers and so not much new in a way of games. It wasn’t till 1958 that William Higinbotham created another game on the oscilloscope called "tennis for two" (sounds like the start of pong to me).

Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope!

So that's technically the birth of the video games, but then came the use of really using a computer for video games, and in 1962 Steve Russell created, "Spacewar!” a game to go down in history. Steve Russell was a computer programmer/computer scientist many argue he actually gave birth to the industry of computer games, and it wasn’t just the fact he made one of the first games, he made such a great game to set it off that it’s no surprise the market is as big as it is now.

The Orininal Spacewar!

Then along came Ralph Bear, who some say pioneered the video game industry. Ralph actually first hypothesized playing games around 1950, but it wasn’t till 1966 that he actually managed to start making his idea a reality. With a Bachelor of Science degree under his belt and working for Sanders Associates, him and a small team set work on making a game playable on a TV set, and then completed it in 1967. The game again was fairly simple, involving a dot, chasing another dot, around a maze, (hmm this sounds like where Pacman may have came from). This then evolved into the first home consol, but lets save that for another random dribbling.

http://spacewar.oversigma.com/ - a link to a java game that is pretty faithful to the original game.