The History of Gaming - 1st Generation

From the moment business owners first realised that video games could be a viable money-making entertainment platform, the industry became cut-throat, with a handful of key figures leading the way. While executives were keen to get a slice of the pie from the start and invest early, the majority had no idea what they were doing, handling a foreign technology they knew little about with something of an iron fist. Making reckless decisions, quashing the creativity of studios and doling out unreasonable deadlines like it was going out of style was the order of the day.

But quite how this turning point came about is another story that starts as early as the 1930's when pinball was the game of choice. Williams, a prominent pinball manufacturer who would later go on to develop a critically acclaimed portfolio of video games such as Joust and Defender, was producing innovative licensed tables. Early arcades were full of pinball tables and people took to the idea in droves. Over the years, the format developed and much like videogames based on films; movie tie-in tables and official licenses appeared everywhere. The industry had truly found a way to become sustainable. However, pinball would soon move aside to make way for new, emerging technology.

During the early 60's, Steve Russell, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was toying with the idea of modifying existing technology to create what he and his fellow students referred to as ‘hacks'. Curious to see how far they could push the limitations of existing tech, this new breed of innovative minds later became referred to as ‘hackers' and it wasn't long until Steve created his greatest hack yet, the world's first interactive video game.

Throughout 1961, Steve worked for six months, tinkering with a vast amount of code to create his first working prototype of spaceship dog-fight title Spacewar! During development, Steve's ‘hack' was seen by his peers as a total waste of time, but despite this criticism the final version was finally up and running a year later in 1962.

The game was basic, bearing a likeness to spaceship title Thrust that would come several years later. Due to a lack of processing power required to program an enemy ship, Spacewar! Was two-player only, letting players duke it out on a small screen, firing rockets at each other and sling-shotting off the gravitational pull of a sun.

Perhaps the anti-climax of this historic breakthrough is that players still saw Spacewar! as an entertaining pet project, rather than something that could be turned into a money-making venture. As such, Steve didn't copyright the game or collect any money from it, missing out on a potential windfall. Others would soon come and piggyback Spacewar!, creating their own titles and starting up their own companies. Two of these players, Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell, would later take gaming into the mainstream.

In particular, Baer would go on to create the world's first commercially available video game console, the Odyssey. Released in 1972 and engineered by military electronics giant Magnavox, the machine was over-priced and dogged by some bad managerial decisions by the company board.

A few years earlier however, Bushnell, a electronic game arcade worker was getting to grips with entertainment technology, conducting repairs and gaining a great understand of how these complex machines worked. While studying at the University of Utah, he became familiar with game development, building several prototypes that would become popular in student circles. One game went a step further and became the world's first coin-operated arcade machine. Computer Space closely resembled Spacewar! but ran independently in its own cabinet. It didn't shift many units, but Computer Space paved the way for the start of the industry. The fact that the operation manual was the size of a phone book probably didn't help its marketablity much either.

Determined to make something of his creations, Bushnell, along with a few other coders decided to form the world's first development studio. Several names for this new business came and went, but eventually they settled on ‘Atari'. Things would change drastically from this point forward, with the creation of arcade tennis title Pong. Amusingly, Bushnell avoided the Computer Space manual fiasco by bundling the arcade machine with a card that simply read: "Avoid missing ball for high score". Wise move.

By 1972, the game was a hit and really brought people round to the idea of hanging out in bars and pizza parlours and playing games with friends. The birth of the video game arcade, as opposed to the pinball arcade, was in motion. Unfortunately, relations between Baer and Bushnell were allegedly sour, with both disputing ownership of the technology. Competition, even at this early stage, was fierce, with both sides keen to get the biggest slice of the industry before it even began.

Throughout the next few years, Magnavox moulded itself as the straight-cut, business-savvy company, while the Atari employees lived the lives of geeky rock stars, with drink benders and wild parties becoming commonplace. All of a sudden, the industry became attractive to new, fledgling coders, keen to get into that scene.  

Unfortunately for Atari, by 1973, the third-party dev scene had truly kicked off, with several copycat Pong games flooding the bars and cafes. The competitive market had arrived and no one was really sure what would happen next. Thanks to Atari, the notion of home-gaming had become both socially and commercially acceptable across America. Several new game companies across the world started to form and would later pose problems for the troubled developer.

In the same year, Masaya Nakamura, a Japanese business owner gathered an investment of several thousand dollars and started a company called Namco which would later go on to create some of the industry's most loved titles including Pac-Man, Galaxian, Rally-X and Dig Dug. The developer would prove a driving force of the second generation of gaming; at the same time a bright young chap named Shigeru Miyamoto landed a job at an entertainment company called Nintendo. Things were on the cusp of well and truly kicking off, exciting times indeed!