Guns and Guts

The Video Game - Part I

December 9th, 2008

This may not be true, but it seems fairly certain that nothing has pushed hardware manufacturers harder, at least manufacturers of computer hardware used in the home, than the video game. Sure a lot of the technology may have been born for other uses, but much of it has been optimized and pushed to it’s limits simply for improved video gaming performance.

The overclocking and computer customization craze is almost exclusively the domain of gamers. No one risks popping a $1,000 processor so they can run Microsoft Word faster. The hardware manufacturers have no doubt built super-performing hardware for business and scientific reasons. I am not saying games are the reason we have fast computers, simply that they drive the home computing market and have for a long time.

History Before My Participation
The very first video games were created by scientists as early as 1947. Wikipedia has a good article on the beginnings here. The first high performance computerized video game, was Spacewar!, which was created by a trio of geek heroes at MIT in 1961 on a DEC PDP-1. The wiki article on the PDP-1 is fascinating as well. We owe much to the guys that pioneered so much using that machine.

All of the early examples of what would become known as video games were created by really geeky men in lab coats. Their computers filled up whole rooms, and a modern iPod shuffle’s computing abilities would put them to shame. The men worked with what they had, and more often then not used their simple games as a way to interface the public with their expensive sci-fi hardware.

Early commercial games started appearing in the early 70s, with Atari’s first game Pong being the first success commercially. All kinds of games, good and bad started popping up.

In 1978 Tomohiro Nishikado came up with the most awesome Space Invaders. He had to customize the hardware, because existing hardware could not keep up with the game. It was based on an Intel 8080 CPU, and was a groundbreaking game at the time. Nothing like it had been seen before.

The home video gaming front was opened by Magnavox in 1972, when they released the first console named Odyssey. It was a weird device by today’s standards. It ran on batteries and had no sound.

The Beginning
My first memory of a video game of any sort was William’s 1980 release Defender. I was four at the time and my Dad was quite the Defenderplayer. I remeber standing next to him and watching him play the game quite a bit. Every once in a while he would waste a quarter and let me play for the several seconds it took me to lose all my lives.

The first video game I ever really played was probably Space Invaderson the Atari 2600. The Atari version of the 1978 original game featured simplified graphics and different game modes. The game created a video gamer for life. My Dad’s Atari 2600 spent many a weekend with my cousin and myself at the helm. A few of the games I remember specifically include, Activision’s Stampede, Atari’s Combat, and Parker Bros. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. I always owned my cousin at Combat for what it’s worth.

I lived with my Mom and Step dad while growing up so the Atari was only available to me when I went to see Dad. This was supposedly to be alleviated when we got an Intellivision. The Intellivision console was technically superior to Atari’s 2600 at the time in several ways. The problem with it however was that it used different games and had fewer games available. This hurt the console’s appeal with me. There were lots of nice sports and board games, but I wanted to play Space Invaders or Stampede. The extra buttons, flashier graphics, actual 16 bit processing, and the additional 9 controller buttons didn’t mean squat to me.

Finally there was an adapter released that allowed you to play 2600 games on the Intellivision. It was great, and my first game purchase was Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong is one of my most hated games, seeing as I have never made it past the third level. Before we could get any other games for the console, power supply was left plugged in overnight and it burnt out! My Step dad decided not to get a new one, and that was it for the Intellivision. It sat up on a shelf in our den for at least fifteen years. My Mom probably threw it away at some point.

This began a long drought in my video gaming. I still played the Atari at Dad’s house, and played games on my TRS-80 that I had to type into the machine in BASIC every time I wanted to play one, and any available Commodore 64 machines. This corresponded, unsurprisingly, with the video game console crash of 1983. The PC became the domain of video gaming for several years. At the tender age of 8 my funding abilities were severely underdeveloped, so these obsolete options were all that were available to appease my lust for electronic gaming action.

Actually, let me take a step back here. That is not entirely true. My gaming activities were limited during those years at home. The best games were still only available at the neighborhood arcade anyway. Many of the best games were ported to the 2600, and other consoles, but the ports were generally of much lower quality. This was fine with us little kids, as we didn’t have many quarters to go around anyway. The teenagers at the arcade were pretty pushy, and always occupied the best machines indefinitely.

Once the crash went down, all the new awesome games were only available at the arcade. You could also get a quick fix at your local 7-11 or skating rink. They usually had several cabinets set up. Even grocery stores would have something around occasionally. The mall arcade was my Mecca at this time. We went to the mall quite often, and sometimes my Mom would actually give me a dollar or two to “waste” in the arcade.

Some of my favorite games at the time included Pac-Man(already a classic at that point), 1942, Spy Hunter, Galaga, and multitudes of others that have slipped my mind permanently. These machines were everywhere. A dedicated kid did not have a hard time find a video game to play in those days.

Pizza Hut usually had at least one sit down Pac-Man or Donkey King to mess with. The movie theaters had their own mini-arcades, and some industrious youths actually told the start time of movies to their parents wrong intentionally. This allowed them to get there early and get a few games in before the movie.

One of the biggest day’s of the year for me, was my birthday of course. This meant it was time to go to Chuck E. Cheeses and have a birthday party. The greatness of this place was not their automatons stuffed animals, or their crappy pizza. The place was full of arcade games of course, and the birthday boy got pretty much all the tokens he could ask for. I remember getting in trouble for ignoring all the kids that were invited because I was too engrossed in playing some game. Another favorite memory involved a lesson in honesty.

So I was strolling along looking for the next cabinet to feed, and saw a token sitting on the floor. After picking it up, I spotted a man working on one of the machines. After presenting it to him, and telling him that it would be stealing to just take it, he reached into the machine he was working on, and grabbed a handful of tokens. This nice guy proceeded to drop them all in my token cup, and my eyes probably began to bulge with excitement. After he told me that was a reward for my honesty, I thanked him, and ran along my way. These little tokens may as well have been krugerrands to me.

Well, this is enough for now. In the next installment we will take a look at the most amazing thing my young self had ever seen. It would change my life, and reinvigorate my at home gaming. The infamous, awesome, and still extremely cool Nintendo Entertainment System.

Categories: Entertainment, Life, Tech | Tags: geekery