From Mainframe to PC

The computers of the 50s and 60s were mainframe systems in educational and governmental institutions, and were so large that entire rooms were required to store them. They were slower than contemporary calculators, and instead of a monitor and memory they had punch cards or spools of punched paper tape for the input and output of data (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, 1996). Willy Higinbotham's Tennis for Two is understood to be the first video game, designed in 1958 using an oscilloscope, analog computer, and push buttons. However, it is more often remembered that, when the first computer with a display and typewriter (a $120,000 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1) was produced at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), undergraduate hackers from the Tech Model Railway Club created Spacewar (Herz, 1997, p. 5). Brenda Laurel, wondering why Spacewar “was the ‘natural' thing to build with this new technology?” argues that:

Its designers identified action as the key ingredient and conceived Spacewar as a game that could provide a good balance between thinking and doing for its players. They regarded the computer as a machine naturally suited for representing things that you could see, control, and play with. Its interesting potential lay not in its ability to perform calculations but in its capacity to represent action in which humans could participate . (1993, p. 1)

In describing the process of the game's creation as an almost logical process, Laurel implies that it emerged naturally from the dynamics of the new technology. However, as Friedman observes, the development of Spacewar pointed to an “early recognition of computer games as models of human-computer interaction” (1995, p. 75), and these models were not “natural.” The military institutions which funded computer research, the demographics of the programmers, board-based wargames, and models and ideologies of human agency and participation determined the possibility of Spacewar (also see Levy, 1984; Price, 1985; Wilson, 1992).

Like many early games, Spacewar was initially inaccessible to the public, though its code was disseminated on punch cards to other university computers and soon other kinds of games were developed. Many of these early games were more experiments in computer calculation than real games, with interaction limited to the novelty of inputting data and getting feedback. The game LIFE (1970), written by John Conway, simulated cellular growth patterns, and only required initial input data from the user and a key press to initiate each cycle of growth (Levy, 1984; Wilson, 1992; Friedman, 1995). Lunar Lander involved entering data about changes in a landing ship's engine thrust, and output data that determined the ship's trajectory and whether or not it landed safely. Hammurabi (or Kingdom ) ran in year long cycles of a feudal domain, and required inputting data about grain planted, taxes, building plans. (Herz, p. 9).

Arcade games were the first media to commercialise on the graphical gaming capabilities of microprocessors, and were popular amongst teenage youth up to the late 80s. The first coin-operated (“coin-op”) arcade game was Computer Space (1971), though the first commercially successful arcade game, Pong , was developed by Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari in 1971, and released as an arcade game in 1972. Spacewar , like many other mainframe games, was released as an arcade and microcomputer game in the form of Asteroids , and companies like Midway, Taito and Namco soon released such classic games as Tank , Gunfight , Space Invaders , Galaxian , and Pacman . Arcades were seen as deviant places by concerned parents and social groups, but they lost popularity after the rise of home computers. While arcades are now commonly found in suburban malls, they have been sanitised to the extent that parents feel comfortable leaving their children while they go shopping (Herz, 1997).

In 1976 the first programmable read only memory (ROM) was developed, and, in 1978, the Atari VCS 2600 console was released, along with its classic game Breakout . By the end of 1983, some fourteen million units had been sold (Price, 1985). Atari licensed Space Invaders for the Atari, and produced a range of classic games, such as Missile Command, Centipede, Freeway and Frogger. As Kinder notes, the first U.S. boom in home video games began in 1979, with companies such as Atari, Midway, Mattel, Cinematronics, Sega releasing more challenging games (p. 88). Systems by Apple, Radio Shack and Texas Instruments were soon superseded by “the Atari 5200, Colecovision, and a new line of microcomputers by Atari, Coleco, Commodore and Mattel” (Price, 1985) which had greater resources for game sounds and graphics.

While 1970s saw the birth of video arcades, home consoles, and personal computers, and the 1980s saw computer gaming become an industry, after a three year boom and a peak of $3 million annual sales:

a glut of poorly designed home video games flooded the American market, causing Atari to lose close to $600 million. The plunge, which began in 1983, and fell another 60 percent in 1984, bottomed out in 1985, when video games seemed really dead. (Kinder, 1991, p. 88)

It was during this slump that Nintendo cornered the market. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) reached America in 1986, and in 1989, one in five households owned a Nintendo system. Nintendo's marketing strategy involved maintaining control over its software so that other companies could not flood the market with inferior games, a strategy for which it was sued (Kinder, 1991, p. 91). However, Nintendo has filled the market with additional merchandise—TV shows, movies, magazines, hot lines, fan clubs, and product tie-ins—and Nintendo's revival of the market facilitated the success of Sega's Master System, which was released in its wake.

The present landscape of computer gameplay can be seen less in terms of American or Japanese dominance than in terms of major corporations or minor software development companies upgrading the technical specifications of their platforms. 1989 saw the release of not only the 16-bit Atari Genesis and NEC's Turbo-Grafix 16, but the portable, hand held computer games, Game Boy, Atari Lynx and NEC TurboExpress. In 1991, Nintendo entered the 16-bit era with its Super NES, and in 1992 Sega incorporated optical disks into games. In 1995, Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn were released, followed in 1996 by the Nintendo 64. In 2000, the Sega Dreamcast was released, and in 2001, the Playstation 2 began to supersede its predecessor. Most recently, in 2002, Microsoft released the X-Box, and Sega released the Nintendo Gamecube.

From Hardware to Genre

Over the last two decades, the conflict between the arcade and home console market has been displaced by a more vigorous conflict between game consoles and programmable PCs. Even a decade ago, PCs with graphical, “icon”-based interfaces such as the Apple Macintosh, were dismissed as “games” computers, as mere hardware on which games were run. A “real” computer was, supposedly, programmed, with the MS-DOS text-based interface seen as an index of the level of abstraction associated with programming. Consoles, like the recently released Dreamcast, may in some ways be technically superior to MACs and IBM PCs in terms of game performance, because they are “hardwired” to run games, but PC games have greater flexibility. MACs, of course, developed capabilities comparable to PCs, which appropriated the MACs Window-Icon-Mouse-Pointer (WIMP) graphical user-interface (GUI) (see Cubitt, 1998, pp. 2-3). To date, MACs are considered superior in their professional graphical applications, while IBM PCs are considered superior in their professional and networking applications.

However, while early game genres were particular to the machines on which they were played (Stallabras, 1996, p. 86), the advent of CD-ROMs and more powerful systems has meant that “hardware no longer dictates genre” (Herz, 1997, p. --). G iven the increasing graphical capability of PCs and the introduction of Internet access to consoles, the distinctions between platforms may become an index of taste rather than technical specifications. Games are now routinely released to multiple platforms, or “ported” from one platform to another. The extent to which Microsoft's X-Box will collapse the distinction between console and PC is still yet to be seen. It can still be said, however, that games and aesthetics have become as central to the specifications of the platforms in the way the two subcultures distinguish themselves. That is, if hardware is no longer the distinctive means of differentiating between gaming practices, then it may be argued that genres have become increasingly important in defining the aesthetic expectations of players. At present, arcade and console platforms still tend towards action-oriented games, while PCs have tended towards strategy and adventure-based games (Herz, 1997; Turkle, 1984, 1995; Myers, 1991). However, while different platforms may have given rise to distinct genres, and the evolution of computer games is marked by a tension between market formulas and innovation, game genres are generally accepted as crossing gaming platforms.