Early Computer Games
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The re-release of the classic 80s game Wasteland got me thinking this week about the early days of computer gaming. Here's my perspective on them, and a brief history for those interested in the beginnings of our hobby:
There were no personal computers before the mid-1970s. Computers were huge mainframe machines that filled whole rooms (or even floors). They were owned by universities, corporations, and the government. But that doesn't mean nobody played games on them. IBM included a Games Directory with almost every version of its VM Operating System. It usually was not advertised. You had to know where to look for it and have some prowess with control languages to play. But they served a purpose. Games pushed the technology of video graphics and sound to the limits, and taught computer geeks how to use the machine. One US Senator tried to have all games banned from government computers. He failed.
Among the best-known main-frame games were SpaceWar and Lunar Lander. The graphics were extremely primitive but math geeks loved them. In SpaceWar, the cigar shaped rockets fired projectiles that actually obeyed the laws of gravity. But without a doubt, the most popular main-frame game was Adventure. It was based on D&D and text only with a simple two word parser and massive look-up table. It was huge and took many months to solve. Hints and links to it were passed back and forth over DARPA Net, the precursor to the Internet. Adventure reportedly was responsible for many Computer Science majors failing to graduate on time.
Does anyone else remember these or have a story about them? My next post will cover the early PC games in the 1980s.
AubreyMaturin
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@70b975f7a5:
Then LAN parties came along in the mid-1990s. One computer geek would host such a party and invite several friends over. Each would bring their own computer with a length of ethernet cable and a network interface card. All the machines would hook up through a router to a server (usually the guy with the biggest hard drive) and everyone would play a multiplayer shoot em up.
Oh yeah! Loved the DOOM and Quake parties that my friend used to host.
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I think the 1978 IBM game Kayleb describes above was the original Star Trek game. It was found in many of those IBM Game Directories. The 70's era comic strip Funky Winkerbean even featured it in a few of its cartoons. In one, the High School principal was telling the guidance councilor that the school's computer was playing Star Trek again. "How do you know?" asked the councilor. "Because there are 14 Klingons registered for math class."
Computer gaming began to change from mostly solitaire to interactive group gaming in the mid-1990s. The 8-bit home computers of the early and mid-80s had no hard drive, no mouse, and no full screen edit capability. One person sat at the keyboard and used one-letter commands for each character's actions. Arcade joysticks made some muliplayer games possible. My family used to play a four-player one called Mule on the Atari.
The 16-bit computers that came out in the late 80's (MacIntosh, Amiga, Atari ST, and IBM compatibles with Windows) had better graphics cards and introduced SoundBlaster. Most came with a mouse, a hard drive, and full screen edit. But communicating with other users over telephone lines was still too slow to allow real-time gaming.
Then LAN parties came along in the mid-1990s. One computer geek would host such a party and invite several friends over. Each would bring their own computer with a length of ethernet cable and a network interface card. All the machines would hook up through a router to a server (usually the guy with the biggest hard drive) and everyone would play a multiplayer shoot em up.
Really great interactive games like NWN and Half-Life didn't take off until fast internet connections became available to the masses around 2000. These were DSL, Cable modems, or T-1 lines. Individuals could then adventure (or fight) with a group. You might never even get to know who your friends or opponents were in real life. This is our history now.
AubreyMaturin
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Back in 1978 I played my first computer game. If watching my brother and his friend counts as "playing". My brother's friend's Dad worked for IBM and had brought home a machine. It had a built in, 5x5 inch green and black screen. It was turn based space game with "Klingons" and space mines. Each turn you cold fire phasers, torpedoes or move. The figures on the screen were basic keyboard characters. You really had to use your imagination to see it as a space game! No art of any kind and no real descriptions.
We got our first computer 1982 - a mighty ZX 81. Mate, it was FU-TUR-ISTIC!
The thing that blew people away about the ZX81 was that it was so tiny. It didn't even have keys! That futuristic pressure sensitive keyboard was just FAR OUT! Using it made you feel like you were in an episode of Star Trek!To play a game on it my brother and I would need to type out the program from a computer magazine. One would read out the code while the other one finger typed it up. We would start as soon as we got out of bed and be at the end of it by about 7pm. Parents would get cranky about missing the news on TV because it had no monitor and no way of saving data. After a whole day of typing we'd try to run it only to find we had made some tiny typo somewhere, so we'd have to go through the whole thing again. Eventually we could play it! It was like Space Invaders, but there was only a single space invader. AWESOME!
We heard that you could hook a cassette tape player to it and use the tape to store programs on. But we didn't get that high tech until we got a Microbee later. You'd need to play a 90 minute tape all the way to the end before you could play a game. My problem level computer gaming habit really started with Defender.
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The first "computer" system I played on was a Spectrum 48k. It was a really primitive system with a processor of 3,5MHz and 48kB RAM. I think I was 5 or 6 years old when I played for the first time games like Shinobi, Outrun, Phantomas or Double Dragon that were contained in magnetic tapes, also called cassettes. About everyone here has probably had a walkman or a cassette, but I assure you my 16 years old cousin looked at me like I'm a dinosaur when I spoke of it to her.
Cassettes were great - they could be freely copied with a cassette recorder, which back then everyone had, there were even portable versions and the cost was really low. They could be rewound with a pen, and if the magnetic band somehow broke, you could glue it back together. Or just knot it, if you didn't mind missing 3-4 seconds of the track, to then keep playing just fine. Of course there were already some piracy laws, but they weren't pursued in any way as we innocently enjoyed our music and video-games that we copied, loaned over to our friends and borrowed back naturally because DRM-locked media or anti-piracy measures weren't a thing. Hell, not even internet was a thing.
I'm really not that old, and I'm a pro-technology and pro-science person, but seeing how nowadays no teenager could survive a regular day without a mobile phone makes me think that sometimes technology is not the way forward.
Oh well, times change!
Some things haven't changed though - technology wars. Back then it was Amstrad vs Spectrum, or VHS vs Beta, and today it's XBox vs Playstation or Blu-ray vs DVD. That, and the fact that we'll never agree on which one is the best.
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Personal or home computers have been around since the late 1970s. Those who bought them for home use were programmers who loved computers because there was almost no software available for purchase (except arcade games). I bought my first in 1981. It was an Atari 800. A group of Adventure-playing friends from work all bought the same machine about the same time. We chose Atari because it was much cheaper than an Apple 2 or IBM PC, and had much better graphics and sound.
The lack of software didn't concern us. We subscribed to monthly magazines like Compute and SoftSide that had type-in programs in Basic or Machine Language. We typed them into our machines, debugged them, made changes to them, and passed them around to our friends. Then we discovered Wizardry and got mad because it was only available on Apple 2. Industry reps told us the Atari made it too easy to copy disks and most Atari owners would copy any game they purchased and share it with friends. Apple users, they told us, were used to paying much higher prices.
Gatlord and I began playing Wizardry on a friend's Apple 2 in 1982. Our small group went over to this guys house on a Friday evening about once or twice a month. We started at about 7 PM and played until well after midnight. Wizardry was D&D based, with a party of four characters that adventured together. It was turn-based and the only graphic was a small static window with a primitive color portrait of what you were fighting. It was huge and absolutely captivating. It took us until some time in 1983 to finish it.
We played one of the sequels: Wizardry 3 a few times, but soon got hooked on Ultima 3 and Ultima 4. These titles were translated for Atari so I began playing them at home by myself as well. That more or less ended my type-in programming days. In the mid-1980s, our group branched into Might and Magic (the original, before Heroes) and then Bards Tale. We never finished those because Wasteland came along in 1987 and we played it all the way through to conclusion. We then got into Pool of Radiance, the first "Official" D&D computer game and its follow-ons, but by then more capable machines had come along and we all drifted apart. Gatlord bought a MacIntosh and I bought an Atari ST.
We also played a number of space warfare and galactic conquest games.Other than the "sit around one machine and take turns" play that I describe above, we couldn't really do anything like what Attentus describes until the Internet came along in the 1990s. I'll talk about that in my next post.
AubreyMaturin
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i think of 'computer game' as of something more abstract, generic & on topic. it's 'the play' with other people, computers & art included.
