- Good time of day. Today the story will be about a diverse and interesting beginning of video games creation.
The history of computer games begins in the 1940s and 1950s, when the academic community developed simple games and simulations. Computer games were not popular for a long time, and it was only in the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade machines, game consoles and home computers appeared to the general public, that computer games became part of the pop culture.
Attempts to create simple games on digital devices were made even before the beginning of the Second World War (and in 1947, the first electronic game was already programmed, the monitor for which served as a screen of military radar - it was a simulator of enemy missiles) - but it is believed that the first computer game was "OHO". ("Zero-Like Crosses"), made by A.S. Douglas alone in 1952.
Who were the first game developers and how students made the game
Computer games were the first among others to create massively computer operators in various semi-closed scientific institutions that had computers at their disposal. For example, in 1962, a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created Spacewar! for the new DEC PDP-1 computer. In Spacewar, players were given the opportunity to control, with the help of controllers, spacecraft that shoot at each other exploding rockets. The spice of the game was added by the fact that the ships were circling around a deadly black hole in the middle of the playing field. Spacewar! became very popular around the world because DEC built it into their computers as a program to test their performance.
The first game to display an image on your home TV
In 1966, Ralph Baer created the first "television" game Chase, which became the first game to play, which could be played by displaying a picture on the TV screen at home. Also in 1967, there were several interactive games that required a ray gun.
Creating a UNIX operating system for the sake of the game, the date of creation and the author of the first computer mouse
In 1969, hardworking programmer Ken Thompson created a game for MULTICS. It was named Space Travel. In ST, the player could travel on a spaceship between the planets of a small solar system and land the ship on one of them, which was the purpose of the game.
But after closing the MULTICS project Ken had to look for a new computer for his game, which became a computer of General Electric. But it was very expensive to work for it, so persistent Thompson ported his long-suffering game to the old PDP-7. To port the game to this computer, UNIX was created. Besides, 1970 was the year of birth of the computer mouse (author - Douglas Eneglbart). However, it was used in games much later.
The first generation of arcade games (1971-1977)
In 1971, Spacewar was greatly simplified by removing physics and inertia from it, which made it possible to make it much less demanding on the "hardware" and, by placing it on compact electronic boards, to connect them to the TV and get... The first slot machine! It was released a thousand and a half of these slot machines, which marked the release of computer games in the masses. People could play these machines in public places - for money, of course.
The advent of Atari and the creation of PONG, Space Invaders and Asteroids.
- In 1972, Debny and Bushnell created the video game company Atari, which soon became an ultra-popular game called PONG and borrowed a lot from Tennis for Two. It was possible to sell more than 1900 machines with PONG in them. Thus, PONG became the first computer game ever to pay off many times.
- In 1978, another game developer, Taito, also released Space Invaders, which became extremely popular. Atari saw how much people want pixels and spectacles - and in the same year let the people also very financially successful Asteroids.
