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All For A Game...

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Dedicated gaming consoles are not a hot item in this

country. They aren’t available through proper channels, and many don’t even know

about their existence. But those of us who do know about them are bound to ask–a

computer to just play games?

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Worldwide, these consoles are making major waves. What

started off as a venture to draw more crowds to a normally boring museum tour, has ended

up as an industry in itself.

Gaming itself has had an interesting evolution. It all

started way back in 1949, when an enterprising young engineer thought of putting a game

into a TV. Here, we present a trip down the gaming lane.

1949: Games in a TV! You must

be joking



Video games were conceived in 1949, when a young engineer Ralph Baer was

assigned the job of designing a television that would be the best in the world. He thought

of building a game into this TV, but his idea was shot down.

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1958: Video games are here



The first video game was developed by Willy Higginbotham of Brookhaven

National Laboratories, New York. The game was similar to table tennis and played on an

oscilloscope. A year later, he displayed this game on a 15” monitor.

1961: The first computer game





The first game that could be played on a computer was created by Steve

Russel, then a student at MIT. It was called Spacewar and ran on a DEC PDP-1–a

mainframe computer.

1966: Baer’s at it again



Ralph Baer joined Sanders Associates, and this time managed to convince

his employers to allow him to develop an interactive game for television. Working with a

team of engineers, Baer developed two games in 1967 and patented them in 1968.

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1970: Game development goes

commercial



Sanders Associates licensed Baer’s game to Magnavox for commercial

development. In the same year, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney developed the first dedicated

gaming machine that could run an arcade version of Spacewar. They called this Computer

Space. Nutting Associates–an arcade game manufacturer–purchased it, and the

first commercial version was released by Nutting the next year.

1972: Baer’s creation

sees daylight



Magnavox named Baer’s creation as the Odyssey, and displayed it

publicly for the first time at a convention in Burlingame, California on May 24, 1972. The

Odyssey had over 300 parts, and included hand controls, dice, playing cards, and play

money. It came pre-programmed for 12 games and was priced at $100 each. It was an instant

success and is estimated to have sold over 100,000 units in the first year.

Bushnell decided to build a simpler version of Computer

Space, as the first version was perceived to be very complicated and didn’t sell

well. He left Nutting, and started his own company along with Dabney. The company was

Atari. Al Alcorn joined Atari, and was assigned the job of developing the game. He named

the project Darlene after a female co-worker. What he developed was a simple game of

tennis, called Pong. Pong was a success, and more and more companies, including

Nutting,

started creating similar games.

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1975: Pong goes home



With decreasing sales in the arcade market, Atari decided to build a home

version of Pong that would connect to the normal television. Sears, Roebuck and Company

joined up with Atari to market the product. Later that year, another company–Midway

Games–released the first “computer game” called Gunfighter. It used a

microprocessor and LSI (large scale integrated) circuits.

1976: Cartridges and

microchips



Using the new microprocessors, Fairchild Camera and Instrument released a

new gaming machine called the Video Entertainment System. This was later renamed as

Channel F. Fairchild developed a library of game titles on cartridges, and a player could

change cartridges to swap games.



This was also the year when violence came to games. Exidy Games released a new game called
Death Race 2000 that involved squashing static figures of people. After much public hue

and cry, the game was pulled back.

1978: Nintendo arrives



Nintendo entered the video-game fray with Computer Othello, based on a

board game of the same name.

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1981: Activision is born,

Pac-Man comes in



To make up for the declining sales of Odyssey, Magnavox released Odyssey 2

with a built-in membrane keyboard. It was programmable and could take cartridges. Several

disgruntled programmers left Atari, because the company refused to give credits, and

started their own company called Activision. This was the first third-party game

developer, and is one of the largest today.

Namco released Pac-Man. Initially titled “Pack

Man”, this is the most popular arcade game of all time.



1981 also saw the first video-game magazine–Electronic Games, founded by Arnie Katz
and Bill Kunkel.

1982: A new computer to play

games



Commodore released the Commodore 64–an inexpensive but powerful

computer designed just to play games. It outperformed all other game consoles in display

quality, but was quite costly.

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Nintendo released Famicom (Family Computer). Designed as a

toy, it was packed with a number of popular Nintendo titles. Nintendo also tried tying up

with Atari for distribution of Famicom in all countries except Japan, but the deal fell

through.

The market was slow between 1982 and 1984. A few titles

were released by various vendors, but all of them failed to make a mark. The race was to

make as many Pac-Man clones as possible, but nothing could beat the popularity of the

original.

1985: A slow rise from a deep

lull



Video games made a comeback with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment

System (NES). It was test-marketed in New York amidst lots of skepticism.

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A Russian programmer Alex Pajitnov designed Tetris, a

simple puzzle-game for PCs. Tetris went on to become an all-time favorite.

1986: The year of

entertainment systems



The NES was a success, and it was made available across the US. Sega and

Atari jumped into the fray with Sega Master System and Atari 7800 respectively. Nintendo,

however, had made its mark, and was the most popular of them all.






1989: Games in your hand



In 1989, Nintendo released Gameboy. It was a tiny hand-held gaming device,

and sported a monochrome LED screen. The first model was on Tetris, and spirited by its

success, a few more models were released.

Not to be left behind, Atari purchased the distribution

rights of the newly-developed Handy Game by Epyx, and released it in the market as Lynx.

The Lynx sported a color console.

1992: Sony and Nintendo part

ways



Nintendo scrapped its previous deal with Sony, and tied up with Philips to

develop the CD player. Sony scrapped the PlayStation that it had initially developed with

Nintendo, and started out to build a 32-bit CD-only game machine.

1992-93: The 32-bit era



This period saw a boom in the 32-bit game console market, with various

players releasing consoles based on 32-bit processors. Atari jumped ahead, and released

Jaguar at 64 bits (actually, two 32-bit co-processors). Nintendo and Sega released their

own 64 bit consoles later that year–Project Reality and Saturn respectively.

1995: PlayStation is back



On September 9, 1995, the Sony PlayStation was launched. It was a CD-only

gaming machine, as Sony had promised. Though competitors like Saturn from Sega existed,

the PlayStation turned out to be the darling of the masses.

1998-1999: A peek into the

future



On November 27, 1998, Sega released Dream-cast in Japan. It was launched

in the US and other countries on September 9, 1999. It’s a 128-bit system and was

earlier code-named Katana. Sony launched its next-generation PlayStation–PlayStation

2, also based on a 128-bit processor, on September 13, 1999, in Tokyo. With other

competition being more or less absent, the market is now split between PlayStation and

Dreamcast. PlayStation 2 is very new, and with stocks of the

original PlayStation still around, it’s yet to make its mark.

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