THE HISTORY OF VIDEOGAMES PART 1 - January 1999
| Videogames as we know them today (the VERY first video
games were created in the early 60s by tech-heads in an American university with a
computer the size of Old Trafford, but we're talking here about stuff that anybody
could walk into a bar or arcade and put 10p in) were born in 1972, when beardy hippy type
Nolan Bushnell created Pong. Famously featuring the single playing instruction "AVOID MISSING BALL FOR HIGH SCORE", even the drunks in the bar where the first-ever machine was located understood enough to be mesmerised by the bright electronic light and the hypnotic "bip...bip...bip" soundtrack, and Bushnell found himself being dragged back to the bar by the irate owner to complain that the machine had broken down after only a few hours of operation. It turned out that the problem was simply that the thing was so stuffed with coins, nobody could get any more into it to have another game. Bushnell's company, Atari, swiftly mushroomed in size, and the videogames business as a whole exploded into life as everyone and his monkey brought out their own Pong rip-offs, first in arcades and then as home "TV games", thereby creating the console industry as well (where Pong survives still - there's even a version of it for the Nintendo 64). Pong, of course, seems a tad primitive today. But it's still more fun than Actua Tennis 3. |
|
