THE HISTORY OF VIDEOGAMES PART 2 - February 1999
| After Pong, the videogames phenomenon caught on quickly,
with dedicated video arcades springing up everywhere. As this exciting new form of
entertainment grew in popularity, only one thing was missing - hysterical scare
stories in the newspapers feeding parents' natural terror of their children doing
something they didn't understand. The first of these duly showed up in 1976, when
Exidy released Death Race, a simplistic driving game where the object was to run down
little stick-man pedestrians (in fact, the game was originally called Pedestrian), who
emitted a blood-curdling electronic scream when you ran them down, leaving little white
cemetery crosses in your wake. (21 years later, SCi would release Carmageddon, basically
the exact same game with better graphics. The newspapers, obligingly, were still
shocked and horrified.) As an extra classy touch, the game had a two-player mode in which
players could team up and drive the little peds into the paths of each other's cars
in a fine display of sociopathic teamwork. Death Race wasn't actually the first bad-taste video game (1975's Shark had you merrily chomping away at panicking swimmers), but its success attracted the media and whipped up a storm of controversy that eventually saw prominent psychiatrists analysing its influence on the American equivalent of Newsnight. Today, the British Board of Film Classification have refused to award a certificate to the full-gore version of Carmageddon 2 until child psychiatrists have assessed its impact on innocent young minds, even though it's supposed to be for over-18s only. It's nice to know we're making progress. |
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