Forty Years Of Arcade Games And Those Who Started It All

It was in 1971 that Nolan Bushnell changed the world, when he and Ted Dabney created the first ever commercially sold arcade game, Computer Space. It may not have been a great success, but a year later arcade games would change forever when Bushnell and Dabney added two words to our language, Atari, and Pong. Pong was the first real success story, a simple game where you would control a paddle and and hit a ball from left to right until somebody missed it.

Almost 20 years before this, in 1952 on a EDSAC vacuum-tube computer, A. S. Douglas made a graphical version of Tic-Tac-Toe. This is arguably the first ever computer game. But it may have been a game made on a US Nuclear research lab in 1958 that influenced Bushnell, the William Higinbotham made Tennis For Two, played on a Brookhaven National Laboratory oscilloscope. Computer Space was based on a game made in 1962, called SpaceWar, which used a MIT PDP-1 mainframe computer.

Between 1971 and 1973 about 30 games were made for arcades, and the business steadily grew, with 57 more developed between 1974 and 1975. And then it exploded starting with 53 releases in 1976 alone.

During this time, a certain college drop out got a job at the newly formed Atari. The young Steve Jobs lasted just one semester at Reed College, before becoming employee number 40 at the Atari Los Gatos facility. Soon he was sneaking his friend Steve Wozniak into the place so they could play the arcade machines late at night. The two were instrumental in the hardware for another variation of the pong game, the very successful, Breakout. Jobs and Wozniak would of course go on to form the Apple Computer Company, which is a whole other story.

Up until 1974 most video games used simple block graphics, but then Atari introduced ROM chips to store graphical data and the first game to use this was called Tank. In 1975 Midway would be the first to use microprocessors, as they released the Western game, Gunfight. Many of Midway’s games were developed by Taito in Japan, a growing force in the industry.

Up until around 1978 you would have to be in a bar or arcade to play these games, but Space Invaders changed all of that. Another Taito designed game for Midway, Space Invaders was so popular that game machines were suddenly found in corner shops, in fact anywhere they could fit. Atari’s answer to Space Invaders was Asteroids, and it went onto become the biggest selling game of all time.

The first color games were seen in 1979 and then Toru Iwatani designed a game, based on a folk-tale from Japan, and when it was released in 1980, Pac Man took over the world. It would lead to television shows, cereals, clothing and so much more. In 1981, another super character was introduced for the first time, the main character in Donkey Kong, Mario! Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario still lives strong, especially on Miyamoto’s revolutionary Wii console.

And proving the games were not just for men, in 1981, Dona Bailey became the first ever woman to co-design a game, Atari’s Centipede. It was also interestingly enough the first game which attracted a lot of female players.

By the time 1982 came the industry was huge, and soon tie-ins with movies began. Midway released a game based on Tron, which actually produced more profit than the movie! Which brings us full circle as the sequel to Tron the movie has just been released, as has a flurry of new Tron games.

These were the early days that led to the revolution of the Eighties that would see the games evolve with computer technology. Today, arcade games for sale Toronto are as popular as ever, fighting, racing and interactive dancing games that these early creators could not even imagine. But without their work, none of it would have been possible.

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