The Birth of PC Gaming 30
jayintune writes "2old2play has an article up talking about the birth of PC gaming and how computers turned into entertainment. From the article, 'It's difficult to pin down what the first true PC game was. Broadly defined, early computer games date back to primitive missile simulators (circa 1947) and Tic-Tac-Toe games on very early computers with analog electronics. These computers were essentially glorified calculators with a bit of storage (in some cases, "storage" meant the position of a physical relay as big as your fist, or the on/off condition of a vacuum tube).'"
XYZZY (Score:4, Interesting)
Hunt the Wumpus (Score:2)
Digital vs Analog Computers (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/videogame.htm
Re:Digital vs Analog Computers (Score:5, Informative)
You are correct that Tennis for Two was probally the very first video game, however it was basically nothing like Pong, sure, both 'simulated' tennis, but thats where the similarities stop. Tennis for Two has a sideview, simulates gravity and allows the player to control the angle at which he reflects the ball, while Pong is top down and has a panel that you can move up and down. Tennis for Two looks really looks quite a bit more impressive and while Pong has been cloned thousands of times, I havn't yet seen a Tennis for Two clone.
Ports (Score:2)
Shannon's analog Hex-playing computer (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlike tic-tac-toe, which is so trivial that a tic-tac-toe-playing computer is only entertaining because it is a computer doing it, the Shannon and Moore machine put up a genuine challenge to a human player, on a game that was not fully analyzed at the time, and that was interesting enough to human players to have been released as a commercial board game.
Of course, I have also wondered whether Link trainers, [wingsofliberation.nl] full-sized flight simulators of the 1930s, were ever "flown" simply for entertainment. Knowing human nature, I bet they were. In fact, speaking of bets, I'll bet pilots placed bets on the outcome of competitive Link-trainer contests. (That's entirely speculation on my part). The Link trainers probably qualify as analog computers, even though the computations were, I believe, performed by pneumatic bellows and other non-electronic devices.
Re:Shannon's analog Hex-playing computer (Score:1)
This article is full of errors (Score:5, Insightful)
The TI 99/4A had 15 colors, not 16, and pretty crappy ones at that. Zork was not a "re-incarnation" of Colossal Cave Adventure, it was a completely different game that just happened to be in the same genre. The TRS-80 Expansion Interface did not "include" the disk controller, it was an extra cost item. And when the hell did Franklin try to clone the Mac? Most glaring of all to me was saying that Radio Shack came out with the TRS-80 in 1971. It was 1977, get some bifocals already.
And they are clearly Commodore sympathizers, since they parenthetically refer to the TRS-80 as the "Trash-80" for no good reason, without giving the Commode-Door the same treatment.
Oh wait, this is 2old2play.com, where their definition of "old" is age 25-30.
Anyhow, as far as I'm concerned "PC gaming" didn't really happen until there were proper "Personal Computers" available commercially, which meant the second wave of micros in the late '70s (Radio Shack, Apple, Commodore), but I'll give some credit to the first micros (IMSAI, etc.) and the timesharing era. The best games before games became commercial were Super Star Trek (all you needed was 16K and a lot of time to type it in), and Adventure (which I got to play on 300 baud DecWriters using the timeshare that my high school had).
Re:This article is full of errors (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This article is full of errors (Score:2)
Re:This article is full of errors (Score:1)
Specifically, about the origins of Zork here In the Beginning [mit.edu]
Of course, it's very Infocom centric. Well, it is MIT, birthplace of Zork, after all.
Re:This article is full of errors (Score:2)
I own one of these.
Re:This article is full of errors (Score:2)
Not to mention the fact that he pretty much glossed over the Atari 8-bits entirely. Bastard. (See my username...)
I remember modding the Star Trek game (Score:1)
That was on a Hewlett Packard. Way before I bought my Apple and started my own game business.
At least for me (Score:2)
The birth of PC gaming was Kingdom of Kroz [textmodegames.com]. It put apogee on the map and got me addicted to PC gaming forever. It was all about the keyboard... "Wait, you mean my atari controller has 5 switches, and my PC has 101?"
Re:Storage (Score:2)
Re:Storage (Score:2)
Photon torpedoes! (Score:1)
Re:Photon torpedoes! (Score:2)
http://www.dosgamesonline.com/index/game/StarTrek/ 496 [dosgamesonline.com]
I highly recomend an update.
http://wcuniverse.sourceforge.net/vegatrek/index.h tml [sourceforge.net]
Bartend (Score:2)
Re:Bartend (Score:1)
Re:Bartend (Score:1)
There was also a sanitized version called "Root Beer Tapper" which was made to pacify the angry parents who didn't want little Johnny getting pro-alcohol messages from his video games.
tapper ? (Score:1)
Space Quest (Score:1)
One of my favourite game related quotes (Score:1)