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40th Anniversary of Video Games Today
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 16th May 2007
Today marks the official 40th Anniversary of video games. How ever did we get from Pong to Bioshock?
Video games are generally thought to have begin when two Associate Engineers, Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison, sat down for a a two player competition of what they called "The Bucket Filling Game". Fascinated with it, the pair continued working on a selection of video game projects which culminated in "The Brown Box" and the Odyssey video game System.
Although other games, namely Spacewar which is considered to be the first computer game ever, pre-date The Bucket Filling Game by a few years it was the two player version of The Bucket Filling Game that was first designed for use on a television screen.
Somehow, over the last forty years we managed to progress from the bucket filling mini-epic to landmark titles such as Doom, Deus Ex, Half-Life and the life-devouring World of Warcraft. Since the likes of Spacewar and The Bucket Filling Game we have seen new characters emerge, like Mario, Link and JC Denton, some of whom have become almost a recurring part of today's culture.
Even language has changed, with words like Pwn, n00b and ROFL all becoming common place and which are inexorably tied to the popularity and growth of the video games market.
Of course, not all changes have been for the better. ET for the Atari 2600, Postal 2 and Jack Thompson, all have left their stain on the good name of our beloved obsession.
For those with a love of all things retro, 1UP is currently hosting an article about the birth of video games and an interview with Bill Harrison.
So, what game was it that got you hooked? Are you a Secret Of Monkey Island fanboy like me, or was it Wonderboy: The Dragons Trap on Gamegear or Command and Conquer on PC that got you addicted, as it was for some of the other bit-tech writers. Let us know in the forums!
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Comments (36)
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What was everyone's first ever experience of a computer game? My father has reminisced about playing the original Pong on a black and white telly in his lounge, but for me it was the Commodore 64, and in particular Dizzy the Egg. Legendary machine the Commodore 64, even though it still loaded quicker than Half-Life 2. *titter*
oh yeah now thats hard core :)
128k memory, and you had to program it in BASIC to do anything (even load/run a disc)
Pfft, centipede then trying to code a skii game. Took me three weeks before I realised I hadn't saved :(
From there, punch and judy on C64, Jet Set Willy on BBC, then Rick Dangerous II and Monkey Island on Amiga A500+. After Monkey Island, the rest is history.
I remember my first console though - got a NES 'action pack' (or whatever it was calledt) - x2 pads, zapper, and the Mario/Duckhunt cart. Best Christmas ever!
First PC game I played was Alley Cat ...go CGA graphics (woot!)
Thing is, even though I owned a NES as a kid, I still used to love playing on older machines. We still had the Amstrad, which got regular use, and a few friends had systems like the Atari 2600, and the Vectrex, which I thought were fantastic.
ah Rick Dangerous now thats a great game.
After the BBC it was Amstrad then the good old PC 286/ PC 386 / Amiga 500+/ Comadore 64 / PC 486 / Game Boy / Master System II / MegaDrive 1 / Game Gear / Lynx / Mega CD 1 / Atari Jaguar / NES / Snes / 32x / Saturn / Pentium 350/500/1Ghrz / PS1 / N64 / PS2 / Xbox / AMD 2600 / Game Cube / PSP / AMD 64 3700 / Xbox 360 / DS Lite
Next will be PS3 :)
Never did get a 3DO and I really wanted one too. I also wanted the Jag CD for some reason but never found anywhere that sold it.
and oh-so-many games on it !! Z-out, Venus the flytrap, Pang (THAT is hardcore), and many more...
then moved to PC, but can't remember games that really marked me. (I mean at the beggining)
Currently on this drug called Lord of the Rings Online... Quite a difference in graphics.
After that, Spectrum, C64, Amiga 500, and the inevitable raft of PCs...
ok just kiddin....
my first is NINTENDO!! W00T W00T for Mario and Superdeltaforce or wutever that 2D action shootemup game is called.... and then Sega.... (not Saturn) (Spiderman and Sonic ***!)... i was 9yr old and i sold my Nintendo to my buddy and with my savings i bought a Sega lol..... after that its Super-Nintendo for Xmas on grade 5 (yes, button-masher Dragon Ball Z!!!)... then straight to PC in Junior HIgh...... and the first game is Doom and some futuristic jetfighter game... wutever tat was.....
pong was probably a year or 2 before my time though ;)
They were fooking hard those old adventure games on the BBC. One such game, IIRC, was The Lost Frog, which we never managed to complete back at Primary School. Upon tracking it down via an emulator a few years back we got to the bit we couldn't get past only to discover the answer we needed was obtained via an extremely complex, rare and totally obscure mathematical model few people had even ever heard of, let alone used, and we were trying to complete this game aged 8. No wonder we struggled! Stupid thing was the game was designed for 8 year olds, it was billed as Educational Software. What kind of creepy child genius were they trying to create?
They were all stupidly hard, Granny's Garden gave me nightmares and Martello Towers was just creepy. It was full of things like:
"You enter a room, a man laughs manically at you from above.
You can go north, north east, or north north east."
What was this game designed for, psychotically insane orienteering?
I did find one for "chucky egg" that was the first game on the Amstrad for me.
After that it's really a blur... some names pop up though;
- Streetfighter
- Mark of the Wolves
- King of Fighters
- Samurai Shodown
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
- Final Fantasy
- Sega Rally
- Final Fantasy
- Breath of Fire (the old ones)
- Tetris (how can I forget?)
And kazillions more where that came from :D Long live videogames!
Damn! i'm getting too old for this s*t :(
As impressive as that is... I'm still trying to work out what "s*t" is?
Doom was my first lan game. Me and my bro played none stop on our 486's.
Then came DoomII oh my god. The fun we had was amazing
My first online game was Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun on a 56k modem.
Megaman 3 on NES.
Oh well.
Heh. Did anyone ever play Karnov?
Oh yeah and in primary school i played that stupid lost pyramid or pharoh game on the Apple 2.
i dont think ive ever seen another clay animation game, but that damm light machine took be to damm long. and just re-read my post and thought id add we were talking about how rainbows happen in science class - sounded a bit gay in the original