The Odyssey and the Arcades


    Masaya Nakamura
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    • - By the mid-1970s, technological development of video games had begun to seriously stagnate. Pong-style ball-and-paddle games filled the arcades, but different and new gameplay was scarce and hard to come by. The biggest roadblock in development was in technology. A computer game could be programmed by simply writing code; a video arcade game could not. They still had to be physically built in discrete logic chips within the machine itself, a much more time-consuming task which required a rare degree of expertise. - 1975 - Meanwhile, the AY-3-8500 chip was introduced, an integrated circuit designed specifically for ball-and-paddle games, and it led to a sharp increase in home Pong clones. - 1975 - Tele-Games Pong, - 1977 - The Coleco Telstar series, - 1976 - The Video Master, in Iran, - 1977 - The Telejogo, in Brazil, - 1977 - The Color TV-Game series, in Japan. - These were some of the dedicated consoles beginning to propagate to an increasingly worldwide audience. But they could only play games that were hard-wired into the system, typically a single one or variations on a single one. A leap in technology was needed for video games to progress. Ultimately, what sparked the hardware revolution was the introduction of two new microprocessors, the MOS Technology 6502 and the Zilog Z80. - September 1975 - At the Wescon trade show in San Francisco, the 6502 was shown to the world for the first time. In attendance were Steve Mayer and Ron Milner, who were impressed by its price and capabilities. So they met with Chuck Peddle, the team lead behind the microprocessor’s engineering. They drew up designs for a home console using the chip Within two days, the teams came up with a design for a console based on the chip, codenamed Stella after one of the engineer's bicycles. Milner had a prototype running a version of Tank not long after. The plan was to make a home video game machine that could be programmed like a computer. Not only could games be released separately this way, but they could be released after the console’s hardware was finalized. - January 1976 - But they weren’t the only ones. After engineers Richard Chang and Dave James were shown a demonstration of the 6502, they began planning their own video system to use ROM chips and the microprocessor, which would be able to run all kinds of games. In the more immediate future, they were also considering a type of game that could run on calculator hardware, which would have a much smaller form factor. The leadership saw electronic games as a stepping-stone to making a general-use microcomputer, a barely existent thing at this point. - December 1974 - The Altair 8800 had already hit the market as the first widely available microcomputer. It was a type of computer far smaller than anything seen previously. However, it was a computer kit, meaning that any single user would have to assemble its components themselves, a complicated process requiring a degree of engineering knowledge. - 1975 - The introduction of the Altair had far-reaching effects. For one, Bill Gates and Paul Allen were inspired to start a company making software for the machine. - 1975 - Jack Tramiel had long been in the calculator business, which bought integrated circuits supplied from Texas Instruments. When Texas Instruments decided to cut out the middle man and manufacture calculators themselves at a lower price, his company was driven out of the market overnight. Facing bankruptcy, he took a $3 million infusion from a wealthy businessman, Irving Gould, to save the company, and bought out a new microprocessor supplier: MOS Technologies. Jack Tramiel was now Chuck Peddle’s new boss. - January 1976 - But Peddle was much less interested in making microprocessors for calculators. He saw a future in the parallel world of microcomputers, and he built a computer kit using the 6502 called the KIT-1. - Steve Wozniak was a Hewlett-Packard employee who enjoyed tinkering with computers in his spare time. He had his own terminal already, but the Altair gave him the idea to build in a microprocessor and make it into a full computer. He could never afford any of the ones on the market, though- until he got wind of the 6502. There's a decent chance you've never heard of Steve Wozniak before. But most people have heard of his friend Steve Jobs. - 1974 - Jobs was a computer technician at Atari, one of the company's first hires. What clinched the job interview for him was the circuit board he brought down to the office, a version of Pong he had built himself. The typical number of TTL chips in an arcade video game was in the hundreds, but this one used only 30. Only, it hadn't really been built by Steve Jobs at all. The interviewer didn't know it, but Steve Wozniak had really built the board. - 1976 - One of the projects Jobs was brought onto was to create a single-player alternative to Pong. The gameplay had already been decided by the senior engineering team, Al Alcorn, Steve Bristow, and Nolan Bushnell, drawing from the pre-existing game Clean Sweep. But they still needed to get the game’s engineering done, and working in a mass-producible state. Typically, there would be no reason for a computer technician like Jobs to be assigned to a project like this. But the project leads remembered that circuit board Jobs had brought in, which somehow got Pong to work with 30 TTL chips. Something less than 50 would save them a lot of money. So Jobs was given a challenge: If he could come up with a version of this game that used less than 50 chips, he would get a $750 bonus, and every chip he could save under that limit would net him an extra few hundred dollars. Jobs didn’t just agree to that challenge, but said he could come up with a prototype in just four days. There's only one problem with this plan: Steve Jobs was not an engineer, and did not really know how to design circuit boards for video arcade games. So Jobs went to his friend Woz. He convinced Wozniak to come up with a prototype for him, with the agreement that the two would split the $700 bonus. Wozniak still had to go to his day job at Hewlett-Packard, so he had to go to Atari afterwards and work through the night, four nights in a row, to get the prototype completed in time. In the end, he got the game running with just 44 chips. Being so far below the limit earned Jobs a bonus of $5,000. Jobs honored their original agreement and gave Woz the $350 he promised, conveniently neglecting to mention the extra money he got for having a chip count so low. The final release of the game didn’t use Wozniak’s exact design anyway, using about 100 chips instead, but Wozniak kept tinkering with the game. Now with intimate knowledge of the game’s circuitry, he wondered if he could get a computer to run the game as a piece of software instead, - March 1976 - And by March, Wozniak showed off his computer kit running the game at the Homebrew Computer Club. The feat required the addition of a bunch of extra features: color graphics, sound, game paddle support. Woz even created a new language to run the game, a dialect of BASIC drawing from 101 BASIC Computer Games as one of its primary reference materials. Intended with arcade-style video games in mind, GAME BASIC was made specifically for the 6502 microprocessor. He showed the computer’s design to his employer, Hewlett-Packard, but they weren’t interested in pursuing it. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, had all sorts of ideas. He wanted to start up a new company to sell the machine, and he urged Wozniak to come on board. - April 1976 - So the Steves quit their jobs at Atari and Hewlett-Packard to start their own company. They chose the name “Apple” in part because it was further up in the alphabet than Atari, and sold some of their possessions to fund development of a mass-produced version of the computer kit. - May 1976 - The game they worked on released concurrently. This single-player version of Pong replaced the other player with an array of rectangles, chipping away at it like a brick wall. So it was given the name Breakout, with a prison-break theme, and soon became one of the most popular arcade games worldwide, with plenty of “brick-breaker” imitators. - 1976 - Once their computer was complete, Jobs and Woz gave a whole presentation at the Homebrew Computer Club. In attendance was Paul Terrell, from the Byte Shop, a local computer store. Impressed by the machine, he offered to buy 50 computers at $500 each. Jobs and Wozniak scrambled to get 50 units together in time. But when they eventually delivered the 50 Apple I units to the Byte Shop, Pat Terrell was surprised. He didn’t realize the two Steves were giving him a computer kit, missing keyboards and monitors. He expected a fully assembled machine, not requiring users to buy a bunch of components separately. Terrell accepted the Apple I, but the Steves took the suggestion to heart. - June 1976 - By now, there were quite a few engineers working on the same thing, all centering around the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Leininger was a member, and he was pulled from a part-time job at the Byte Shop to work on a microcomputer using the newer Zilog Z80 microprocessor, to eventually become the TRS-80. - Summer 1976 - Jack Tramiel gave Chuck Peddle the go-ahead to make one at about the same time, giving him a deadline of only six months to get a complete machine ready to put out at the Consumer Electronics Show in January the following year. - September 1976 - As the various teams worked, word of the follow-up to the Apple I made its way to Peddle, who arranged to see a demonstration of the machine. It was exactly the kind of thing Peddle was looking for, and with such a short deadline, simply buying out the technology would be an easy solution. Steve Jobs was fine with the idea of selling the technology to another company. But he drove a hard bargain, and the deal was ultimately too expensive to go through. - January 1977 - Chuck Peddle’s system, the Commodore PET, became the first personal computer available to the public at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. - April 15–17, 1977: It was shown again at the first annual West Coast Computer Faire, alongside a booth from Apple Computer, where Steve Jobs introduced the Apple II. The event was organized with the goal of popularizing the personal computer, and it seemed to succeed, with twice as many attendees as expected. - 1977 - By the end of the year, all three of the “holy trinity” of personal computers made it to market. For the most part, these were intended as home appliances first and game machines second. You could run game software on all of them. - But for real-time, graphical, arcade-style games, the Apple II was the platform for you. GAME BASIC became Apple BASIC, the first and most popular version of BASIC to run on 6502-based machines. In its early days, the Apple II’s library was primarily composed of arcade game clones, starting with Steve Wozniak’s own “Brick Out.” - 1978 - One of the earliest developers on the platform was Silas Warner, an alumnus of the PLATO computer game community known for its pioneering first-person, 3D games. His first games on the system were experiments in replicating this type of first-person perspective, Maze Game and Escape! - 1980 - Galactic Attack drew even more heavily from the PLATO tradition, a direct conversion of the game Empire. - The Commodore PET and the TRS-80 didn’t have the capabilities of the premium, high-end Apple II, but they still had a significant library of games drawing from the less graphically heavy tradition of earlier computer games. - December 1978 - Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio was inspired by the older text game Hamurabi. Created by George Blank, it updated the gameplay to include city-building mechanics, even introducing a graphical element for the TRS-80's limited display. - December 1978 - Adventureland came from the pioneering Adventure. It was the first text adventure game sold for personal computers, and led to an extensive series of follow-ups. - 1977 - But besides the 1977 trinity of personal computers, the same year also introduced the world to some of the first home video game consoles. - November 1976 - The Fairchild Video Entertainment System had actually made it to release late the previous year as the first home console to use exchangeable ROM cartridges. - September 1977 - The Stella project came to fruition the next September as the Atari Video Computer System. At launch, there were only nine games available for the console, ports of various arcade games under different names. Pong became Video Olympics, Gran Trak 10 became Indy 500, Tank and Jet Fighter were combined as Combat, the console’s pack-in title. October 1978 - The next year’s selection of games came with Breakout, Space War, and Outlaw, a copy of Gun Fight. The console used a “game selection” feature, perhaps a remnant of Pong machine hardware, which gave slight modifications to the gameplay. Although they were presented as different games, this was also how the console controlled things like single-player vs.multiplayer options, difficulty options, and map selection. - December 1977 - At about the same time as the Atari VCS, there was the Bally Astrocade. Its graphical and audio capabilities were significantly above those of the VCS, but without a strong library to back it up. - 1976 - Richard Chang and Dave James’ home console was still years away from release, as they were working to combine microcomputer and video game console technology. However, the company’s electronic toy was completed very quickly, and became Auto Race, the first electronic game of this type. - A line of other handheld electronic games soon followed. These would not be typically considered video games, but they were often made by the same companies, and would incorporate design elements from those games. - 1978 - Electronic Quarterback, and its successors, came from the same company behind the Telstar line. - 1978 - Simon, one of the most popular, was based directly on an earlier arcade game. - 1978 - Merlin: The Electronic Wizard was particularly popular, notable in that it could play multiple different built-in games. - 1980 - The Game & Watch series, beginning with Ball, came out of the same company behind the Color TV-Game series. Many of its games replicated video games, but on the whole, the lineup of games was much more original than the sports and arcade game conversions seen from other electronic games. - November 1979 - In this line of early electronic games, they began to converge with video games surprisingly quickly. The Microvision was a neat piece of engineering, combining handheld LCD games with the interchangeable cartridges now introduced in early home consoles to make the first handheld game console. It had a unique problem to solve with the display of the system; while video games all used video screens, these electronic games used all sorts of displays, or no display at all. To unify them into a single all-purpose thing, it introduced the LCD dot matrix, a monochrome, unlit grid of pixels which could represent incredibly low-resolution graphics. There was a similar problem to solve for its controls. It used a single dial and a set of buttons, with a novel method of differentiating them between games. A sort of sheath was built into the cartridges themselves which fit over the buttons, labeling and customizing them to fit the particular game being played. - This burst of new hardware created a sudden new world of games outside of the arcades. But it also poised these new platforms for the new rush of creativity and development about to spring up within the arcade world.