Charlie Fish - The History of Video Games

VIDEO GAMES

CHARLIE FISH

Dedicated to Emma, for making everything possible.

We bonded over Scrabble and Super Mario 64 .

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

White Owl

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire - Philadelphia

Copyright Charlie Fish, 2021

ISBN 978 1 52677 897 0

ePUB ISBN 978 1 52677 898 7

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52677 899 4

The right of Charlie Fish to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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While researching this book Ive been blown away, again and again, by the scale of the video game industry. But, despite the immensity of this commercial juggernaut, one inspired individual with a quirky vision is so often able to create something new that captures the hearts of millions.

I was born in 1980, so video games have always been part of my life. I was the perfect age to be swept up by Nintendos ascendancy. When I was seven years old, living in Massachusetts, I couldnt wait for school to finish so I could go to Dannys house to play on his Nintendo Entertainment System.

At home, we had an IBM personal computer. Our floppy disks were still floppy. I bonded with my dad over Sierra On-Lines graphic adventure games. Later, having moved to the UK, I filled notebooks with level designs for Lemmings and Commander Keen .

At the age of 13, my parents rewarded me for good exam results by buying me a Super Nintendo Entertainment System with Super Mario World I could hardly believe the enormity of this gift. Meanwhile, on the PC, I was building urban utopias in SimCity 2000 and (to my parents distaste) blasting hell demons in Doom .

A level design for Lemmings from my exercise book, 1991. (Charlie Fish / CC BY 4.0)

SimCity 2000 (1993). (Maxis)

As I grew older, I made a conscious effort to spend less time playing video games, but never managed to resist their siren song for long. Every few years I bought the latest Nintendo console, and embraced the joy of gaming again for a few intense months. The advent of smartphones ensnared me into the habit of playing a quick game whenever I had a few spare minutes and too often when I didnt.

While writing this book, I was designing levels in Super Mario Maker 2 , building civilizations in Through the Ages , and pretending to be a moody goose in Untitled Goose Game . Games are rewarding on a deep-seated psychological level. Just as rewarding are the stories behind them. I hope youll find these stories as fascinating as I do.

Untitled Goose Game (2019). (House House/Panic)

My dads first computer, a Sol-20 he bought in Toronto, Ontario in 1976. (Robin Sundt)

Level 2

PLATFORMS AND TECHNOLOGY

Video games are shaped by the technology of the day, and human creativity has always found ingenious ways of pushing the limitations of the hardware.

In 1990, British student Andy Davidson was playing around with a Casio graph-plotting calculator during a particularly boring maths lesson, when his friend said, I bet you cant make a game on that. He accepted the challenge. He made a basic artillery game, and soon ported it over to the schools Amiga computer. The game was so popular, his teacher banned it. After working on it for four more years, he approached struggling game developers Team17, who snapped up the idea, and the hugely successful Worms franchise was born.

The idea behind Worms was not new. Artillery games, usually featuring two players taking turns to fire projectiles at each other on the screen, have a long heritage a watershed example being Artillery Simulator released in 1980 for the Apple II home computer.

In fact, the worlds first video game was almost an artillery game. In 1947, American television pioneer Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for a Cathode-ray tube amusement device. The idea was to hook up an oscilloscope to a TV screen so the user could control the cathode-ray tubes electron gun with dials, like an Etch-a-Sketch, and simulate firing a missile at a target. But the equipment was expensive and the device never hit the market.

There were a handful of early computers designed to play games, using a series of light bulbs for the display. First was the Nimatron , presented at the New York Worlds Fair in April 1940, which played the mathematical strategy game Nim . The Nimatron was a success about 50,000 people played it, and the computer won more than 90 per cent of the games. But in subsequent years it was largely forgotten, and a decade passed before another game-playing computer made a splash.

Total Wormage , precursor to the original Worms (1995). (Andy Davidson/Team 17/Ocean Software)

Patent for Cathode-ray tube amusement device, 25 January 1947. (Thomas Tolivan Goldsmith Jr. US Patent 2455992, Public Domain)

The designer of the Nimatron , celebrated quantum physicist Edward Condon, considered it a shameful failure that he did not exploit the full potential of his idea. (Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Westinghouse Woman with electric brain machine The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1935 1945)

At the Canadian National Exhibition in 1950, Bertie the Brain was a four-metre-tall monstrosity that emitted a loud buzz, and featured a visual display backlit with light bulbs. The machine was purpose-built to play noughts and crosses (a.k.a. tic-tac-toe), with several difficulty levels. It was very popular at the show and, by all accounts, hard to beat.