Dustin Hansen - Game On!: Video Game History from Pong and Pac-Man to Mario, Minecraft, and More

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To the most talented men and women Ive ever worked with, the (2004) NFL Street Development Team. I could still whoop you all today. Well, except Barney. That guy is a legend. And maybe Snagy. And Burnside. Okay, and probably Vandy. But the rest of you would be mine.

One of the most interesting things about writing a book about the history of video games is that when it comes to history in general, video games are super young.

I mean, how many other history books can you think of where the original people involved with the topic are still alive? Not to mention, most of them are still innovating and doing new things in the game industry today.

Its cool, when you think about it. Everything is really new. Even Pong is still new enough that if you looked around, you could find a copy, in some format, and check it out today. The game industry is alive and growing, and that is very exciting.

I remember my grandpa John telling me that he loved his career because he was always learning. He was a veterinarian, and new advancements in medicine happened all the time. He had to study to keep up on things. When I was lucky enough to enter the game industry, I discovered the same joy my grandfather had known. Minus the puppies but with way more Left 4 Dead office LAN party breaks, of course.

NFL Legends Football 98 Accolade

I started making games in 1997, painting digital football players for a game by Accolade Software called Legends Football 98. I had to paint each frame of the animation by hand, because 3D graphics werent advanced enough at that point to be of any help. It was pretty cutting-edge stuff at the time, but a short six years later I was making complex 3D digital sculptures of those same football players for Electric Arts NFL Street. Three years later I was messing around with controllerless systems like the Xbox Kinect, and creating 3D graphics for games on the Nintendo 3DS that actually displayed things in 3D without needing fancy glasses.

NFL Street Electronic Arts, Inc.

And now Im working with a group of crazy smart innovators at a company called The Void, where we are marrying VR (virtual reality) with real-world locations. The best way I can describe it is that we are building a digital theme park where you not only play a game, you get to be in the game. Its mind-blowingly cool if I do say so myself, and something I never dreamed about when I was touching up 2D sprites of Jerry Rice on my 386 PC in 1997.

The video game industry goes through big changes every year, but even the most advanced, high-tech, innovative ideas stand on the shoulders of games that have come before.

Thered be no Madden NFL if Pong hadnt put the first sports game on a gaming console.

Would we have Grand Theft Auto V without The Legend of Zelda showing us what an open world looked like back in 1986 on the Nintendo Entertainment System?

And Forza Motorsport 6 owes a lot to the racing games of the past. In fact, they paid homage in their promotional commercial in 2015, where they showed their realistic-looking Ford GT zipping through pixelated versions of older games like Gran Trak 10, R.C. Pro-Am, Pole Position, and Ridge Racer, just to name a few. A tagline on the Forza Motorsport website claimed, Every pixel and line of code ever written has been leading up to this moment.

Xboxs Forza Motorsport 6 TV commercial Microsoft Corporation

I couldnt have said it better myself.

The games we play today, as well as the games we will fall in love with tomorrow, promise us hours of enjoyment. Days, weeks, years of fun lie just around the corner, but it is important to take a look back from time to time, to get a better understanding of those that came before.

So, gamer, put on the old time-traveling helmet. Crank the dial back on the Wayback Machine to a time before the Internet. To a time before cell phones and color TVs. Way back to a time before controllers, handheld gaming devices, social media, and even microwave pizza.

Lets go back to the beginning. After all, these are not just the games that influenced the game designers of today and tomorrow. These are the games that shaped us all.

Pong Atari Interactive, Inc.

It wasnt the first game. Not by a long shot.

In fact, Pong wasnt even the first digital tennis game. Some say it wasnt even the most complicated or most advanced, or even the most innovative game of its day.

So why do so many people consider Pong the godfather of video games?

It might be because Pong is just a fun word to say. Go ahead. Say it out loud. You know you want to. Ill wait. Heck, Ill even join you.

Pong. POOOOONG! Pingity-Pong Pongity-Pong.

Before Atari decided on the name Pong, the game was code-named Darlene, after one of the early Atari employees. While Darlene is a perfectly fine name, it isnt nearly as fun to say as go ahead. I know you cant stop now. POOOONG!

See, its fun! And in the end, the game was just as simple as rattling off a bunch of pong nonsense, and that is what made Pong so great. It was easy. The games before Pong were interesting, and innovative, and difficult, and usually could only be played by other computer and software engineers. But Pong didnt need instructions, only cost a quarter to play, and instead of sitting inside a computer lab, the first Pong machine stood in a busy tavern. But Im getting ahead of myself.

Pong has been featured in many popular TV shows like That 70s Show , King of the Hill , and Saturday Night Live .

For now, lets rewind a bit and see how Pong came to life.

In the early days of computer games, there was a ton of confusion about who created what first. Part of the problem was that creating games at that time required hardware that cost mountains of cash, and part of it was that people didnt really understand what games were back then.

Although there were a lot of inventions that could make a pretty good claim to being the first video game, theres no doubt who made the first successful game. It was video game pioneer Nolan Bushnell.

While attending the University of Utah in 1962, Bushnell spent most of his time studying in the computer engineering lab. While he was there, he got the chance to play a game called Spacewar! and he was hooked. The game was played on a living roomsized computer called a PDP-10, and it was complex, challenging, and most of all, addicting.