Saturday 15 November 2008

LET ME SAY THIS TO START.....

*bows* I AM SORRY FOR MY LACK OF BLOG POSTS!!!! Alas my writing skills have declined since my GCSE days and thus, the task of writing consistently and about actually things, instead of shouting potato over and over again, was quite a daunting thought and I have been somewhat putting it aside these past couple of weeks. However I am now getting my ass in gear and will start my blogs with an epic bang of a post, ladies and gentlemen I present the history of gaming courtesy of moi ;D.

THE EPIC HISTORY OF GAMES: The Beginnings

Prior to reading the vast amounts of information bombarded at us on blackboard, I knew very little about the history of gaming. I was one who focused on upcoming releases and what not, the only gaming history I knew, or at least though I knew, was pong being the “first” game and Mario being around before I was born and that Pac man kicked behind back in the day. So I was a bit surprised to discover that computer gaming heralded back to as far as the 1950s. Here I discovered multiple accounts of the first game, or at least perceptions of the first game, such as the first technologically possible game, the first game made for entertainment etc. For the sake of my head not going kablooey I’ve decided to look at things in chronological order, and thus brings me to the first computer game known as OXO (sadly it does not go well with chicken) on the EDSAC computer (which was mighty beast I tell ye) created by A.S Douglas in 1952 for his Ph.D thesis on Human Computer interaction, which was basically tic tac toe on a screen, seemingly basic and pointless (seriously, a piece of paper would have sufficed =P) but hey things had to start from somewhere.

look at the pwetty graphics *___*

*cough* anyway apparently it ended here for good ol OXO, but alas it didn’t end for computer gaming, in the next game herald the birth of computer games for entertainment and multiplayer =P. Made in 1958 the game ‘Tennis for Two’ was developed for usage on an analog computer ( a much smaller beast than the Edsac) by American Psychiatrist William Higinbotham. Created to entertain guests at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, it was as the name says tennis for two people. Think of it as a sort of pong predecessor with it having a side view instead of the top down view we all know and love.

"IT WAS IN!!"

This next game, often noted as the first computer game (although I don’t see why, all it did was be more available and maybe be a bit more inventive than tennis for two...), as with many things it was made out of the boredom of MIT students in 1962 (well maybe not out of boredom but ya never know ;D), the game was SpaceWar! An epic game of a war IN SPACE with black holes and spacey thingys that do space stuff.....well it was highly influential in that it got so much coverage through the internet which surprisingly existed back then.

War....IN SPACE

Then in 1967 a man named Ralph Baer, who we can thank for the idea of putting games with TV, wrote the first videogame known as Chase, which oddly I have yet to find out what it was about....

And finally to round off this portion of history of video games we come to the 70s, which was basically the golden age of arcade games, here we have the birth of the coin-op courtesy of the Galaxy Game (DAMN YOU FOR MAKING ME LOSE SO MANY POUND COINS). Spacewar! Returned as Computer Space and became the first mass produced and commercially available videogame courtesy of Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, both of which in 1972 created Pong, the first commercially successful videogame, whose mechanics I’m sure i don’t have to explain to you lovely people. ;D

*bows*

And oh my I sure do ramble, well I’ll end this entry for now and put my personal gaming history separate for the time being, as heh I want to go in a bit of detail for that ;D

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lol I see you're very used to the bowing now :P