In 1962, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Stephen Russell designed the first real video game, Space Wars, on a nearly 1500-kilogram computer, the PDP-1.
Today, 60 years later, video games have become an indispensable part of people's lives, with more and more game anchors, more and more professional leagues, and more and more products in the app store, video games are ushering in their own golden age.
Where previously only a few people took pleasure in drawing in the community, we now have a national wave of national games where chatting, making friends, and even working can be played in several games.
Games are being given more and more social attributes, but the number of people who evaluate them varies widely.
In June 2018, the World Health Organization officially classified gaming addiction as a mental illness and urged governments to integrate it into health systems. In the eyes of many Chinese parents, games are a symbol of awakening and a poison that destroys their children's future, and it is the responsibility of teenagers to learn games well.
But in the context of the times, everyone is involved or is participating in the construction of the virtual world.
There is a lot of overlap between games and games, and even for some people, games are their life and the basis for their survival. From the rise to the fury, humanity's obsession with video games has actually deepened as games have evolved.
Before Space Wars, there were pioneering trips.
In 1952, the world's first recorded video game was born. This is a good game to run on a vacuum tube computer. Produced by A.S. Douglas of the University of Cambridge, but not for entertainment at the time, he used it to present his human-computer interaction paper. The player operates the computer's turntable through basic artificial intelligence.
However, the game can only be defined by screen displays, without elements of screen activity and real-time updates, and many consider it not really a video game, but it is a milestone that shows the infinite possibilities of video games.
A few years later, the American television engineer and father of the world's video games, William W. Bush, was killed in the game. Using oscilloscopes and analog computers, William Henderson created the world's first graphically displayed video game, Double Tennis.
Located at the Brooklyn Haven National Laboratory in Brooklyn, New York, the game's interface is a simple side view of the tennis court where players hit a "gravity-controlled" ball into the net by manipulating two control knobs with tracks and a box controller with a batting knob. Because of its simplicity and novelty, it is very popular with tourists.
Unfortunately, it didn't last long, only ran for two seasons and was demolished the following year. Many scientists at the time mainly questioned whether expensive equipment and cutting-edge technology were too wasteful for the game.
But it sowed a seed, and the appeal of the game was born.
After as many as 100 people lined up to watch Tennis for Pairs, video games are said to have entered the fast lane of their own development. "Space Wars" is a milestone on this path, it makes two players fight each other, each player controls a space plane capable of launching missiles, and if one side is wiped out, the game is over.
To add to the fun, there are other designs that require players to avoid the star in the middle of the screen, and they will fail if they touch it. If you get too close, you'll be attracted to it. The game was eventually released on a new DEC computer, and later on the early morning internet, video games began to reach more people.
It's a very novel idea, but it doesn't work in commercialization.
At that time, private ownership of computers was not possible, PDP-1 alone was worth $120,000, and even a big wave was just a ripple in a small lake. But Space Wars is very popular on American campuses. There are many students who have nothing to do with this discipline, and they are willing to come to the laboratory to fight a few rounds of war, and the whimsy will gradually ferment in it.
Among the students who came to the lab was Nolan Bushnell, who believed in the future of video games. After working in the coin-operated machine hall, he felt that if space wars were turned into arcades, it would be a success.
In 1968, after graduating from college, Bushnell became an engineer for a tape company and learned that the price of a computer at the time had dropped from more than $100,000 to less than $4,000. He was determined to turn his college ideas into reality. Taking advantage of the tape company's convenience, he quickly got his way through the design of Computer Space.
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell
Nutting Associates, a coin-machine maker with similar dreams, unthinkingly bought the game, turned it into a coin-operated machine, and placed it in bars across the United States. But, like Space Wars before it, Bushnell's initial attempts were not warmly received.
Players thought the game was too complex to compete with the popular pinball games of the time. In addition, most of the people who went to bars at that time were working people, and the principle of cyberspace was Newton's first law, which was too esoteric and too unfounded. Bushnell, though, did not give up.
A year after cyberspace was launched, Bushnell took matters into his own hands and started his own company with a friend who paid $500. The company later became a pioneer in video games, Atari. It was in this year that the Odyssey console was released and was a huge success.
At the time, Odyssey could even be found on consoles at Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, which was one of the main reasons why Bushnell took this step. To practice programming, Bushnell had his former colleague Alan Alcombe imitate Odyssey's ping-pong game. It was another inadvertent affair, and it turned out that Olcomm had made a mess of things.
The new game designed by Olcom can record not only the score, but also the sound of each impact. What's more, as the ball hits the racket in different positions, the angle of reflection also changes, which is undoubtedly a huge innovation. Even Bushnell was drawn to spending hours a day playing the game.
I love it and don't know how customers will react. To experiment, Bushnell continued with the idea of Computer Space, putting the game on a special device and testing the reaction in a bar called Andy Cap.
The next day, the bartender called and said, "You have a problem with this machine, come and see, there are a lot of people waiting to play." When I walked to the bar to turn on the console, I saw too many players and coins being thrown into the box so the machine couldn't play.
The bar was already crowded with robots, and Bushnell sniffed out huge business opportunities. With the success of the prototype, he received $50,000 in funding to start a dedicated production line. Back then, it was no exaggeration to say that bars, swimming pools, college campuses, wherever there were people, there were machines playing table tennis, they took over the Odyssey and ignited video games from the United States to the rest of the world.
As games took the world by storm, engineers' brains were ignited, more than one person saw the business opportunities in the game, and more and more companies joined the game' competition.
In 1980, Nintendo released its first handheld Game & Watch. The designer is One of Nintendo's three masters of technology, Junpei Yokoi. Since then, the appearance of Nintendo has become a common memory of many 80 and 90 years.
On July 15, 1983, a memorable day for all video gamers around the world, Nintendo released its first console, the FamilyComputer, or Red and White, Contra, Super Mary, and more.
The people of Contra
Before the advent of the Red and White Machine, all games were machine-to-machine and could not be switched. From the beginning of the birth of the red and white machine, the concept of plug-in card exchange games has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and many people's game careers may have started from this time.
But for Chinese gamers at that time, almost all the game consoles in their hands were not real Nintendo products, but replicas, or compatible machines, manufactured by domestic manufacturers, known as "Little Bawang", which was a copycat of them.
From today's point of view, there are hardly any exceptions, whether from Japan, Europe, the United States or the United States, or from Taiwan across the strait, there are pirated games, some from classic video game bands running on consoles, and some from game software that occasionally appears on personal computers. Games that really originated in Chinese mainland are still the dreams of many players. Today, China's level of game production has lagged far behind that of the "Western powers."
After the red and white machine caught fire, Nintendo took the opportunity to launch gameBoy in 1989, claiming to be the longest running console in the history of video games, with cumulative sales of more than 100 million units. Then the wind changed, and video games entered the 3D era.
Game Boy
Before 1990, when video games were at key nodes, all games were programmed, just flat, collectively known as pixel games or 2D games.
Pushing Open the 3D Gate is a game called Star Villains. It's not a hit, but it gets various game makers to start working on their own 3D engines. Red Alert 2 is the product of that wave. Toy Story is the first feature film with pure 3D modeling.
The popularity of 3D animation, in turn, has driven the development of game consoles. Video games began to truly enter the public's field of vision, entering a stage of a hundred flowers.
In 2000, the rise of the end game, "Legend" was born.
In 2005, Warcraft came out and became the pinnacle of massively multiplayer online games. Now, VR and AR have once again upended people's gaming experience from scratch, with all the work in the game being done in CG, with inputs and outputs being done through somatosensory devices. What followed was a shift in people's perceptions of games.
Warcraft?
Someone quipped that the question between boyfriend and girlfriend in the past was who Mom and her girlfriend would save if they fell into the river, but now the question is more, "Who is important to me in this game?" ”
In 2018, 6 matches including "League of Legends" were selected for the Jakarta Asian Games Exhibition. Five years ago, more than 16,000 gaming enthusiasts applied to add esports to the Olympics. As a young "art", games have gradually become synonymous with "technology and culture".
What "electronic heroin" and "spiritual opium" have spawned is an immeasurable economic market. In March 2021 alone, Glory of Kings raised $257 million from players around the world, topping the global mobile game bestseller list.
What the future of video games is, no one can say for sure, how to play, how to use, is the real concern of our generation.