Tennis for Two – a dinosaur in video game history.
YouTube / William Hunter

1970s – Birth of the video game machines

Up to the beginning of the 1970s, students tinkered with increasingly compact computer systems. In 1972, the firm Atari was founded. The company not only dominated the video game industry for the next decade – it also developed Pong, the first game to become a global success. The playing principle of Pong is very similar to that of its predecessor, Tennis for Two, and could not have been easier. The instructions are limited to the statement: ‘Avoid missing ball for high score.’ In this game too, two players attempt to hit a ball – no more than a pixel – over a line. Although the idea for the game was not new, Atari integrated the computer, together with a display screen, into a box with a coin slot – thus inventing the video game machine. For the first time, a video game was available to a broader public for very little money. The game Space Invaders (1978) heralded the beginning of the golden age of the arcades, where the teenagers of the 1980s gambled away their pocket money on video game machines. Prior to this, computer technology had made significant progress, with the founding of Apple in 1976 and the development of microprocessors. And Atari succeeded in pulling off another coup with the Atari 2600 home console: more than 30 million people bought the games console, launched in 1977, which wasn’t restricted to just a single game but, thanks to interchangeable cassettes, offered a theoretically infinite number of games. The games featured very simple graphics and narratives. Levels, by which the game became increasingly difficult, and points systems were typical features. Players attempted to beat the high score, and found fame in the continuous rankings list. This meant simple games remained exciting for a long time.

Playable browser version of the classic game Space Invaders. Click on the image to start the game. Use the arrow keys to move the spaceship along the bottom of the frame, and shoot with the space bar or with the ‘Fire’ button on your mobile phone.
funhtml5games.com

1980s – The infancy of video games

Many classic games that are still going strong today came out in the 1980s: Pac-Man (1980), Ultima (1980), Mario Bros (1983), Tetris (1984) and SimCity (1989). At the beginning of the decade, not only was the market awash with countless new consoles, but increasingly cheaper and more powerful home computers started appearing. In 1983 the console market collapsed. Many companies, among them the industry highflyer and games pioneer Atari, went bankrupt. But before that, Atari did manage to release the game E.T. (1982), still considered the worst video game of all time thanks to its crude graphics and complicated gameplay. Out of the rubble of the industry emerged the firms Commodore, with its Commodore 64 home computer (1982), and Nintendo, with the Nintendo Entertainment System console, or NES for short (1985). With the more refined technologies, the games pushed forward into new spheres; gameplay and graphics became more innovative. Games got their own characters and more complex stories. Most genres as we know them today have their origins in this period. The Commodore 64 even allowed highly motivated users to program their own games. Children and teenagers of the 1980s spent hours in front of their home computers or consoles, and with the release of the Game Boy at the end of the decade, they even carried on after lights-out, playing by torchlight under the blankets.

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Excerpt from the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros from 1983.
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1990s – A new dimension

Like the first generation of players, the games industry had grown up. Video games entered a new dimension – literally, because in the second half of the decade the graphics became three-dimensional. Players were now able to move in three directions instead of two. These game worlds looked more realistic and offered more complex possibilities. Console and game manufacturers vied for a share of the ever-growing market. In 1994, Sony launched the PlayStation – in technical and graphic terms, it was a quantum leap compared to the existing consoles. The game design studios churned out more innovative ideas, with history often serving as inspiration for the gameplay: in Age of Empires (1997), gamers built entire civilisations, and in Command & Conquer (1995) they waged war. In Tomb Raider (1996) they searched for historical artefacts alongside Lara Croft; in Monkey Island (1990), it was pirate’s treasure they were after. But in the 1990s the games industry also lost its innocence because, inaddition to the gameplay action, violence also increasingly became a theme. Starting with Wolfenstein 3D (1992), ‘first-person shooters’ emerged. In these games, a player uses a weapon to kill off his or her opponents from a first-person perspective. For the first time, society starting asking itself whether violence in video games leads to violence in real life. The discussion continues to this day.

Thomas Bürgisser

Poet-president in a snowstorm