The evolution of gaming: computers, consoles, and arcade

Introduction

                                             

  Gaming today is a widely recognized part of our cultural landscape. But those of us over thirty are just old enough to remember a time before gaming, before digital entertainment invaded the arcades, our computers and our homes.

Gaming itself is as old as history. Artifacts from ancient Sumeria and Egypt have shown that our ancestors enjoyed playing board games thousands of years ago. But electronic games required the invention of electronic computers. The earliest computers were slow, failure-prone monsters that took over entire rooms and had less power than a modern pocket calculator. Still, early programmers on these machines felt compelled to waste time by making these computers do things like playing tic-tac-toe. After World War II, electronic computers moved out of the realm of cutting-edge laboratories and into universities and large corporations. Many university students became the first game programmers, transforming their fantasy and sci-fi imaginations into digital adventures.

The concept of hooking up an electronic game system to a television set was invented by Ralph Bauer in the early 1950s. Later he took his ideas to the TV company Magnavox, which released a refined version of his "Brown Box" prototype as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. The Odyssey was primitive, displaying only spots of light on the TV screen, and it required translucent plastic overlays to simulate the appearance of a game. Still, the revolution was underway, and there was to be no stopping it.

The first wildly popular home console system was the Atari 2600, released in 1977. It used plug-in cartridges to play many different types of games, and thanks to the popularity of Space Invaders, it became a best seller. Computer games, written largely for the Apple ][ and TRS-80 computers, were also taking off at this time. While the console industry experienced a crash in 1983, it soon recovered and both computer and console games never looked back.

There are many books and articles on the history of video games. But one area that I felt was not sufficiently explored was how games tended to be categorized in certain genres, and how the genres themselves had evolved and changed over the years. Besides the difference in graphics, was playing tennis on an Atari 2600 significantly different from playing the same game on a Playstation 2? Many old-school gamers often lament the focus of graphics over game play in modern titles, but was it really true that only graphics got better over time? I decided to find out.

Please note: The categories and games I decided to review are by no means exhaustive. In selecting eleven categories, I have left out a few that some will feel are significant. Also, due to time restrictions, I decided to choose only six games for each category. The choices of games are not random, and are not necessarily fully representative of all genres and platforms.

Of the 66 games reviewed here, I have personally played 50 of them, or 76 percent. I played over half of these at the time they were first released, and over the years have managed to finish 15 of them, although not all the games have an ending as such. 19 of the 66 games are console or arcade games, or 29 percent, so some may feel consoles are underrepresented in the list. However, if you count games that have been ported at some point to game consoles, 31 or 47 percent fall into that category. In only one game out of 66 was I a member of the development team.

With that said, let's jump right in to the genres and see how they have evolved over the years. When looking at the screen shots, make sure to hover your mouse over top to see if a higher-resolution image is available.