Games for people who never touched a computer
For most people in the 1970s, a computer was something a company or a university owned. Yet millions of them played a video game. They did so in bars, bowling alleys, pizza restaurants and arcades, and later on a television at home. The games ran on specialized electronics rather than on machines anyone thought of as computers, and that is the main reason they reached ordinary people so quickly: nobody needed to learn anything about computing to put in a coin.
This article follows that consumer boom. The laboratory experiments and mainframe pastimes that came before it are covered in the overview of early video games, so we begin where games first appeared in public venues.
The first coin-operated machines
Two coin-operated games appeared in 1971: Galaxy Game, installed in a student building at Stanford University, and Computer Space, produced by a company called Nutting Associates from a design by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Both borrowed ideas from the Spacewar! tradition of two ships fighting in space. Computer Space is often described as the first commercially sold arcade video game, although “first” depends on how a game is defined, and Galaxy Game’s creators were working on something similar at the same time.
Neither was a runaway success, partly because the controls were hard to learn. The breakthrough came in 1972 when Bushnell and Atari released Pong, a simple tennis-like game that could be understood by watching someone else play. It spread through bars and arcades and drew many imitators, which helped create an industry with several competing manufacturers.
Bringing the screen home
In the same period, Ralph Baer and colleagues had been developing a way to play games on an ordinary television set. The result was released in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey. Its games were simple, and players used plastic overlays on the screen to add scenery. Atari followed with a home version of Pong in the mid-1970s, and a wave of similar single-game machines appeared.
These early home units were typically built around fixed circuits, so each one played only the games it was made for. The next step was the programmable console, which we explain in more detail in the account of game consoles and the cartridge era. In outline, a cartridge held the game’s program, and the console supplied the processor, graphics and controls. Atari’s Video Computer System, released in 1977, is the most famous example, though several other companies sold cartridge systems around that time.
The shift depended on cheaper chips. As integrated circuits became cheaper and microprocessors arrived in the 1970s, designers could replace custom logic with a small programmable processor. That made it possible for one console to play many different games, and for a manufacturer to sell new games for a machine customers already owned.
The golden age of the arcade
The late 1970s and early 1980s are often called the golden age of arcade games. Space Invaders, released in Japan by Taito in 1978, is widely credited with drawing huge crowds and spreading the idea of a game with waves of enemies and a high-score table. Asteroids, Galaxian, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and many others followed in quick succession, and the arcade became a regular part of youth culture in the United States, Japan and parts of Europe.
Several traits defined the era:
- Short sessions. A game was designed to be learned in seconds and to end soon enough that a player would put in another coin.
- Characters and themes. Pac-Man, for example, aimed at a broader audience than the space-combat games before it.
- Small, clever technology. Designers worked with very little memory and processing power, which shaped the look of the games, a theme explored in the article on pixel art.
- Sound as part of the appeal. Simple synthesized effects and tunes became recognizable, a subject covered under sound chips.
The 1983 downturn and what followed
The home console market grew rapidly in the early 1980s, with several competing systems and a large number of games from many publishers. In 1983 the North American market contracted sharply. The causes are usually described as a combination of too many similar products, uneven game quality, heavy competition from home computers and an oversupplied retail market. Several companies lost money or left the business. Explanations differ in emphasis, and it is safer to say that multiple factors contributed than to point to a single cause.
The recovery came partly from Japan. Nintendo released its Family Computer in Japan in 1983 and sold a redesigned version in North America in the mid-1980s, with an emphasis on quality control and licensed software. Meanwhile, home computers such as those of the home computing wave created a different route for games, where hobbyists could write and sell their own, a story told in the article about bedroom programmers.
Why this period mattered
The arcade and console boom did several things that experiments alone could not. It taught a mass audience to use a screen and a controller. It created steady demand for faster processors, better graphics and cheaper memory. And it established the games business as a source of jobs, with designers, artists, programmers and musicians working in teams.
The technical lines it started are still visible. Today’s games remain descendants of those short, score-driven arcade sessions in some respects, and of the programmable console in others. How the pictures on those screens were produced is a separate story, taken up in the history of computer graphics.