The History of Computer Games

A useful article...long, but worth a read...

The history of computer games – from text to DirectX
The world of gaming has changed massively since the first game, Spacewar, appeared in 1961
Iain Thomson, Personal Computer World 18 Apr 2008

ENT

Ever since the birth of the home computer, people have wanted to play games on their PCs.

The patent for the first game using a CRT monitor was filed in 1947.

When the first DEC PDP-1 mainframe was delivered to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1961 it took staff just months to write a shooter called Spacewar.

But it was the boom in home-computer ownership in the 1970s that saw games take off. Since then designers have developed code that uses computing power to the fullest and have been pivotal in the development of hardware, such as sound and graphics cards.

Today the industry is worth billions and the population of online gaming communities outnumbers that of some nation states.
Modern professional gamers are at the cutting edge of computer hardware and gaming machines are used to design the new generation of mainstream computers.

1970s and 1980s

The early years


When home computers began to rise in popularity during the late 1970s, the public was already used to playing electronic games. The video arcade boom had seen a generation grow up playing games, and consoles using Rom cartridges were becoming a feature in many homes.

The first computer games were built primarily by university staff and students because they had easy access to computers. They were mostly text adventures with no graphics.

However, before long the first 3D maze game, Mazewar, was created, which also became the earliest example of a first-person shooter (FPS) after a combat system was added.

University systems were increasingly networked, so the sector also gave us the first multi-user dungeon (Mud) games. These were played by a limited number of people navigating an imaginary landscape using text commands but they also allowed participants to talk to one another.

It was mainly the work of hobbyists that led to these games being played on standalone computers. They either shared games among themselves or distributed them via magazines such as Creating Computing, which printed out the source code for others to input and play.

But games design was hampered by a plethora of platforms and limited hardware capabilities. The Apple II, considered powerful for its time, lacked a sound chip, so used an innovative software hack to vibrate the speaker at different frequencies to simulate notes, for example.

Data transfer was another problem, with most computers storing software on cassette tape that was limited to between 500 and 2,000bits/sec and required careful sound control to work. Although 5.25in floppy drives were available at this time, they were primarily for business use.

Living colour 
Colour was also pivotal. In arcade games, it was provided by coloured stencils across the screen but in 1979, the first true colour game, Galaxian, arrived -– though colour games had yet to reach computers.

But in 1982 things changed, with the launch of the Commodore 64 in the US and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in Europe. The powerful Commodore and inexpensive ZX Spectrum dominated the games market for the next few years.

The Commodore 64 was built using a graphics controller that had been designed for a games console and was capable of displaying 16 colours, bitmapping and screen scrolling.

The three-channel sound chip was created by a former synthesiser developer, leading games designers to start incorporating music themes into games.

The ZX Spectrum was slightly more limited, with 15 colours (seven in two tones and black) and an effective resolution of 256x192.

Its single-channel speaker could cover only 10 octaves but at half the price of the Commodore, it sold in the millions and was also widely cloned in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Birth of legends 


The increasing amount of computing power available in the 1980s made new types of games possible.
In 1980 Flash Attack became the first game to allow two players to link their computers via a serial port and play against each other using home-made cabling.

Flash Attack has been cited as the first strategy game but for most, the original examples of this were Utopia and Stonkers.
Utopia was certainly the first simulation game, where the player managed resources to build up an empire, but there was no player-directed combat. Stonkers, on the other hand, had player-controlled combat but lacked the intricate management side of Utopia.

Despite these advances, it became clear that PCs were reaching a limit of what they could do on their own as users demanded better graphics and sound.

Visual awareness 
Graphics cards for bigger computers had been around since the 1960s but it wasn’t until 1981 with the first IBM PC that they became common in home computers. However the card was limited to one colour, with four-colour (or 16 text colours) CGA as an expensive upgrade.

After IBM launched the IBM AT in 1984 and standardised around the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), which offered 16 colours for graphics, it was at last on a level pegging with the competition.

But the IBM AT also had a simple design that was easily cloned by other manufacturers and this led to much wider ownership of computers as prices fell. It also made widescale games distribution for the platform more economically viable.

After a brief standards war, IBM settled on the video graphics array (VGA) standard in 1987, allowing much more colourful games with 256 colours, and by the end of the decade the new extended Graphics Array (XGA) protocol was giving 65,536 colours at a resolution of 1,024x768.

This gave designers a lot more leeway in how to use colour and sharp graphics. Strangely it was the simple games that used this most effectively. Tetris, invented in 1985, was quickly turned into a brightly coloured game with simple rules that proved highly addictive.

The improvements in graphics made a big difference to the computer games market, allowing text-based adventure games to move into graphics.

One of the most popular of these was Leisure Suit Larry, a scrolling puzzle adventure game in which the hero tried to find a girlfriend. It became one of the most pirated games of the decade and went through many follow-up versions.

By the end of the 1980s the new graphics capabilities were used to create more realism, leading to the game that brought simulation games into the mainstream, Sim City.

The aural experience 
Around the end of the decade affordable soundcards also began to make an appearance.

The first came from Canadian company Adlib in 1987 but it was quickly superseded by Creative’s Soundblaster card, which dominated the market and drove Adlib out of business.

Up until that point, game sound came from a single PC speaker. The development of a dedicated card, into which could be plugged proper stereo speakers and subwoofers, revolutionised game sounds.

The advent of high-quality sound also caused a significant change in the way sound was used in games. The ability to generate not only stereo but later surround sound meant that for the first time, when a player heard a sound they could tell roughly where it was coming from. This made FPS games more exciting and realistic, rather than just having tinny music playing in the background.

Games such as the Alone in the Dark series made great use of the improved sound capabilities to make unsettling music an essential part of gameplay.

Other games, such as Carmageddon, even allowed players to integrate their own music into games, an approach taken by many manufacturers.

1990s

Shoot first, ask questions later


If there was one type of game that dominated the 1990s it was the first-person shooter (FPS). In 1992 Wolfenstein 3D, in which the player infiltrates and destroys a Nazi stronghold, was released and gained a cult following.

A year later a similar game from the same manufacturer called Doom began to achieve massive success, because of its superb simulated 3D environment and bloody game play. Another key factor in the success of Doom was its initial distribution as shareware. Freeware and shareware were relatively recent business ideas and many in the games industry thought games distribution wasn’t suited to those methods.

They were proved wrong and by the end of 1995 Doom had a bigger user base than Windows 95, many of whom paid for the full software version. As a direct result, many games developers now habitually release demo versions as free or shareware to publicise the game.

The success of these two games inspired a host of other first-person shooters, including Doom’s sequel Quake, Marathon for Apple users, Duke Nukem 3D and Half-Life. All refined the principle, adding better physics engines, more realistic gameplay and more innovative environments.

However, the graphic nature of these and other games caused public concern. Computer games had traditionally been seen as more respectable than video arcades and escaped censorship but the new generation of ultra-violent games caused governments to act.

In the US the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) was formed with congressional approval in 1994, to rate computer games in the same way as films. Germany banned Wolfenstein 3D almost immediately for its use of Nazi imagery and other governments soon introduced bans or restrictions.

Carmageddon, where points are gained for running down pedestrians, was effectively banned by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) until the developers made it less gory.

The worries weren’t helped with the launch in 1995 of the first 2D/3D graphics cards, followed by true 3D cards a few years later.

These cards used their power to free up the computer’s CPU while allowing for much greater realism during games.

The game that capitalised on this capability to best effect was Duke Nukem 3D, launched in 1996. This used a different physics engine from Doom and, while it wasn’t a totally 3D game, the player could for the first time fly above the playing area or swim below it.

It also came with a large and easy-to-use developer kit – a factor that was to become increasingly important for many games during this decade.

Mod for victory 
Games such as Duke Nukem 3D and Doom were released with developer kits that allowed players to design their own levels and share then with friends. The companies also discovered a lucrative sideline in licensing their game engines to other developers.

A good development kit became crucial to a game’s success. Gaming communities developed around games and teams of fans would submit their designs and modifications for general use.

This was made possible largely by the growing popularity of the internet. Gamers had always been early adopters of communications technologies and games communities were some of the most active bulletin board sites.

While games were small this provided enough communication but the 1990s saw large-capacity games being developed by huge teams with multi-million pound budgets. Modifications were now big chunks of code and a reliable transfer mechanism was needed.

As it turns out, two arrived. First physical storage underwent a revolution. In 1991 Tandy and Commodore released computers with CD-Rom drives built in, increasing the storage capacity of removable media from the 1.44MB floppy disks that were standard at the time.

The new medium allowed people to share files and gave games manufacturers a huge amount of capacity to build gameplay. In 1993 a game called Myst used the storage capacity of the CD to generate a huge playing landscape that was beautifully rendered in a way that would have been impossible without a huge stack of floppy disks.

The advent of the CD-Rom was another boon to the strategy and simulation gaming market. Sim City’s success proved the market for simulator games was viable and inspired a host of similar titles including Railroad Tycoon and Theme Park. The company behind Sim City also expanded the field with The Sims, which became a big worldwide hit.

Meanwhile Civilisation and other strategy games benefited from more scenarios and better graphics, allowing developers to focus on gameplay in ever-increasing detail.
The second big revolution was the growth in bandwidth throughout the 1990s, together with the advent of the World Wide Web and the browsers to use it, which gave games players an easy way to talk and share files.

Bandwidth was also useful for playing games online.

It was easy to play non time-dependent games, such as chess, by email.

But other games, where reaction time was critical, were painful to play at dial-up speeds.

The advent of broadband at the end of the decade saw a surge of interest in online gaming, as shown by Counter-strike (see Classic 2000s games below).

As broadband spread towards the end of the decade it also spawned a new kind of game – the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

These games were versions of existing role-playing games, where players assumed a character and interacted with each other online.

A version of this was tried very early on, in 1984, when Compuserve became the first ISP to host an online RPG, Islands of Kesmai. However gameplay wasn’t in real time and it was expensive to play, with hefty data charges.

More recent MMORPGs such as Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds in 1996, Ultima Online in 1997 and Everquest in 1999 are based purely online, with virtual worlds stored on remote servers that players sign onto in exchange for a monthly fee.

Paying regular subscriptions to play has grown in popularity and the market is now worth more than $1bn annually worldwide.
2000s
Reality bites 
Parts of the computer games industry entered the 20th Century under a cloud. The 1999 Columbine massacre was taken by some as proof of the harmful effect of video games.

This didn’t stop ever more graphic and gory games coming onto the market. Even the US Army got in on the game, developing and releasing its own FPS called America’s Army as a recruitment tool.

The game, released on Independence Day 2002, was developed around the Counter-strike physics engine and was designed to be as realistic as possible. It is available as a free download and the army is pleased with its success. Figures show nearly a third of recruits play the game before joining up.

The new decade also brought Microsoft into the gaming market in force. While the PC had become the de facto gaming platform of the last decade, PC games still only made up about a fifth of total games sales. The rest of the market went to consoles such as the Sony Playstation, so Microsoft decided to get in there and launched the Xbox. This was a big shift for the company and has proved increasingly successful.

Meanwhile for PCs the computer gaming market now actively shapes computer development. Computer manufacturers have realised that gamers represent the highest-value computer buyers.
Dell’s takeover of games specialist Alienware and HP’s VoodooPC purchase show how seriously they take the market. HP uses VoodooPC engineers to develop its next generation of systems.

“Gamers are early adopters and high-performance enthusiasts who can test drive advanced technologies that could some day be broadly applied to other computing capabilities,” said Rahul Sood, chief technology officer for HP’s global gaming business unit.

Meanwhile, ever-increasing broadband speeds and falling usage costs have continued to stoke demand for online gaming. MMORPGs are growing ever more sophisticated and in 2003 Project Entropia set up the first game currency that was backed by real-world money.

This popularity was spurred further by the launch of World of Warcraft (WoW) in 2004. The game has grown to have more than nine million subscribers worldwide.

But as MMORPGs have grown ever more realistic, so too real-world problems have been introduced into the games.
Shortly after WoW was launched players began to receive copious amounts of spam in their gaming inboxes and new technology had to be built in to shield users.

Simulation games too have gone virtual. In 2002 the Sims Online was launched, taking the original Sims family and transplanting them to a massive online world of 13 cites.

So far the game has had moderate success, but not on the scale of the offline version.
Meanwhile in the FPS genre, games have come close to the pinnacle of realism and are now diversifying to keep gamers interested.

In 2000 Deus Ex combined the experience points system of an RPG with FPS tactics to create a highly successful game.
For the mainstream FPS market new developments continue apace. Half-Life 2 uses increased computer power to let computer-generated characters show realistic facial expressions and has a highly detailed playing environment.

Doom 3 has concentrated on improving the physics engine of the game for greater realism. This provided the developers with a good source of income from licensing the physics engine to third parties.

FPS games are also making it into virtual worlds, giving rise to a new class of game called a massively multiplayer online first-person shooter (MMOFPS). This takes a multiplayer FPS and puts it into a virtual world similar to MMOPRG games.

The first such game was World War 2 Online, published in 2001. This allowed thousands of players to fight across a scale map of Europe and has spawned a number of sequels and imitators.

What’s next? 


The past 30 years have seen computer games change from a hobbyist’s pastime to a multi-billion dollar industry involving the biggest players in computing.

Games have been one of the most rapidly developing areas of programming and their progress has to an extent been governed by the speed of the development of the PC industry.

The development cycle has come full circle and games play an increasing role in pushing the development of hardware for a new generation of mainstream computers.

1980s game technology: 3D graphics 
While true hardware-supported 3D graphics cards wouldn’t arrive until the 1990s, clever software design made realistic simulations possible and, by the end of the 1980s, 2D scrolling games were almost extinct.

Techniques such as texture wrapping, where colours are placed around an object to give the illusion of texture and depth, made this possible. Later engines allowed for irregularly shaped walls and floors to further give the illusion of depth.

Such software shenanigans were known in the industry as 2.5D and they lasted until 3D graphics cards came onto the market. Not only did they get the best of low-powered hardware, they ensured the entry price for computing stayed low, because there was no need for extra kit to play a game.

This differs from today’s situation, in which games developers work closely with hardware manufacturers to make sure new games use the computer’s resources to the fullest.

Classic 1980s games

Elite 
The 1984 space trading game Elite was created by two Cambridge University students and managed to squeeze 3D wireframe graphics out of the 32MB of Ram on the BBC Model B computer.

The two also used a planet generation algorithm that gave players 256 planets spread across eight galaxies to explore.
Elite was very popular. It made the UK national news and a bidding war followed among games manufacturers for porting rights to other platforms, showing the increasing financial clout of the gaming industry.

It was also the first game to include such ancillary material as a novella about the game, a full manual and even stickers to brand PCs.

Sim City 
Sim City was the first mass-market simulation game, where players would design, build and run a city rather than destroy things. This involved laying down road and rail links, providing utilities to residents and taxing them to fund further improvements.

The game was significant for two other reasons. It was one of the first computer games where players didn’t win or lose a game, simply maintained the status quo.

This may also have contributed to its other distinguishing factor -– its popularity with women. Sim software has a far higher percentage of female players than others and is among the best-selling games worldwide.

Sim City has now been expanded into several franchises, notably The Sims, where players raise a virtual family unit from the cradle to the grave. The Sims is officially the world’s best-selling computer game at 16 million copies.

Classic 1990s games

Doom 
Doom was a revolution when it was introduced. With a 3D environment, excellent use of colour and shading, extreme violence and dark humour, Doom was a smash hit and dominated the first-person shooter games format for years.

The game attracted a big following partly because the initial levels were distributed free as shareware. Within two years more than 10 million PCs were running Doom and many of those players bought the full game.

Doom also popularised network play, with the initial game allowing for up to four people to compete in a deathmatch. This became such a problem that many companies, including Intel, banned the game in the workplace because it was consuming too much network bandwidth.

Civilisation 
The Civilisation franchise has been widely recognised as the gold standard for real-time strategy games. Players start with a settler and have to build cities with manufacturing and financial infrastructure, conduct diplomacy with neighbours, research scientific goals and fight battles.

The eventual goal is to wipe out all other players or build enough capacity to send a spacecraft to seed other planets.
This gives the game a broad appeal to both aggressive and constructive gamers, and the educational nature of the game appealed to parents.

One of the key characteristics of this game is the amount of time a single game takes to complete – sometimes up to 20 hours.
The immersive nature of the game and the time it takes were blamed by author Iain Banks for the late delivery of one of his books, which was only finished after he smashed the game’s disc.

1990s game technology: DirectX 
Just as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer became the de facto standard browser in the 1990s, so too did its DirectX software become the standard for games developers.

Microsoft introduced DirectX at the same time as Windows 95, because it was concerned that games developers would stay writing for Dos unless a compelling reason to change platform focus was given.

The DirectX suite is a collection of standardised APIs for controlling how graphics, sound, peripherals and networking are managed.

Hardware manufacturers write their own drivers and the net result is that any game should run seamlessly on any Windows PC.
There have been accusations that Microsoft uses DirectX to encourage people to upgrade their operating system. The newest version, DirectX 10, is available only to Windows Vista users, so gamers wanting to play the latest games will have to upgrade.

2000s game technology: moving online 
As the internet has spread into homes, games manufacturers have been quick to incorporate it into their games. Although multiplayer games have been around in some form for decades, it is the growth of the internet, particularly broadband, that has profoundly changed how people play games.

Some types of games, such as first-person shooters, benefit because people can play against each other, which is much more satisfying than beating the game’s intelligence engine. Broadband has been crucial in this genre, since a slow internet connection makes it easier to get killed.

Role playing in totally online environments has been revolutionised by broadband. Games such as Everquest and World of Warcraft have millions of users inhabiting completely artificial worlds that are, in essence, limitless in scope.

Classic 2000s games

Counter-strike 
Doom may have paved the way in the computer games market but Counter-strike remains one of the classics in the multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) genre.

The game was nothing more than a modification of an existing game, Half Life. Developers created a series of skins that allowed players to fight as terrorists or police playing over a variety of maps.

Two things set Counter-strike apart. First the environment was very realistic, with accurate weaponry that experienced recoil, an excellent physics engine and sound that mimics the playing environment perfectly.
Second, it was easy to network and was much better played online in real time against live opponents, allowing friends to form clans to play against other.

Later versions allowed players to talk to each other during the game via USB headsets, and this reinforced the community aspect of the game.

Counter-strike clans still play regularly and it is now the most popular FPS in the world.

World of Warcraft 
In the new century World of Warcraft (WoW) has dominated the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and is the most popular game of its type, with nine million paying customers.

Warcraft games had been around for a decade but WoW shifted the game from being a simple strategy game to an entire online world inhabited by human and computer avatars that fight, trade, and develop crafts and guilds controlled by players who pay a monthly fee to enter.

There was little new in WoW when it was released but the intricacy of the online environment, the ability to convert actual currency into gaming tender and the opportunity for players to buy land and develop it proved popular. This latter function has made some players a decent living in real world money.

The game has provoked concern because of its very addictive nature. Some countries, including China (which has a third of the world’s players), limit gameplay to three hours after a few players died from exhaustion and harmed themselves by simulating gameplay in the real world.

Using an emulator to play Dos games 
Many people grew up with classic games written in the age of Dos and want to play again, but much of the older software is incompatible with modern versions of Windows.

In order to solve this problem emulators have sprung up. These can handle older games at their intended run speed without interfering with the modern operating system.

Dosbox is an open-source emulator, and one of the most popular. The installer is included on this month’s special bonus cover CD, or can be downloaded from the Dosbox website and is available for a wide variety of platforms. Once it’s installed you should copy old games onto a folder on your hard drive.

Dosbox has no graphical user interface (although third-party GUIs are available) so an easy-to-remember folder location on the C: drive, such as C:\DOSGAMES, is best.

When you run Dosbox, you’ll need to specify the folder containing the old games as Dosbox’s main drive. Then running the game’s .exe file should start it.

If an older game is running too fast or slowly, the speed of the emulation can be changed using the F11 and F12 control keys, while the frame rate can be altered with F7 and F8.

Gaming timeline


1961 Space War, the first computer game

1971 The Galaxy Game becomes the first coin-operated computer game

1973 Will Crowther creates the first computer adventure game, called Adventure 

1973 Mazewar, the first 3D maze game

1978 Roy Trubshaw writes first multi-user dungeon for a British university network

1979 First transatlantic Mud game held

1980 First networkable PC game

1981 Castle Wolfenstein launched

1982 Utopia is first simulation game

1982 First text and colour graphics game

1983 First real-time strategy game

1984 Compuserve first ISP to host RPG

1985 Tetris invented

1986 Rim Worlds War first play-by-email RPG game hosted on commercial server 

1987 Adlib releases the first soundcard

1987 Midi Maze introduces deathmatches

1988 Pool of Radiance launched

1989 Soundblaster starts business

1989 Sim City launched

1990 Ultima and Wizardry reach PC

1991 Civilisation launched

1992 Wolfenstein 3D, Dune II, Mortal Kombat launched

1992 Alone in the Dark uses actors

1993 Doom launched

1994 Doom II, Command and Conquer launched

1994 ESRB set up

1996 Duke Nukem launched

1996 Quake launched

1996 Syndicate Wars puts advertising in a computer game for the first time

1997 Age of Empires, Ultima Online, Grand Theft Auto launched

1998 Half-Life launched

1999 Billy Mitchell achieves the highest possible score for Pac-Man with 3,333,360 points

1999 Everquest launched

2000 The first game modification to be more popular than the original, Counter-strike, launched. Later to become the world’s best-selling FPS

2001 Microsoft enters console market with the Xbox

2001 World War 2 Online becomes the first massively multiplayer online first-person shooter (MMOFPS)

2002 The Sims Online launched

2002 US Army releases America’s Army, the first time a game has been designed for recruitment.

2002 Grand Theft Auto 3 launched

2003 First MMORPG virtual currency, with real-world value, set up by Project Entropia

BTEC Magazines Project Task 2

BTEC Media

Computer Games Magazines project – preparation for practical work

Task 2: Generate Ideas for Printed Material

In Groups of 4(ish)

[or on your own if you can’t handle group work/don’t like anyone]

1. Brainstorm ideas for the contents of your magazine. Record these ideas on paper: everything you do at this stage will be used for assessment

2. Use the internet to research existing computer games magazines: what do they have inside? How are they laid out? How many pages do they have? How much do they cost? How often do they come out?

3. Who is the audience for your magazine? How have you identified them? How is your magazine going to meet the needs of this audience?

4. How much is your magazine going to cost to produce? How are you going to fund these costs? [**try to find out how much it costs to produce an actual magazine. Then think about the advertising you would carry to fund this – what sort of adverts, and from whom, would you put in?]

5. What are the price, frequency and size of your magazine (in pages) going to be?

6. You should have front covers already designed: choose one of these to work with as your actual front cover. Work on individually designing a few (3+) pages from the magazine [Remember, this is a computer games magazine – while you don’t need the actual content yet, you will need to have an idea of what is going to go where…]

7. Research regulatory bodies covering magazines – what aren’t you allowed to put in?