1976: Death Race
Category: Arcade
Based on the 1975 movie Death Race 2000 (although not officially licensed), Exidy’s 1976 arcade game Death Race might be the first case of public outcry over videogame violence. The goal in the game was to run over as many stick figures as possible with a car. The figures then turned into impassable grave crosses, littering the screen and making the game harder with increasing score. The controversial theme sparked wide media criticism about its violence and bad influence on children, in turn increasing sales of the game. Exidy later added instructions which referred to the stick figures as evil gremlins that had to be run over, but it didn’t fool anybody, considering the development title of the game was “Pedestrian”. Exidy stopped production after about 1000 units sold, due to increasing attempts to get the game banned.
Play it
Thanks to RogueSynapse, a free remake for Windows, created with DarkBASIC, is available. The game was designed from memory of the actual arcade version, and does not claim to be thoroughly authentic.
1976: Night Driver
Category: Arcade
Atari’s Night Driver arcade game is the first racing game to feature a 1st-person perspective. Players drive a car along a road, and have to get as far as possible before time runs out. Leaving the road costs time. To hide the fact that current microprocessors are yet far too slow to cope with a detailed 3D view, the game is said to take place at night, with the road only visible through reflective pylons at its side.
See it in action
Night Driver as played on an emulator:
Play it
Night Driver is fully emulated by MAME.
1975: First microprocessor Arcade game
Category: Arcade
Since the release of Computer Space in 1971, a couple of hundred arcade videogames have been manufactured by various companies, all of them simply based on transistor-transistor logic (TTL). One of those games was Western Gun, a two-player wild west shooting duel produced by Taito in Japan. Midway licensed this title for release in America, and Nutting Associates handled the conversion. The resulting game, Gun Fight, would enter videogame history as the first videogame to be based on a microprocessor (the Intel 8080 at a clock speed of about 2 MHz).
The new possibilities that microprocessors offered, along with their rapidly declining prices, would mean that TTL-based videogames would soon disappear.
Emulation
That a game is microprocessor-based means that it can in theory be emulated on your computer. And in practice, there’s MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. This is a huge project dedicated to accurate emulation of currently over 7900 arcade games (as of April 2009, including clones), all within one multi-platform program. MAME is open-source, and pre-compiled versions are available for many systems, most importantly Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. In other words, with the age of microprocessor arcade games begins the age of games that probably can be emulated on your system.
An important note: In order to emulate games, you will need their original (ROM) images. These can be ripped from the original game if you own it. The images are also available from various sources on the Internet, but it is up to you to check whether your local laws allow you to download them, or whether the specific source has the rights to distribute the images.
Visit the official MAME website for further information.
If you are using Windows, I suggest you go for the MAME Plus! build, which includes many additional features, and a great user interface (mamepgui.exe).
1974 Arcade game firsts
Category: Arcade
- Tank by Kee Games is the first game using IC-based ROM to display more complex graphics. Kee Games had apparently sold clones of some Atari games before, but this original two-player maze shootout was so successful that they ended up revealing Kee Games as being just a subsidiary of Atari. Atari did this to trick distributors, who would insist on having exclusive deals with game manufacturers. With this “shadow company,” Atari was able to get deals with two distributors at once. Tank was so successful though that distributors did not care for exclusivity in videogame distribution anymore, so Atari and Kee Games merged.
- Gran Trak 10 by Atari is the first racing videogame. It can be played by one player, displays a track in top-down perspective, and features a full-size steering wheel, gas pedal, and stick shift for controls.
Play them
Gran Trak 10 cannot be emulated on a computer because it does not use a microprocessor. However, Sprint 1 ( 1978 ) is a microprocessor remake of the game, and is emulated in MAME.
1972: Atari Pong
Category: Arcade
Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari in 1972 and started designing and manufacturing their own videogames. Deeming the planned racing game to be too hard a task for the moment, their first engineer, Allan Alcorn, is assigned to create a simple ping-pong game – the resulting Pong is the first commercially successful videogame and started the first videogame boom, which is why it is often mistaken to be the first videogame ever.
Play it
If you actually don’t know what Pong plays like, Pong.at gives a good idea.
The best simulator is probably DICE, the Discrete Integrated Circuit Emulator. Don’t worry about the technical name, playing is just a matter of “click and go”. Press 5 to insert a coin (1 to push start if required). Right player uses cursor keys, left player uses WSAD. You can download precompiled Windows (32-bit) binaries, or the source-code. The project is based on SDL.
The History of Pong
1971: Galaxy Game, Computer Space and Atari
Category: Arcade
Because of the success of the Spacewar! game, some students decide to build a public version of the game that people could play for money. Their arcade game is called Galaxy Game and is installed at the Tressider Union of Stanford University in September 1971. The machine is very expensive because it is based on a PDP-11/20 computer, building it cost about $20,000.
Two months later, the first commercially sold arcade video game is created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It is based on Spacewar! too, although it has been modified to let one single player battle against computer-controlled alien spaceships, and it is released only two months after Galaxy Game, in November 1971. It is called Computer Space and licensed to Nutting Associates who brings it to market in a nice, futuristic fibreglass cabinet. The game is not a huge success with the general public however, as the controls are too complicated for people who are just discovering what a videogame is. Still, it deserves a place in history for actually being the first commercially sold videogame ever.
Nolan and Ted make about $500 in licensing fees, which they rightfully think is not enough. So one year later they start a new business called Atari, with which they would soon produce their own, new game called Pong.
Watch it
See a short gameplay clip of an actual Computer Space machine:
Play it
As the Computer Space game is a discrete logic device without a microprocessor, it cannot be emulated on a computer, only simulated. Two such simulators for Windows can be downloaded from Computer Space Fan’s website:
Computer Space Simulator for Windows (1)
Computer Space Simulator for Windows (2)
