Evolution of Video Games by Ben Newman
Introduction
Over the years, video games have been evolving the way they’re played and how they look. From pixels to HD textures, 8-bit chiptune to a full orchestra, the video game industry has changed a lot since the first console from 1972.
Starting Off
Video games had first started out as small simple formats, the first interactive concept being created as early as 1947 by Thomas T. Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann. The concept was simple, a small dot on the screen being controlled in a complete analogue setup using a missile radar screen!
When it comes to the first recognisable title, most will automatically think about PONG being the first but in actual fact it was Spacewars that was the first recognisable game in 1961. The game was 2-player and consisted of 2 spaceships shooting at each other, much like Asteroids.
However, it wasn’t until 1971 that games were first put out to the public, beforehand the games would stay where they were created, mostly at universities. The company Galaxy Game created the first coin operated games machine with 1500 units of their game Computer Space being placed in arcades. Computer Space was created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, the same people who went on to create PONG the next year and also founded Atari.
Along with the creation of PONG, 1972 also marked the first home console being created, the Magnavox Odyssey which was created by Ralph Bear. The odyssey was a flop though due to poor marketing along with being overshadowed by the home PONG console.
At around this time of gaming, games contained no real graphics, mostly geometric shapes controlled with clunky controllers. They also lacked proper colouring and were rather buggy and slow. But in 1975, a game called Gun Fight came out and was the first arcade machine to use a microprocessor. It was developed by Midway Games and used an Intel 8080 CPU, an 8-bit chip which allowed the graphics to be more continuous and fluid, being much faster and more solid.
The home consoles at this time were rather large and bulky looking but in 1979 the first handheld console came out called Microvision. This was also the inspiration for the D-pad in future.
The next year in 1980, the first 3D game was created called Battlezone. While simple in modern standards it was very complex for the time it was created, giving the ability to traverse anywhere in a rather featureless world, hide from attacks and attack enemies.
Most games these days are played online or local multiplayer but it wasn’t until 1983 that the first online game came out. This game was called Snipes and was created by SuperSet software. It was a text based game played by multiple people on IBM PCs.
A Bit Extra
While it wasn’t the first console ever made, it’s definitely one of the most recognisable in the game industry, this was of course the NES, the first 8-bit console which came out in. A bit refers to the speed of the microprocessor in how many bits can be accessed each operation. So the 8-bit processor could only access 8 bits of data per operation, 16-bit could access 16-bits and so on. The NES has sold around 62 million units to date and was Nintendo’s top selling system.
2 years later in 1987, the first 16-bit console came out called the TurboGrafx-16 Entertainment Super System. It was also the first ever system to feature an optional CD module allowing for more storage, cheaper costs and better sound. It’s also the world’s smallest console and around 10 million units have been sold to date.
Fast forward to 1993 and the first 32-bit system was created, the Amiga CD-32. Only roughly 100,000 units were sold worldwide however, but at the end of 1994, the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation was released and were much more successful. The PlayStation was also the first games console to ever sell over 100 million units.
Soon after, the Nintendo 64 came out which was the first 64-bit console which was way ahead of its time. Over the next few years the first 128-bit consoles came out, including the Dreamcast, Nintendo Gamecube, PlayStation 2 and the Xbox, with the Sega Dreamcast being released in 1998, two years before the PlayStation 2, which came out in the year 2000 and is the bestselling console of all time. The Playstation consoles and Xbox consoles had discarded the previously common use of cartridges and stuck to using CDs, however these were still early times so the graphics weren’t top quality and many common features of modern games were missing such up HD textures, high quality animation and HD sound quality.
With the Playstation 2 also came the first game controlled without a controller, namely the Eye Toy. It consisted of a camera set above or below your TV which tracked your movements to navigate through the menu and play the games.
Along with graphics and animation, music and sound effects also play a large part of the creation of a game. In the first games such as Super Mario for the NES, the games used basic chiptune on a square wave. While simple, the first overworld theme would soon become a highly recognisable music track.
Music had changed from the simple 8-bit sound as the Sega Genesis and Saturn came out, using its own sound format which would be highly recognisable, mostly in Sega’s noticeable series, Sonic the Hedgehog. Come the Nintendo 64, music began using more advanced synths and such in an almost orchestral style.
Around the 128-bit era came the big orchestral music pieces to be used in games such as those found in Playstation 2 and the Xbox in titles such as Halo, Lego games and the Eye Toy games.
