Electronic Games
| I | INTRODUCTION |
Electronic Games, interactive hardware or software played for entertainment, challenge, or educational purposes. Electronic games vary in design but can include vibrant color, sound, realistic movement, and visual effects; some even employ human actors. There are two broad classes of electronic games: video games, which are designed for specific video-game systems, handheld devices, and coin-operated arcade consoles; and computer games, which are played on personal computers.
Electronic games are a popular pastime for both children and adults. Categories include strategy games, sports games, adventure and exploration games, card and board games, puzzle games, fast-action arcade games, and flying simulations. Some software programs employ game-play elements to teach reading, writing, problem solving, and other basic skills.
From their crude origins in the late 1950s and 1960s, electronic games have grown to become a multibillion-dollar industry, one which uses the latest computer technology to produce ever-more realistic game experiences for millions of users (known as gamers). Electronic game sales (hardware and software) were estimated at about $10 billion in the United States in 2004, with worldwide totals exceeding $20 billion. One significant trend in the market was the simultaneous release of games based on new motion pictures, and even big-budget movies inspired by popular games, as video games made inroads into other areas of entertainment. Some of the most elaborate games today can take years of work and tens of millions of dollars to produce.Studies have shown that, increasingly, the majority of gamers are age 18 or older. In response, many software companies and game studios have focused on developing more advanced games aimed at late teenage and adult audiences. This in turn has sparked concerns by some parents’ groups that younger teens and children are being exposed to graphic violence, drugs, and even sexual imagery in popular games. Most game developers now follow an established rating system—much like the movie industry—that includes the designations E (for Everyone), T (Teen), M (Mature), and AO (Adults Only).
| II | EARLY EFFORTS |
Steven Russell, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), created the first computer game—Spacewar!—on a Digital Equipment PDP-1 computer in 1962. The PDP-1 was unusual for the time because it featured a screen, unlike most computers that still had only printed readouts. In Spacewar!, two players dueled using tiny ships that flew around a screen representing a star field. The game attempted to mimic the actual physics of space flight. Like Higginbotham, Russell did not patent or market his game; one use was to test computers during installations.
While attending the University of Utah in the mid-1960s, an engineering student named Nolan Bushnell became familiar with Spacewar! In 1968 Bushnell moved to California and experimented with reproducing Russell’s game without using a computer, which at the time were too large and expensive for a commercial game. Eventually, he created a version of Spacewar! that used a black-and-white television set and dedicated circuits (electronic hardware created to run a single program). He persuaded a company called Nutting Associates to manufacture the game, and in 1971 the company began marketing the first video arcade game: Computer Space.
| III | VIDEO GAMES |
The term video game generally refers to interactive entertainment programs that are projected onto television-type screens, either by coin-operated arcade games or dedicated game-playing computers called video-game consoles. Some video-game systems feature built-in screens, such as Game Boy, a popular handheld system manufactured by Nintendo, and Vectrex, a tabletop console made by General Consumer Electronics in the early 1980s.
In 1966 a small team of engineers at a military contractor called Sanders Associates produced a device for projecting rudimentary interactive games onto a television screen. The team created several shooting and sports games, including a table-tennis simulation similar to Tennis for Two. Rather than market the game itself, Sanders licensed the technology to Magnavox, a company that manufactured televisions and other home electronics. Magnavox packaged the invention as Odyssey, the first home video-game console, and released it in 1972.
| A | The Atari Era |
After seeing a demonstration of Odyssey, Nolan Bushnell founded Atari Corporation in mid-1972. His first product was a coin-operated tennis game called Pong, a close imitation of the Magnavox game. Pong became the first commercially successful video game. Pong and video-game technology brought new life to the amusement games industry. Prior to Pong, devices such as pinball and electromechanical games were found mostly in bowling alleys, bars, and pool halls. As video games became increasingly popular, especially among children, dedicated amusement arcades would become widespread.
In 1975 Atari released a home version of Pong, which became one of the best-selling products of the December holiday season. Several other companies decided to enter the market the following year, including Fairchild Camera and Instrument, which released the first console to use interchangeable cartridges rather than built-in games.
In 1977 Atari released its first cartridge console, the Video Computer System (also known as the 2600). Although not an immediate success, the 2600 eventually became an international phenomenon, and more than 20 million of the machines sold worldwide. Atari made games for the system but also allowed other companies to produce games under licensing agreements. In 1978 Bushnell left Atari to open Pizza Time Theaters, a chain of restaurants that featured the Chuck E. Cheese character and a vast selection of video games.
| B | The Golden Age of Video Arcades |
Coin-operated games such as pinball were a small and fading industry when video games completely changed the landscape. In 1978 Midway Manufacturing, one of the biggest pinball companies, imported a coin-operated video game called Space Invaders from Japan. The game was so popular in Japan that the government had to quadruple production of the 100-yen coin because so many were being used in the machines. Space Invaders became a hit in the United States, where Midway sold 60,000 of the machines, three times the sales of most popular arcade games of the time.
Midway followed this success in 1980 with another Japanese import: Pac-Man. In this game, players guided a ravenous yellow circle through a maze, while it ate dots and avoided monsters. Namco, the Japanese company that created Pac-Man, sold more than 300,000 of the game machines worldwide, making it the most popular arcade game of all time.
With Pizza Time Theaters legitimizing the idea of arcades and hits such as Ms. Pac-Man, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Tempest, Frogger, and Defender bringing new excitement to gaming, the coin-operated video game business boomed. In 1981 Americans spent 75,000 person-years and $5 billion playing video games at an estimated 4,300 arcades in the United States. Many popular arcade games also were translated for use on the Atari 2600 and its chief rivals in the home market—Mattel’s Intellivision and Coleco’s ColecoVision.
In 1982, however, interest in arcade games started to decline and revenues dropped. Many arcades closed as the entire industry retrenched. By the end of 1983 interest in home games had dried up too. Atari began selling computers and never returned to prominence in video games, Mattel dropped out of the game business, and Coleco eventually went bankrupt.
| C | Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft |
A Japanese company called Nintendo rekindled the electronic-game business in 1985 when it introduced its Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the United States. With more powerful computer chips allowing for advanced graphics and faster game play—exhibited in games such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda—Nintendo brought new excitement to the market. Nintendo would go on to sell more than 30 million NES machines in the United States and more than 90 million worldwide.
Nintendo also brought new market savvy to the industry. Realizing that game hardware soon becomes obsolete, Nintendo pioneered the practice of releasing new consoles every five to six years. The NES, for example, was followed by the Super NES and then by the Nintendo 64. Nintendo further expanded the video-game market in 1989 by launching its Game Boy handheld system. Nintendo sold an astonishing 120 million Game Boys from 1989 to 2001.
Nintendo began to face serious rivals for the home market, however. In the late 1980s the Japanese company Sega introduced a popular system known as Genesis. In 1995 Japanese electronics giant Sony Corporation launched its PlayStation line of game consoles. Sony dominated the console market after 1995, selling more than 90 million PlayStations worldwide by 2002. The PlayStation 2, released in 2000, continued this dominance.
In 2001 Nintendo released the GameCube platform and software giant Microsoft Corporation entered the fray with its new Xbox console. These systems featured a variety of advanced capabilities such as a hard drive for saving games and the ability to connect to the Internet or local area networks (LANs). Such connections enabled players to download more advanced levels of play and additional characters, and to play with other users. Some systems even sell additional equipment so online players can speak to each other and verbally help (or taunt) other players during play. The three major console manufacturers used such technological advances to try to gain market share in this fast-paced, lucrative business.
In late 2005 Microsoft released Xbox 360, the company’s second-generation gaming platform. The new machine further developed and expanded the capabilities of game consoles, including the ability to connect digital cameras and portable music devices, interact with other gamers, play digital video discs (DVDs) and music compact discs (CDs), and download a wide variety of games or add-ons to its large internal hard drive. Xbox 360 also offered free online gaming, although multiplayer gaming still required an online subscription.
By 2006 Xbox had displaced Nintendo as the second bestselling console behind PlayStation. In November 2006, as industry competition stiffened, both Sony and Nintendo debuted new video game consoles. Nintendo introduced Wii, which featured wireless, motion-sensitive controllers and built-in Wi-Fi technology for connecting to the Internet. Sony premiered PlayStation 3, a powerful game console that offered models ranging from a 20-gigabtye to a 60-gigabyte hard drive. PlayStation 3 enabled game players to insert Blu-ray discs, which have five times the storage capacity of DVDs and allow users to play games using high-definition television screens. Sony also offered free online Internet gaming. Microsoft countered the same month with a feature enabling Xbox users to download movies and TV shows.
The introduction of Wii made Nintendo once again a major player in the video game industry. The continuing popularity of the video game known as Halo, exclusive to Xbox, kept Microsoft in the top ranks of video game makers. The release of Halo 3 in September 2007 set record first-day sales of more than $170 million.
| IV | COMPUTER GAMES |
While video-game systems are used solely for games, gaming is only one of the many uses for computers. In computer games, players can use a keyboard to type in commands, a mouse to move a cursor around the screen, or sometimes both. Many computer games also allow the use of a joystick or game controller.In 1972 Gregory Yob of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst created the first text-based computer game, called Hunt the Wumpus. In this game players followed a narrative containing clues about the location of a creature in a series of caverns. Using clues in the text, the players’ objective was to locate the beast and shoot it.
In 1975 a programmer named Will Crowther created Adventure (also known as Advent and Colossal Cave), a highly influential text-based game later expanded by a researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In this game, players used one- and two-word commands to respond to situations in a story. For example, in a room with a treasure chest and a staircase, a player might type “open chest,” then “down stairs.” Wrong answers often resulted in an interactive death. Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s these text-based adventure games—another popular game in this mold was called Zork—dominated the field of computer games.
After playing Adventure on her husband’s computer, a California woman named Roberta Williams persuaded her husband, Ken, to help her make games. Wanting to go beyond text-based technology, Roberta created simple illustrations that Ken encoded into the game. Their game, Mystery House, released in 1980, was the first computer adventure game to combine text and graphics.
To tap into the growing excitement over video games at the time, many computer-game publishers marketed both authorized translations of arcade games and thinly disguised versions of arcade hits. Many publishers also created their own “arcade-style” action games. In 1982 Broderbund released Choplifter, a game in which players flew a helicopter over a desert to rescue hostages. Marketed shortly after the Iranian hostage crisis, Choplifter was an instant success.
| A | Advantages of Computer Games |
Computers brought a new flexibility to electronic games. Because computers stored data, they made a good platform for lengthy adventure and role-playing games. Players could store their progress and continue the games at a later time. With consoles such as the Atari 2600, players could only start games from the beginning. This situation changed slightly in the mid-1980s, when Nintendo built a battery-backed chip into The Legend of Zelda that allowed players to record their progress.
Computer systems such as the Commodore Amiga and Apple Macintosh brought other advantages to gaming. These machines used mouse controllers, devices that gave players fast and highly precise control. As technology progressed, computer monitors offered higher resolution than television screens, giving computer games a crisper look. This improved resolution made computers ideal for running strategy games such as SimCity and Civilization, which featured highly detailed graphics.
Although some computer-game publishers dropped out of the business, others—such as Broderbund and Sierra On-Line—gained prominence. Electronic Arts, which was founded in 1982, became one of the biggest names in the industry. The company’s success was fueled by aggressively recruiting top game designers away from competitors and by packaging its games in attractive boxes.
In 1984 Electronic Arts paid professional basketball stars Julius Erving and Larry Bird $25,000 each to use their names and likenesses in a game called Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One. The game was an instant success, leading Electronic Arts to strike up a similar relationship with National Football League (NFL) announcer and former coach John Madden to create a football simulation game for the Apple II computer in 1989.
For many years personal computers (PCs) were plagued with compatibility problems that hampered them as a gaming platform. Because only Apple manufactured Macintosh computers, however, these machines had standardized parts and operating software. Programs that ran on one Macintosh computer could run on any Macintosh that had sufficient processing power. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Compaq, Packard Bell, and several other companies all manufactured different PC machines, seldom using standardized components. As a result, games that ran on one type of PC might not run on PCs made by other manufacturers.
Singaporean entrepreneur Sim Wong Hoo began to solve this problem in 1989 when he introduced a PC sound card called the Sound Blaster. Although other companies previously had released sound devices for PCs, Sim succeeded at establishing Sound Blaster as the standard for PC sound. Future sound cards needed to be “Sound Blaster-compatible,” meaning they needed to use the same software (often called drivers). Having a standardized sound protocol enabled PCs to run games with robust music and voice files that sounded as good or better than the audio in console games.
| B | Popular Computer Games |
In 1993 id Software published Doom, one of the most influential computer games of all time. Doomonline multiplayer gaming (playing with or against other people through LANs or the Internet). popularized a three-dimensional, first-person perspective camera—allowing players to see the game through the eyes of the character they controlled. The game also popularized
In the early 1990s a drop in the price of CD-ROM technology led to a wave of multimedia games (games that combine audio, video, animation, photographs, or other media). Compact discs (CDs) can store from 650 to 700 megabytes of data, more than 400 times the storage space of standard floppy disks. With this extra storage, designers could add voice files, digitized video of live actors, and other assets to their games. Companies such as Digital Pictures, Access Software, and Viacom published interactive movies, or games that combined digitized footage of real actors and virtual sets.
In 1993 Broderbund published a game called Myst for Macintosh computers, and Virgin Interactive Entertainment published a game called The 7th Guest for the PC. In both games the player explores a rich virtual world, trying to solve puzzles. Millions of copies of these games were sold, popularizing multimedia technology and attracting large new audiences to computer gaming.
In 1995 Microsoft launched Windows 95, an operating system that further simplified the use of PCs as a gaming platform. With built-in driver support for sound cards, graphics cards, joysticks, and other controllers, Windows 95 removed most of the compatibility issues that had long plagued computer gaming.
The PC game market declined in the early 2000s as video-game consoles became more powerful, incorporating high-end graphics, hard drives, and Internet features that were formerly exclusive to home computers. Some popular console games continued to be simultaneously released for the PC, but others were designed solely for the console market.
| V | NEW PLATFORMS |
Building on the success of interactive games played on consoles and computers, some companies have branched out into new platforms. One of the fastest-growing gaming platforms is the Internet. While the first multi-user dungeon game (or MUD, online role-playing game worlds involving multiple players) appeared in 1979, recent developments have made Internet, or online, gaming a unique platform unto itself.
One type of popular Internet game is characterized by its “massively multiplayer online” (MMO) worlds, in which hundreds and even thousands of players can socialize and compete with one another. These games are also sometimes known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs. With 100,000 paid subscribers by 2000, Origin Systems’ Ultima Online was the first economically successful MMO game. Games such as Sony’s EverQuest and Microsoft’s Asheron’s Call built on this popularity and on the expanding availability of broadband Internet access. Other popular MMO games include The Sims, World of Warcraft, and Lineage. Developments in the console game market, such as Microsoft’s Xbox Live feature, were also able to take advantage of the Internet to connect gamers and enhance their games. Xbox Live had attracted about 4 million paid subscribers by the end of 2006.
The rapid pace of technological growth appears to offer a bright future for the electronic-games industry. Several companies now publish games for handheld personal digital assistants as well as for cell phones. The popularity of electronic games today actually drives the development of new technologies because companies see a huge, lucrative market in which to release new products. Cutting-edge developments such as virtual reality may eventually be introduced to a mass audience through video games, breaking new technological ground in society through play.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
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