History of Games

Development of the computer game industry

Computer games have been around since 1940s, starting from simple dots to squares moving across a CRT screen. (Anon., 2018) Over time we have improved the graphics from displaying simple 16x16 textures to 2048x2048 (2k) Ambient Occlusion maps, bump maps, normal maps and textures maps. The first game to have normal maps is Halo 1 due to the xbox’s hardware capabilities. Battlezone from 1980 was the first game to use 3D in wireframe (Plus, 2010).

Lifestyle of a gamer

Gamers are usually known for always sat down, playing games all day and all night. Many people see gamers as someone who doesn’t move, eat all the time, be overweight and don’t go outside.

While I don’t think this is true, many non-gamers do because that is what it appears like on the surface. If we dig down, a gamer is someone who spends their time challenging themselves day and night and compete with others to become one of the best players at the game. An example of this are those who play in competitions and today it could also be considered a full-time job because you can do things such as livestreaming and creating entertainment. (King, 2013)

Gaming pioneers

Allan Alcorn invented one of the best-selling game called pong. Pong is a 2D-based game that is based off tennis. It allows 2 players to compete against each other, getting a ball to the other side, if it hits your side then the opponent gets a point and if the ball hits their side you get a point. The first player to hit 10 wins. Many variations exist today featuring artificial intelligence and more range of colours.

Allan Alcorn first completed a bachelors degree in computer science in 1971 and spent 11 years working in research and development (R&D) in Atari. According to his LinkedIn page he has also worked for Apple to help make programs for the Macintosh.

Allan Alcorn

Tomohiro Nishikado invented space invaders, a single-player action game where you control a Gun from the surface of a planet and aliens are coming down towards it. You must defend your planet by shooting them down and dodging their attacks. The game uses 2 colours, green for the friendlies and white for aliens. Due to its hardware and programming at the time when you got close to killing all the aliens on the screen it will drastically speed up, making the game more difficult because it doesn’t have to draw as much to the screen.

Tomohiro first started with an engineering degree from Tokyo Denki University in 1968 and then got a job at Pacific Industries. Pong wasn't the first game he made he previously made over 10 before it such as Interceptor and Speed Race.

William Higinbotham was one of the people who created Tennis for Two, which was the first video game ever created. The game was created for an open day event at the Brookhaven National Labratory in 1958. The device used to play the game on was as big as a fridge and used analogue rather than digital and ran at 36 Hertz (0.0036GHz).

Higinbotham was born in 1910 and in 1940 became a physicist that worked on the first nuclear bomb at the Brookhaven National Labratory. Unfortunately he died in 1994.

Development technology platforms

In 1995 Nintendo released the virtual boy. This was the first virtual reality headset for games. The Virtual Boy was tailored towards children and adults. It featured a red and black 384x224 (Anon., 2018) display and used a controller for input and cartridges for games.

Comparing it to the pimax in 2018 which uses 8k (both eyes combined) with 32-Bit colour and motion controllers.

We have also started seeing watch games recently like Pokémon go and lifeline, but we have yet to see how this develops.

Gaming Cultures

There are many cultures within the gaming industry this is because people like playing in different ways for example, consoles. Consoles are designed to allow people to have hassle-free gaming, no need to change settings, just plug it in and play while on the other hand, pc gamers like to mess around and explore. They want the best settings, the best quality and the highest frame rates. PC gamers are also the most flexible with in terms of what they can use for example, single/multiple monitors, hardware, mouse, Keyboard and controllers. The choice of operating systems. The stores etc…

There are also people ranging from 16 to people in their 40s playing games on their mobile phones on games such as candy crush when there out and about like on the train.

Some people also like using games and consoles in the past because of the retro theme. Many people think differently on what is classed as retro, I believe that anything older than 2000 is classed as retro but others think that it is games you played before you’re 13.

Gaming Identities and Social impacts of gaming

Currently people play games at many ages, the younger are more influenced by the older (Around 18 – 50s) as show on YouTube. Games such as Minecraft started off as a game hidden below, no one knew about it until one day people discovered that you could make some interesting creations in the game, showed it to the world and then it took off. Ever since Minecraft has become popular it has become its own thing. One thing that makes Minecraft standout is that it is available on every platform and it allows for crossplay between them all.

Evolution In Consoles

In the 1972 the Magnavox Odyssey allowed families to game at a price of $580, It offered singleplayer games using overlays that had to be attached to the screen and projected white squares on to the tv.

The colecovision came out in 1982 it offered a resolution of 256x192 with 16 colours, 1 kilobyte of RAM and an 8-Bit CPU. The controller improved from the odyssey by having more buttons labeled 0 to 9 in a grid pattern and connected to the console by a cable.

In 1985 Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES for short. The NES offered 24 colours 2KB of RAM and an 8-bit CPU that was faster than the odyssey, The resolution of Nintendo's console was 256x240 and allowed up to 2 players to play together on the same console.

The Sega Mega Drive, which came out in 1988 Improved upon the NES by having over double the amount of colours (64) and had 64KB of RAM. It also had a 16-bit CPU at 7.5MHz and featured stereo sound. The resolution of the Sega Mega Drive was 320x224.

Nintendo, in 1996, released the Nintendo 64 (N64) that doubled the resolution of NES (640x480) and was equipped with 4MB of RAM along side a 64-bit CPU @ 94 MHz. The console could also use up to 16 million colours (32-bit) and featured 16-bit stereo sound, and allowed 4 players to play at the same time.

In 2001, Microsoft began released the Xbox. it allowed up to 4 players to play locally and had internet access via ethernet to play online. The system had 64MB of RAM, a 733MHz CPU and offered internal storage of 8GB to save game progress instead of using a memory card like the previous consoles The price at the release was £300 and used Discs instead of cartridges.

Microsoft followed up with the release of Xbox 360 in 2004 which had 512MB of RAM, a tri-core PowerPC CPU at 3.6 GHz. It also Improved the controllers by making them wireless and was capable of running games at 1280x720 (720p) and had 250GB of internal storage that the user could save games to. The Xbox 360 also had 3 USB 2.0 ports and in later models, had wireless capability and kinect support. Extra info: during the transition from Xbox to the Xbox 360, Microsoft changed hardware vendors from Nvidia to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

The Xbox One, which came out in 2013, brought huge improvements. The console had a massive 8GB of RAM and an octa-core CPU at 1.75 GHz. In fact this is the same specs that you would find in today's mid to high range laptops. The storage also got an upgrade to 500GB and later upgraded to 1TB (1000GB) along with upgrading the USB ports to 3.0 to improve transfer speed. One major feature that the previous console didn't have is built-in Wi-Fi.

In today's generation we have the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro. The Xbox One X has a faster processor and graphics processor and 12GB of RAM. Both consoles can run at 4K at 30 frames-per-second, 60 on selected major titles like Halo, and Gears of War. Both consoles are also capable of running virtual reality.

Bibliography

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Anon., 2018. Virtual Boy | Nintendo | FANDOM powered by Wikia. [Online]
Available at: http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Virtual_Boy
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Plus, P., 2010. The evolution of 3D games. [Online]
Available at: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/gaming/the-evolution-of-3d-games-700995
[Accessed 02 October 2018].

RUTHERFORD, S., 2016. Nintendo Getting Back Into VR, 20 Years After Virtual Boy. [Online]
Available at: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/nintendo-vr-return,news-22199.html
[Accessed 7 October 2018].