A Brief History of Games

Some historians believe that the oldest game is mancala, which may have been played by the ancient Nabataeans (northern Arabia) around 6000 BC.  While Mancala is still played today, it is unlikely to be exactly the same as the version archeologists discovered in Jordan which they dated to over 8000 years ago. Mancala is a name for a category of game (count and capture) that stems from the Arabic word which means "to move." Examples of the game with rules intact have been found in several Egyptian ruins dating back to 1400 BC. There are two basic variations of the game, one played in the Northern Hemisphere and one played south of the equator. A "two-rank" board similar to the modern game and a "four-rank" board.  The decoration and creation of Mancala boards is said to represent agriculture and landscape; a depiction of land being turned into a productive field through clearing plowing, irrigation, and harvesting. 

The Royal Game of Ur  is the oldest game found in which we know the rules. It was invented by Assyrians about 5000 years ago. The game received it's name from Leonard Woolley who discovered the game while doing excavations at the Royal Cemetery at Ur. Ur is located in modern-day southern Iraq. It is a two-player strategy game where the players race to move all their pieces through the course.

It was only in recent human history that games have been invented by individual creators. Most of our games are considered to come from folk tradition, as there is not one creator. These games developed over the course of many years with many different people creating new rules and changing the game. An example of this, would be the game of chess.

The first game designer may be George Fox a children's author who created the game The Mansion of Happiness: An Instructive Moral and Entertaining Amusement in 1800. The game was inspired by Christian morality, where players race to get to the mansion of happiness. Virtue spaces move you forward and vice spaces move you backward.

Although George Fox designed this game in 1800, the idea of individual game designers would not really take off until Milton Bradley designed The Checkered Game for Life  in 1860 based off of The Mansion of Happiness.  The Checkered Game for Life would later become The Game of Life, or Life in 1960.

Table games involving sticks and balls evolved from efforts to bring outdoor games like ground billiards, croquet, and bowling inside for play during inclement weather. In 1777 a party was thrown in honor of Louis XVI and the queen at Chateau Bagatelle. The highlight of the party was a new table game featuring a slender table and cue sticks, which players used to shoot ivory balls up an inclined playfield. The game was dubbed bagatelle and it swept across France.

French soldiers would bring their favorite bagatelle tables to America during the American Revolutionary War. Bagatelle spread and became very popular in America.  In Bagatelle, a stick is used to strike a ball through a chute. Using gravity, the ball then careens through a playfield filled with pins. The ball eventually lands in a scoring pocket.

The predecessors to video games are amusement machines (popular in places called “penny arcades,” themselves the predecessor to the modern video arcade). Pinball was especially important. Pinball was developed from Bagatelle, the stick (or pool cue) was replaced with a spring launcher. Electricity was added, adding dynamic affects such as pop bumpers that propelled the ball. The most important innovation occurred when Harry Mabs created the flipper for a Gottlieb pinball table named Humpty Dumpty. Before this, players relied on the initial spring launcher shot and crude slaps and bumps of the table to influence the ball. The flipper added skill and, most importantly, interaction. Players now had a greater degree of control: a more discrete input that provides an obvious output. Historically, it also provided a critical function: it removed pinball from the realm of gambling and into one of skill, paving the way for legalization of pinball machines in the 1970s. 

Pinball created an industry which at one point rivalled Hollywood in revenue. In doing this, they created the infrastructure in which video games could later exist. The first true game designers were from the pinball industry. This is because the industry grew large enough to require dedicated persons whose main job was to design the games. This was important, because dedicated designers would then acquire the expertise and experience to iterate upon their previous designs.

Perhaps the most famous pinball designer was Harry Williams. He designed numerous tables and pinball innovations, such as the “tilt” mechanism now standard on all pinball machines. (The tilt mechanism limits how much a player can hit a pinball machine to influence the ball. If a machine is struck too hard, the player usually loses the current ball in play). While video game design requires a combination of creativity and software engineering, pinball design requires a similar combination of creativity and electro-mechanical engineering.

The first video game was created in 1958 called Tennis for Two , featuring moving graphics on an oscilloscope. 

The first computer game is generally acknowledged to be Spacewar! by Steve Russell in 1962. It was developed on the PDP-1 (Programmable Data Processor-1) at MIT. In those days, computers were the size of entire rooms and were largely consigned to major universities and corporations. The PDP-1 was known for its small size, the size of a small car. Notice the distinction between computer and video game. This distinction no longer really exists.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, MIT was the primary source for computer game development, for the simple reason that the university was one of the few places where computers were accessible. In contrast, early arcade video games were made by hard-wiring the game’s logic using transistor-transistor logic circuitry, not with programmable central processing units (CPUs). As it happens, these college students and enthusiasts also happened to be players of table-top wargames and other advanced non-digital games. In the 1970s, a new wargame was developed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, called Dungeons and Dragons. Eschewing the historical-based topics of previous table-top games in favor of fantasy, this game would immediately influence computer game designers, who almost immediately began designing games on college mainframe computers to simulate certain aspects of Gygax and Arneson’s game. One such game was called Colossal Cave Adventure (released in 1976). The game was played using text commands with no pictures or illustrations.

Surprisingly, the first commercial video game was not an arcade game. It was a home gaming console, the Magnavox Odyssey, created at Sanders Associates in a project led by Ralph Baer in 1972, and it utilized simple flashing lights on a television screen. The Odyssey was incredibly simple: The system could generate three lights, one of which could move on its own to simulate sports such as tennis. Players could move the other lights with knobs on controllers permanently connected to the system. These controllers had no resemblance to the modern controllers we use today.

The Odyssey would not become a massive hit, however. Pong, developed by Atari, would be. After some unsuccessful early experiments, Atari engineer Al Alorn developed Pong, with instructions from Bushnell to make something simple. His design improved on the Magnavox Odyssey’s implementation of tennis. These design iterations included:

•  Instead of single paddle, the paddles in Pong were actually segments. This allowed Alcorn to control the angle of the ball based on where it hit the paddle. A strike in the center of the paddle would cause the ball to fly back from the direction it came. Striking the outer edges would send the ball back at an angle.

•  Alcorn programmed the ball so that it would increase in speed during extended rallies.

•  Unlike the original Magnavox Odyssey version of tennis, Atari’s Pong was able to keep track of the player’s score.

Though Ralph Baer may have had a better claim to creating the first commercial video game, the revelation that Atari had been exposed to the Odyssey is important because it demonstrates the importance of iteration in design.

The original video tennis created by the Odyssey team established a functional baseline. Al Acorn at Atari could therefore improve upon it by tweaking several aspects of the game. This is the normal process of game design development and improvement. Put another way: It is how we find the fun! First, get something working. Then observe how the game can be more interesting or fun. Make those improvements, and then repeat the cycle again! It sounds quite simple (and it is). But it is nonetheless crucial for the development of great games. Iteration is an extremely important game design principle.

After Pong, video games began their ascent into mainstream entertainment, starting with the video arcade. While arcades are still very much alive today, the golden age of video arcades was from 1975 until about 1983 (that is, when the video arcade was the main venue for most people who played video games). While the Magnavox Odyssey was the first home gaming console, it didn’t take very long for other companies, including Atari, to develop their own home video game devices (1977 Atari 2600). Eventually, these game consoles would rival arcade games in popularity. After an infamous crash in the video game market in 1983 (generally attributed to mediocre game software and the emergence of inexpensive home computers), the market recovered with the Nintendo Entertainment System (known as the Famicom in Japan in 1983, released in the US in 1986). After that, there was never any doubt that video games were here to stay as a form of entertainment.