Planting the Seed

The Magnavox Odyssey makes TV more interesting.

The 1970s were a big decade. Vietnam ended, Microsoft started, Skylab's crew returned to earth, home computers gave rise--and so did hip-hop--Pol Pot assailed the people of Cambodia, Patty Hearst got kidnapped, Margaret Thatcher took office, and Nixon resigned. It was a notable decade for electronic games too. By the mid-1970s, Pong and Atari were slowly gaining momentum, and the Magnavox Odyssey was turning TV sets into game stations. But the economy stunk, inflation was astronomical, and crime and unemployment were both rampant. Music wasn't much fun either. Video games' slow ascent through the septuagenarian decade laid the foundation upon which the $10 billion industry squats today, but the birthing ground was barren. A lot had to change over the course of 30 years to make games take root.

The Atari VCS or later, 2600.

Russ Perry Jr. is the editor of 2600 Connection, an Atari 2600 newsletter, and he's a member of Cyberpunks Entertainment, which produced Stella at 20: An Atari 2600 Retrospective, a documentary about the original Atari programmers. He was only a preteen in the '70s, but he revisits the decade as an amateur historian. "A lot of people were starting to get the idea that making video games could be a pretty lucrative thing." Perry borrows a line from J. Michael Straczynski, of Babylon 5, by saying, "'The universe was holding its breath,' waiting for something to happen."

Plenty was happening. The Altair 8800 was the first PC to come to market, and the UPC symbol was introduced at grocery stores. The pocket calculator was born, and so went our ability to perform basic math without its assistance. The C programming language and Unix both emerged. Times were changing, but Perry says there were "plenty of people who hadn't heard of video games in 1974--and wouldn't care if they had."

Spacewar kept Stanford’s Tressidor Student Union sandwich shop hopping.

Old-school Atari technical writer Bill Haslacher recollects that in the mid-1970s, PCs cost about $7,000, so massively multiplayer online RPGs (MMORPGs) were a long way off. But the first, true interactive computer game arrived in 1961--thanks to MIT student Steve Russell--and Haslacher remembers it well. "In 1974, Stanford's Tressidor Student Union sandwich shop had a time-warp peek at the future. It was Spacewar, and it was running on a Digital Equipment minicomputer lovingly crafted into a coin-operated video game." Haslacher says Spacewar was "never easy to play," but it drew crowds that were eager to toss quarters into its ad hoc coin slot.

If the smartest kids on the block could succumb to video games, how could the rest of us resist? The roots were already planted in academia.

Pinball had been around for years, but it hadn't significantly changed interactive entertainment. Arcades were seen, Perry says, as a "kind of lowbrow, 'bad influence' sort of thing" and not as a pastime destined for longevity.

Janet H. Murray, Ph.D. and professor and director of graduate studies in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been instrumental in the development of Georgia Tech's new degree programs that will launch in the fall of 2004. One offers a doctoral degree in digital media, and the other offers a bachelor of science degree in computational media. Murray concurs that while pinball was considered somewhat of a low activity, "baseball is considered practically a religion," implying a social importance on gaming aside from the environment in which games exist. "If you consider the solemnity with which people--99.9 percent of them male--talk about baseball or football, there is no question that those are serious pursuits and that there's something very, very important at stake in the performance and the witnessing of those games." To Murray, sports like baseball and football are more appropriate antecedents to video games than the smoky pinball bar.

Murray explains that games are a representational medium, like television and film, so they must be considered in the same context. How well do they express themes and ideas? The pinball machine, Murray says, "really was very limited in expressiveness. Now board games, some of them were really beautiful and some of them were played with great attention and passion, but there's just no question that the digital medium adds so many layers of expressive possibilities to gaming." So begins the journey.