The History of Computer Games: Worlds in Boxes
Rich Carlson takes us on wild ride through the History of Computer Games: Worlds in Boxes.
By - Rich "Zdim" Carlson
Rich "Zdim" Carlson, who just finished working on American McGee's Alice at Rogue Entertainment, has taken a fancy to game box art. Big boxes, little boxes, fancy boxes and plain boxes. In a moment of enlightenment, he decided to trace the history of computer games using their box covers to reminisce. Be sure to mouse-over the boxes, as many of them will direct you to downloads or further information about these classics!
The 80's: The First Age
Things got rolling (or bouncing) with Atari's Pong. (Pong was like the black monolith from 2001, but it appeared in bars and restaurants.) ...And mainframe/dumb terminal games like Star Trek and Crowther & Woods' classic cave crawl, Adventure. Also known as Colossal Caves, Adventure was the game that got "everyone" hooked when it was ported to microcomputers. I'm a tad hazy on the dates here but I think this must have been 1978-1982. (Go here to read the amazing story of Adventure, and its creators.)
...And then the onslaught of noisy, flashy coin-op games that soon appeared in every bar, pizzeria and arcade. Defender, Centipede, Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man, Space Wars, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Tempest, Tron... Soon, early consoles like Mattel's Intellivision, Nintendo and Colecovision brought many of these arcade games, and other games, into the living room. Most of these games were unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.
  
At home, that brand spanking new (and expensive, unless one owned a C-64) microcomputer offered strange new worlds to explore. All kinds of fascinating games were suddenly possible to create, and a whole new art form began. Whether playing Zork on an Apple IIe, or coin-op Gauntlet with friends, it was all too easy to get hooked, and become spellbound. This was totally new and special. It was like hearing The Beatles, or seeing Star Wars, for the first time. And people were willing to pay for the experience, whether doling it out addictively in quarters, or by purchasing a game system and dozens of games. I'm no economist, but that seems a potentially lucrative combination. It was like Rock & Roll.
Next: War games...
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