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 and we'll call it even!Advanced Lingo For Games
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| From Space War to Pong
The first computer game was created by Steve Russell and other graduate students in 1962 on a PDP-1 mainframe computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It involved two space ships that floated around in the gravity free environment of space and shot pixels at each other. The graphics were actually much better than what was to follow. The game even included a mathematically generated star field behind the ships. This first game was addicting and fun. It was made freely available by the creators, so it soon found itself on just about every PDP-1 computer at every college that had one. However, commercial success was out of the question, as PDP-1 computers were too expensive to make into arcade machines, and no one owned a personal computer yet. Meanwhile, the computer game evolved. A game called Lunar Lander consisted of absolutely no graphics, but could be played on computers that had no screen, only a spool of paper as an output device. A line of text would appear to tell you your position, velocity, and fuel remaining. You made a move, and the new position, velocity and fuel update were printed. The object was to land before running out of fuel. Not far behind these games was the classic "Adventure." This was a precursor to all computer adventure and role playing games. The game was purely text-based. It simply described your location and you gave it commands like "go north" or "pick up sword." The computer game first came into the public eye with early arcade games like "Pong." These games were first placed in shopping malls, right next to pinball machines and other coin-operated devices. But they soon took over the arcades. | |