The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World

by Steven Kent

  In 1961 Hochberg took a job with New Plan Realty, which was opening the Cavalier, one of the world’s first restaurant/arcades. Built in a new shopping center in Philadelphia, the Cavalier was an enormous endeavor with a 10,000-square-foot dining area and 2,500-square-foot arcade. Hochberg was hired to help build and manage the arcade.

  The same year that Hochberg moved to Philadelphia, a group of socially awkward college kids began an experiment that would eventually change Hochberg’s life.

  * Whether or not Lincoln did in fact play the game, an old political cartoon shows him playing it during his presidency.

  * Pin games is a slang term that members of the amusement industry often use to describe pinball machines.

  * Readers interested in learning more about the history of pinball and seeing its color and pageantry should look for Pinball! by Roger C. Sharpe (E. P. Dutton, 1977).

  * Years later, Harry Williams hired Mabs as his chief designer. Mabs later recruited Kordek to work for Williams.

  Forgotten Fathers

  There’s some question about how you define a computer game. Two interactive programs existed before Spacewar, in which you interacted with switches on the computer and you changed a display on the screen, depending on what you did with the switches. But they weren’t particularly designed as games. And they weren’t very popular because, as games, they weren’t very good.

  —Steve Russell, creator of Spacewar

  The members of the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had their own language. They called broken equipment munged.1 They called rolling chairs bunkies. They called garbage cruft. And they called practical jokes and impressive feats hacks.

  Like most colleges, MIT had several campus organizations. The Tech Model Railroad Club appealed to students who liked to build systems and see how things worked. These were not typical college students. Many of them were short and most were unathletic. Some wore thick glasses. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, years before the invention of the pocket calculator, these were the kids who carried a slide ruler.

  These strange college students, with their funny jargon and nerdy ways, did more to start the computer revolution than any Silicon Valley engineering team. Naturally curious, these MIT students had devoted their lives to intellectual tinkering. They believed in a cooperative society and imagined themselves living in a utopian world in which people shared information—sometimes without regard to property rights. Once they discovered computers, they became known as “hackers.” Before that, they were simply nerds.

  Some members of the TMRC explored MIT at night, looking for machines to examine. One night in 1959, Peter Samson opened a door in the Electronic Accounting Machinery building and found an IBM 407, a machine capable of creating and reading punch cards. To Samson, finding an unguarded computer was as exciting as discovering a new law of physics.

  The IBM 407 was not a full-fledged computer. In order to make it work, Samson and his friends needed to “kludge” a plug board. They didn’t mind the challenge—they’d joined the TMRC because they loved jury-rigging systems. Soon the IBM 407 became a major focal point in the lives of many TMRC members.

  The Hulking Giant

  Many computers of the 1960s were large enough to fill entire rooms. Their inner workings consisted of rows of expensive vacuum tubes; the standard building block for early electronics. Because vacuum tubes generated great amounts of heat, early computers needed cooling systems to prevent fires. Some even had water pipes running through them for cooling. Not only did vacuum tubes heat up, but they were also delicate. Certain computers, while in operation, required a dedicated technician to replace broken tubes.

  Since 1960, silicon chips have replaced transistors, which replaced vacuum tubes, resulting in smaller, faster, and more powerful computers. Floppy disks and compact disks are used instead of much less efficient forms of data storage, such as punch cards and ticker tapes. A standard 3.5-inch floppy disk can hold as much data as a mountain of punch cards and offers faster access to the information.

  For the gaming world, the biggest transformation is in the way computers display information. Early computers communicated via teletype. A few units had computer readout screens. Throughout the 1960s, the University of Utah, Stanford, and MIT were the only U.S. universities that had computers with monitors.

  In 1961 MIT’s two main computers were gigantic—an IBM 709, which the members of the TMRC called “the Hulking Giant,” and the TX-O, one of the earliest computers to use transistors. Though it was considerably smaller than the Hulking Giant, the TX-O still required 15 tons of air-conditioning equipment for cooling. Unlike the 709, which used punch cards, the TX-O encoded data on long strips of paper tape.

  Most students at MIT gravitated toward the IBM 709, causing the unregulated forces of the TMRC to develop disdain for it. They preferred the more efficient TX-O, which had been developed for military purposes. It was smaller, sleeker, and its military designers had given it a monitor. Working on the TX-O, several TMRC members quickly distinguished themselves as master programmers.

  In the summer of 1961, Digital Equipment donated its latest computer to MIT, the PDP-1 (Programmable Data Processor-1). Compared to the Hulking Giant and even the TX-O, the PDP-1 was modest in size—about the size of a large automobile. It sold for a paltry $120,000, and like the TX-O, it had a readout terminal. The TMRC adopted it immediately.

  In those days, when computers were as rare as nuclear reactors, hackers wrote programs for the good of the computer-loving community. TMRC members stored their PDP-1 programs on ticker tapes in a drawer near the computer, where anyone could try them out or even revise them. Creating a new program was considered an impressive hack. So was making a good revision.

  Steve Russell, a fairly new Model Railroader who had just transferred from Dartmouth College, decided to make the ultimate hack: an interactive game. Russell, a short, nervous kid, was fairly new to the club. He spoke quietly, wore glasses, and had curly hair. Though not a senior member of the club, Russell had earned the other club members’ respect by helping a professor implement a computer language called “LISP.”

  Despite his nickname, “Slug,” Russell was intensely smart and energetic. He was an avid reader of “B-grade” science fiction. He particularly loved Doc Savage, a Flash Gordon–like character. Reflecting that passion, Russell determined to set his interactive hack in outer space. He told the other club members about his plans and generated more than a little excitement.

  There was one problem, however. Russell needed motivating. Over the next few months, fellow club members would ask about his progress and become frustrated. They complained that he was wasting time. In the end, Alan Kotok, a more senior member of the TMRC, had to push Russell into finishing his work. When Russell told Kotok that he needed a sine-cosine routine to get started, Kotok went directly to Digital Equipment, the PDP’s manufacturer, to get it.

  Eventually, Allen Kotok came to me and said, “Alright, here are the sine-cosine routines. Now what’s your excuse?” He’d gotten it out of the [Digital Equipment] users’ library.

  Since I had run out of excuses, I sat down and wrote the program to run two spaceships on the CRT, which you controlled with switches. The prototype was completed in 1961 and the finished version in 1962.

  —Steve Russell

  It took Russell nearly six months and 200 hours to complete the first version of the game: a simple duel between rocket ships. Using toggle switches built into the PDP-1, players controlled the speed and direction of both ships and fired torpedoes at each other. Russell called his game Spacewar.*

  It was a two-player game; there wasn’t enough computing power available to do a decent opponent. I was the first person to not make money on a two-player computer game.

  They [the rockets] were rather crude cartoons. But one of them was curvy like a Buck Rogers 1930s spaceship. And the other one was very straight and long and thin like a Redstone rocket. The
y were commonly called the Needle and the Wedge.

  Except for the pacing, Spacewar was essentially like the game Asteroids. The spaceship controls were four switches. One let you rotate counterclockwise, another was for rotating clockwise, one fired your rocket for thrust, and the last one fired your torpedoes. The basic version used switches on the console, and your elbows got very tired.

  —Steve Russell

  In typical hacker fashion, TMRC members revised Spacewar. Some of these additions improved the game so much that they became integral elements. By the time Spacewar was finished, Russell’s simple game had an accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with an accurate gravitational field in the foreground.

  I started out with a little prototype that just flew the spaceships around. Pete Sampson added a program called Expensive Planetarium that displayed stars as a background. Dan Edwards did some very clever stuff to get enough time so that we could compute the influence of gravity on the spaceships. The final version of that was done in the spring of 1962.

  —Steve Russell

  Battles took place around Edwards’s sun. The best players learned how to accelerate into the sun’s gravitational field, loop around, and catch slower opponents off guard. Hovering too close or flying into the sun meant death. Another hacker added a hyperspace button. When trapped by an opponent, players could hit the button and disappear. The risk was that you never knew where your rocket would reappear. You could reappear safely across the screen, but you were just as likely to appear too close to the sun to save your rocket.

  To add a touch of realism, Russell originally made his torpedoes unpredictable. Most flew straight, but some strayed. Judging players’ reactions, he later recanted, replacing realism with dependability. His final version of the game had straight-flying torpedoes. Beyond these touches, Russell’s primary vision of an outer-space torpedo duel remained intact.

  Along with creating the first computer game, the members of the TMRC invented another first in electronic entertainment. Tired of sore elbows, Alan Kotok and Bob Sanders scrounged parts from the TMRC and assembled remote controllers that could be wired into the computer. These remotes were easier to use than the PDP-1’s native controls since they had dedicated switches for every Spacewar function, including hyperspace buttons. This was the forerunner to the gamepad.

  Though Russell’s amazing hack created a sensation throughout MIT, he never made a penny from it. PDP computers were not a consumer commodity, particularly not arcade machines. “We thought about trying to make money off it for two or three days but concluded that there wasn’t a way that it could be done,” says Russell.

  Eventually, Digital Equipment began using Spacewar as a diagnostic program for testing equipment. In effect, PDP buyers got the game free.

  Steve Russell never graduated from college. He followed a professor to Stanford University and eventually moved into the private sector. In the 1970s, he met another legendary computer wizard.

  Steve Russell wound up years later in Seattle, working for a time-share computer company. They would bring in kids after school and have them pound on keyboards to see if they could make the computers crash.

  There was only one kid who could crash them no matter what they did. The kid was named Bill Gates. There’s just this interesting little intersection of worlds that I just thought was a really fascinating thing.

  —Tom Zito, president, Digital Pictures

  Spacewar was the first computer game. Steve Russell made no attempt to copyright his work or to collect royalties from it. He was a hacker and had created his game to show that it could be done.

  The people behind the creation of the first video game did not share the Tech Model Railroad Club’s utopian vision. Their capitalistic vision held up better in the courts of law.

  The Father of Home Video Games

  I reported to the executive V.P. He knew what was going on. And he keeps asking me, “Baer, are you still screwing around with that stuff [video games]?” During the first couple of years and later on, I was subjected to his remarks like, “Stop wasting our money.”

  When the millions started coming in, everybody remembered how supportive they had been of the project.

  —Ralph Baer, former manager of Equipment Design Division, Sanders Associates

  The first video game was created by engineers at Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire–based defense contractor. Like many large contractors, Sanders had its share of sensitive and top-secret activities. But in 1967, some of the noises coming out of one Sanders research lab had many people wondering what was going on.

  For three months there were guitar sounds coming out of the little room on the fifth floor. It sparked all kinds of rumors.

  This is a military electronics company. Everything is classified. You don’t walk in and out of any place without having either a key card or keys. And here’s this room with guitar sounds coming out. All sorts of rumors started floating around about what we were doing in there.

  —Ralph Baer

  The Equipment Design Division of Sanders was led by a stern and meticulous engineer named Ralph Baer; a man with a background in radio and television design who had been with the company for more than ten years.

  Baer was born in Germany eleven years before Adolph Hitler took power in 1933, and he was largely self-educated. Being Jewish, he was kicked out of school at age fourteen. Two years later, his family moved to America, where he eventually took a correspondence course in radio and television servicing from the National Radio Institute.

  Baer had a knack for realizing positive results from unlucky turns of fate. After joining the army in World War II, he studied algebra while stationed in England. One day, after a long study session “in the English mud,” Baer was diagnosed with pneumonia. Three days after he entered the hospital, the rest of his platoon was sent to invade Normandy. He jokes that Algebra II saved his “collectives.”

  A year after he returned from the war, Baer enrolled at the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago. It was his first formal education since being denied schooling in Germany.

  After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in television engineering, he took a job with a small defense contracting firm, turning down an offer from CBS because the salary from the defense contractor paid five dollars more per week. Baer quickly developed a solid reputation. When Sanders hired him in 1955, it was to manage a design department with a staff of 200. By 1960, the staff had expanded to 500.

  Baer spent more than 30 years at Sanders. The first 15 years were dedicated to military projects. During this time, he weaned himself from vacuum tubes and began working on transistor technology and early microprocessors.

  Among Ralph Baer’s best attributes as an engineer was his methodical recording of every step of the inventing process. From the moment he began fleshing out new designs, Baer recorded the entire process, dated it, and filed it away. Because of his meticulous note-keeping, he knows exactly when and where he first got the idea to make games that could be played on a television.

  I’m sitting around the East Side Bus Terminal during a business trip to New York, thinking about what you can do with a TV set other than tuning in channels you don’t want. And I came up with the concept of doing games, building something for $19.95. This was 1966, in August.

  Now you’ve got to remember, I’m a division manager. I have a $7 or $8 million direct labor payroll. I can put a couple of guys on the bench who can work on something. Nobody needs to know. Doesn’t even ripple my overhead. And that’s how I started.

  —Ralph Baer

  The first man Baer allocated to game design was Bill Harrison. Once the concepts were roughed out, Harrison, well versed in transistor-circuit engineering, did most of the implementation. Baer describes Harrison as a young, talented technician who had educated himself on the workings of television sets by assembling a Heath Kit television set.

  In his younger days, Baer was extremely austere or, as he later
described himself, “uptight.” Working with Harrison, he created early video games using a crude mechanism for transferring images onto the television screen. Their game designs, however, lacked entertainment value. The first toy they made was a lever that players pumped furiously to change the color of a box on a television screen from red to blue. Though Baer would later prove to be an excellent electronic toy and game designer, in the beginning his work was more about engineering than game design.

  When he first presented his invention to the executive board, including the company founder Royden Sanders, most of the executives felt that Baer was wasting the company’s time. Some suggested that Baer shelve the project. Others wanted to pull the plug on it entirely.

  My boss came up to play with our rifle; we had a plastic rifle by then. And he used to shoot at the target spot [on a television screen] from the hip. He was pretty good at it, and that kind of got his attention. We got more friendly. And it kept the project alive.

  —Ralph Baer

  In 1967, Baer added another member to the team—Bill Rusch, who brought a needed understanding of fun and games.

  Bill Rusch was an engineer who worked for Herb Campman, the corporate IR&D director. I needed an engineer to work along with Harrison. I wanted two guys to work the problem, and Rusch came mostly because his boss didn’t want him.

  My biggest problem that summer was motivating Rusch. He’d come in at 10 or 11 A.M. and spend an hour talking; he was lazy and frustrating as hell. Rusch was an extremely creative and extremely lazy, hard-to-motivate guy. Brilliant. Also, he played really hep guitar.