WRITTEN BY
PJ EVANShe tale of Andy Capp’s Tavern
in Sunnyvale, California
may now be more myth
than truth, but we do know
some solid facts about what
happened in 1972. A few days after a
local company called Atari had installed
a bizarre-looking upright box next to the
pinball tables, the tavern’s owner called
them to complain the machine was
already broken. Distraught engineers
quickly arrived to find out what had
happened to their precious machine. On
opening the cabinet, they discovered the
coin holder was overflowing with quarters,
jamming the mechanism. Pong was a hit.
Although some doubts have been cast
over this story’s authenticity (including
accusations that the holder had been
deliberately filled up to impress the
landlord), it provides a great opening
moment for the history of video games.
Here, it’s going to be our closing scene.
What happened before Pong captured the
world’s imagination?
Let’s start with some ground rules:
what is a video game? For this particular
timeline, let’s exclude the electro-
mechanical automatons that were
popular in the late 19th century onwards- these normally required some human
interaction to work. The Mechanical Turk,
built in 1770, astounded the high and
mighty of Europe by playing chess with
seemingly true artificial intelligence. In the
mid-1800s, the truth was discovered: an
T
operator with a complex control system
sat inside the device, operating the hands
of the ‘Turk’. We’ll focus on inventions
that use true computation to provide
entertainment and challenges.
If we’re looking at the history of
computer games, that means we need
computers. The answer to the question
‘What was the first computer?’ involves
a lot of debate and beard-stroking, but
we can safely say that nothing qualifies
before 1943 and Alan Turing’s invention
of Colossus – a code-breaking computer
based at Bletchley Park, which is often
cited as the first of its kind. We’ll give an
honourable mention to the well-named
‘Cathode-ray tube amusement device’
patented by Thomas Goldsmith in- Although it used no
computation and was
never actually built, it
was designed for video-
based entertainment, but
we’re not counting it as a) no
computer and b) it didn’t exist.
THE GAME THAT
NEVER WAS
Continuing on the theme
of things that never existed,
we come to one of the
first-ever chess computer
programs, Turochamp.
It’s no surprise that chess
features heavily in the early
history of computer games,IN THE BEGINNING
How did the games industry really start? With bored
mathematicians and a need to sell new-fangled computersExploring the earliest video gamesExploring the earliest video games
44 / wfmag.cc
In The Beginning: exploring the earliest video gamesInterface