C H A P T E R in Software

Creation Code 128 Code Set B in Software C H A P T E R

FIGURE 1-1

In 1971, Intel invented the microprocessor, and changed the nature of computing and, indeed, all of society forever Because microprocessors were cheap, and could be manufactured in large quantities, they made it possible to use computing power in all kinds of ways that had never been tried before Two of the earliest were a coin-operated video game named Pong, and a home console version of essentially the same game, the Magnavox Odyssey Video gaming was a huge success, and a new form of mass-market entertainment was born The earliest consoles could only play one or two games that were hardwired into them, but in 1976, Fairchild Camera and Instrument introduced a machine that accepted ROM cartridges This important advance enabled players to buy new games without having to buy a whole new machine By the 1980s, the market for the games was growing at a tremendous rate, and there were several different home console machines available The two most popular were Atari s 2600 and Mattel s Intellivision Anyone could make ROM cartridges for these machines, so new publishers were springing up overnight The programmers often earned royalties on their games, and some of them became immensely rich making such classic titles as Pitfall and Chopper Command The games had to fit within 4K of memory, so this was truly programming on the bare metal no fancy object-oriented programming languages for them! but on the other hand it was possible for one person to write an entire game in just a few months There were few specialized musicians or artists on the projects; the programmers did it all But within the early publishers success were the seeds of their downfall They kept producing new games faster and faster in order to meet the demand, and in doing so they began to sacrifice quality The games were buggy, too much like one another, and just not that much fun In 1983, the public started to lose interest The industry, which had been spending money assuming that the extraordinary rate of growth would continue indefinitely, crashed Atari and Mattel nearly went out of business Imagic, a publisher which made games for both those machines, was within three days of going public on the stock exchange when Atari announced that it was losing money Imagic s initial public offering was withdrawn, and within a few months they were bankrupt Throughout 1984 and 1985, the home video game industry was nearly dead, although arcade machines continued to be successful at a slower pace

Now we have to go back to 1971 again to look at a whole other branch of gaming: personal computer games When the microprocessor was invented, electronics hobbyists seized on it with delight Building a computer s central processing unit was too

big a project for most hobbyists, but the microprocessor allowed them to buy the CPU off the shelf, then add the memory and peripherals necessary to turn it into a general-purpose computer In 1975, the first microcomputer went on the market: the Altair 8800, which was sold as a kit Soon after that, preassembled micros began to appear The early ones were too small to do much with, and the general public paid them little attention Large mainframes running timesharing systems were still the preferred computer for any serious work Because microcomputers which later began to be called personal computers were first adopted by hobbyists, a culture of sharing information and helping each other grew up around them The owners of a particular machine would establish a user group that met on a regular basis to exchange tips and software (usually programs that their members had written) Although the Internet has reduced the need for user groups, the culture of sharing and mutual support is still very much part of the personal computing world As soon as personal computers became available, people began writing games for them Radio Shack s TRS-80 was one of the most popular machines, as was the Commodore PET, which I owned Most early machines were able to run BASIC programs, so some games were ported over from the mainframes The (completely unauthorized) Star Trek game I mentioned in the Introduction was among the best Computing magazines of the late 70s and early 80s often published entire printouts of game programs written in BASIC Small game companies appeared, selling their games on floppy disks or cassette tapes stuck inside a zip-lock bag with a photocopied page of instructions The early computer game industry grew slowly The machines were small and expensive, and, more importantly, most of them could only display text or rudimentary graphics Most people felt no need to own one and couldn t imagine what they would do with it if they did If kids wanted interactive entertainment, they could go down to the arcade or play on their home console machines, which offered a much more exciting experience

in a 9-to-18-month period, and do it with under 10 man years of effort (current projects can be 100 300 man years of effort) It was a narrow hobbyist market, aimed at the smart, early adopter, high-tech consumers

ack in the STORIES entertainment to old days, the people Most people genres were involved were not as well defined; the teams passionate, na ve, and idealistic, were smaller and more intimate and you did not see as much You knew we were part of of the hard-nosed business something revolutionary in tactics prevalent today You bringing interactive could bring a game to market