A history of video games and some internet crazyness

You know, you can have a quick wander about on the internet and find a bunch of information on just about everything, everything it seems apart from the birth of the lowly video game, it is a thing that is veiled in mystery and legend, with so little hard fact on the subject, makes it hard to give a definite answer, but tonight I hope to at least shed a little bit of light on the subject.

Now games in their earliest form started to appear in the mid 40s, with all of them either being complete theory or they were pretty archaic, with no rules or objectives built in like games of today are, they are more like balls, its there, you can do things with it, you just got to make the game rules from scratch to play a game, plus it was something that required specialist equipment, not something you could buy at the local store.

Now the first real game (in my opinion) was SpaceWar in the 60s, it was developed by a bunch of people that were really interested in computer technology at the time and wanted to see what they could do with the stuff, around 200 man hours later and SpaceWar was created. It was a simple affair, 2 spaceships that are near a sun with limited fuel have to try to destroy the other with missiles, now compared to the earlier games that were developed, it has a clear objective for the player to accomplish, so the player didn’t have to make up rules for the games, which makes them much more like modern games than what had appeared before.

Now you think, “why is it just hobbyists that developed the game and not scientists like the older games?” well for one thing, it was a lot easier for people to get hold of to play, as the computers that the game worked on weren’t the size of a house and about the same cost, so of course as you would mess around in paint, they messed around with the computers to see what they could do for fun!

Which is and what should always be the main drive to making new games, to make something fun for others whilst having fun creating it.

Now origionally I was supposed to do a part of my history of video games in this blog and in 3 pieces, but I felt that it might be better, for it to be in its own blog post, for I have played many games, been a part of the Gaming community for most of my life and so have a deep history with this part of our modern society.