It was the Canadians and the British, the first to build computers capable of playing computer games. From the Canadians, Bertie the Brain was born, and it could play tic-tac-toe. The British gave us Nimrod, a computer capable of playing the game of Nim.

Today, the world wouldn’t be the same without video games, for a gamer knowing where it all begun is a must. The early history of this industry is long, but we can summarize it by learning about the most prominent games of that time. I’ve put together a list with the top 25 computer games from the beginning of video game history.

Tennis for Two

Released as a tech demo in 1958 by William Higinbotham Tennis for Two is arguably the first computer game ever created simply for entertainment. The game recreated a tennis match seeing from the side, where two players would compete against each other. The game was played by an aluminum controllers that had a button that hit the ball and a knob that adjusted the angle of the ball.

Spacewar!

Developed in the MIT in 1962, Spacewar! is one of the precursors of all video games. In this game two ships (the Needle and the Wedge) face each other trying to shoot each other down while sorting the dangers of fighting to close to a star.

Star Trek

Taking advantage of the popularity of the TV series with the same name, the game Star Trek was released in 1971. This is a text-based strategy game where you control the Enterprise and your goal is to hunt Klingon warships. Your game will end if you destroy all Klingon warships, your ship gets destroyed, or the time limit runs out. The game is written in BASIC programming language.

Pong

Pong was released in 1972 by Atari and by many this is considered the first game ever. While technically that’s not true since there were many games before Pong, this game was definitely the first commercially successful computer game in history. Pong is essentially a digital version of table tennis.

Maze War

Developed between 1972 and 1973, Maze War is considered along with Spasim as the ancestors of the first-person shooter genre. Maze War is also considered the first multi-player game played between peer-to-peer computers. This means that in a sense this game could be the ancestor of modern online gaming. The goal of the game is to find and shoot other players.

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Overview

During the late 1970s, arcade game technology had become sophisticated enough to offer good-quality graphics and sounds, but it was still fairly basic (realistic images and full motion video were not yet available, and only a few games used spoken voice) and so the success of a game had to rely on simple and fun gameplay. This emphasis on the gameplay is why many of these games continue to be enjoyed today despite having been vastly outdated by modern computing technology.

The Killer List of Videogames (KLOV) web site has compiled a list of the “Top 100 (arcade) Video Games.” Fifty of them (including all the games on its Top 10 list) were introduced during the period from 1979 to 1984.

Business

The Golden Age was a time of great technical and design creativity in arcade games. Games were designed in a wide variety of genres while developers had to work within strict limits of available processor power and memory. The era also saw the rapid spread of video arcades across North America and Japan.

At this time, arcade games started to appear in supermarkets, liquor stores, gas stations and many other retail establishments looking for extra income. Popular games occasionally caused a crush of teenagers, eager to try the latest entertainment entry.

Probably the most successful arcade game companies of this era were Namco (especially in Japan) and Atari (especially in the United States). Other notables include Nintendo (whose mascot, Mario, was introduced in 1981’s Donkey Kong), Bally Midway Manufacturing Company (who later was purchased by Williams), Capcom, Cinematronics, Konami, Sega, Taito, Williams, and SNK.

Technology

Arcades began to gain momentum in the late 1970s with games such as Gee Bee (1978) and Galaxian (1979) and became widespread in 1980 with Pac-Man, King and Balloon, Tank Battalion, and others. The central processing unit in these games allowed for more complexity than earlier discrete circuitry games such as Atari’s PONG (1972).

The Golden Age saw developers experimenting with new hardware, creating games which used the crisp lines of vector displays as opposed to standard raster displays. A few of these games became great hits, such as 1980’s Battlezone and Tempest and 1983’s Star Wars, all from Atari, but vector technology fell out of favor with arcade game companies due to the high cost of repairing vector displays. (Vectrex, a home video game system with a built-in vector display, was released in 1982.)

Developers also experimented with laserdisc players for delivering movie-quality animation. The first game to exploit this technology, 1983’s Dragon’s Lair from Cinematronics, was three years in the making. It was a sensation when it was released (and, in fact, the laserdisc players in many machines broke due to overuse), but the genre dwindled in popularity because the games were fairly linear and depended less on reflexes than on memorizing sequences of moves.

New controls cropped up in a few games, though, arguably, joysticks and buttons remained the favorites for most manufacturers. Atari introduced the trackball with 1978’s Football. Spy Hunter included a lifelike steering wheel and Hogan’s Alley introduced tethered light guns to the arcade market. Other specialty controls, such as pedals in racing games and a crossbow-shaped light gun in Crossbow, also debuted in this era.

Gameplay

With the enormous success of the early games, dozens of developers jumped into the development and manufacturing of arcade video games. Some simply copied the “invading alien hordes” idea of Space Invaders and turned out successful imitators like Galaxian, Galaga, and Gaplus, while others tried new concepts and defined new genres. Rapidly evolving hardware allowed new kinds of games which surpassed the shoot-em-up gameplay of the earliest games.

Games such as Donkey Kong and Qix introduced new types of games where skill and timing are more important than shooting as fast as possible. Other examples of innovative games are Atari Games’ Paperboy where the goal is to successfully deliver newspapers to customers, and Namco’s Phozon where the object is to duplicate a shape shown in the middle of the screen. The theme of Exidy’s Venture is dungeon exploration and treasure-gathering. One innovative game, Q*Bert, played upon the user’s sense of depth perception in order to deliver a novel experience.

Some games of this era were so popular that they entered the popular culture. The release of Pac-Man in 1980 caused such a sensation that it initiated what is now referred to as “Pac-Mania” (which later became the title of the last coin-operated game in the series, released in 1987). Released by Namco, the game featured a yellow, circle-shaped creature trying to eat dots through a maze while avoiding pursuing enemies. Though no one could really agree what the “hero” or enemies represented (sometimes they were referred to as ghosts, other times goblins or just monsters), the game was extremely popular; there are anecdotes to the effect that some game owners had to empty the game’s coin bucket every hour in order to prevent the game’s coin mechanism from jamming from having too many coins in the receptacle. The game spawned an animated television series, numerous clones, Pac-Man branded foods and a hit pop song, Pac-Man Fever. Though many popular games quickly entered the lexicon of popular culture, most have since left, and Pac-Man is unusual in remaining a recognized term in pop culture, along with Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., and Frogger.

The enormous popularity of arcade games also led to the very first video game strategy guides; these guides (rare to find today) discussed in exacting detail the patterns and strategies of each game, including variations, to a degree that few guides seen since can match. “Turning the machine over” by making the score counter overflow and reset to zero was often the final challenge of a game for those who mastered it, and the last obstacle to getting the highest score.

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