From what I’ve read about video games, it all started with the use of building computer parts together. In example the game known as ‘Tennis for Two’ was made through the use of lighting as was tic-tac-toe. The technology involved really limited them to producing these simple games however it all had to start somewhere. “If I hadn't done it, someone would've done something equally exciting if not better in the next six months. I just happened to get there first" A quote by Steve Russell.
Steve Russell made the game ‘Space war!’ taking him over 200 hours to finish the most simplest of games, the machines back then were as big as cars making it very complicated to produce the games, compared to the technology we have now-a-days it would take an expert no more than an hour to create such a game with a computer that’s about 5% the size of a car. What’s simple now was complicated back then, but working at it and testing his ideas would only give an actual answer if it really could be achieved.
Ralph Baer while working for a TV company was asked to create the world’s ‘best’ TV, however he went along with designing something new his boss and probably the world would be amazed by and with the knowledge of making TV’s for a living he could very well do it. As far as I can tell however Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr and Estle Ray Mann were the first people who wanted to use computers and technology for fun. They based the idea on a missile simulation of the radars used in World War II using a Cathode Ray Tube.
They are many people around the same time who could claim to have made the first ever game like Claude Shannon and his chess program or Alexander S. Douglas creating the tic-tac-toe game, however I do notice how all of these people come from a background relating to science within machines and I think that’s where it has mainly started like in gaming today you need to know what console your making a game for and how it will work else what’s the point in software without hardware? Hardware is the bricks and concrete in gaming, without that the rest wouldn’t stand, you need to build a computer before it can do anything.
It seems as soon as computers where created the idea began to expand into what we could do with them, for example using a radar for planes in the World War, I guess bombing and trying to kill each other with a plane is sort of like a game? (Not a fun one however). I think boredom and the ‘fun’ factor played a big role in the creation of games simply because we play them when we have nothing else to do and these guys had the time on their hands to invent these machines capable of challenging humans when no one else is there to play against. It sort of defines how inventors and science works, you have to make something by investing time and understand what it is you are making, to then understand how to make something else out of what you already have like layers in time from the past to what we have now for example look at Pong from the 1970’s and then look at an Xbox 360 game today, how did we get from simple 2D Pong to complicated and sophisticated hardware, software and graphics we have now? They have developed but they all had to start somewhere and in this case gaming was derived from computers, meaning as the technology advances so will the games we play, increasingly becoming better and that to me is where all of their backgrounds are so significant because you can’t just make a video game out of nothing, you have to know something first before you can create something.
I think it’s all about being creative and having ideas and experimenting with them from what you know already, because that’s what all these inventors who wanted to make games seemed to do in the late 1940’s through to the 70’s. I mean if someone never invented computers, Gaming wouldn’t exist and I wouldn’t be writing this Blog because Game Art wouldn’t exist.
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