Jason Bagent's List: Game Art History Timeline

• the first sale of a home video game system in the world happened somewhere at or around this day, August 28, 1972
• The first home video game system, the Odyssey, was sold by television manufacturer Magnavox, based on patented technology developed in secrecy at a military defense contractor (yes, really).
• German-born American Ralph Baer, an engineer and inventor who holds what is probably the first degree in Television Engineering, issued to him by the American Television Institute of Technology in 1949.
   
   "When technology is ready for something novel, when the components needed to build something new become affordable, it is going to get done by someone- and more than likely, by several people,"

1 more annotation...

• WHEN THE FIRST issue of reason was published in May 1968, hardly anyone knew what a video game was. But that was about to change. That same year, inventor Ralph Baer patented the interactive television device that would go on to become the world's first home video game console. The very first computer game, Spacewar!, was conceived by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student just seven years before that.
• It was around the same time that the video game business we know today was getting ready to boom. The first home video game console -- the Magnavox Odyssey -- hit the market in 1972. Meanwhile, full-size arcade games like Pong and Computer Space were beginning to pop up in pinball arcades and pizza shops around the country. The teen-friendly pastimes were bound together even further in 1977, when video game entrepreneur Nolan Bushneil opened the first Pizza Time Theater -- later to become Chuck E. Cheese -- in San Jose, California. The kid-friendly concept restaurant fused a pizza shop with a sizable video arcade, and it helped pave the way for the windowless, screen-lit gaming rooms that would litter indoor malls and other suburban shopping centers throughout the 1980s.

• That path was not without its political hurdles. By the early 1990s, video game graphics technology had become far more advanced, and game designers used their new freedom to create interactive worlds that were far more detailed -- and in some cases more violent -- than anything that had come before.T hat grabbed the attention of national politicians. Sen. Joe Lieberman, then a Democrat from' Connecticut, arranged for a congressional hearing on the marketing of violent video games after seeing splashes of pixilated cartoon blood in such pulpy fantasy action games as Doom and Mortal Kombat.

  The hearings made big headlines at the time, as politicians scolded game makers for marketing what they said was graphic content to children. Several states followed up with bans on the sale of violent games to minors. But courts consistently overturned those prohibitions. Now, with the passage of time and the advancement of technology, it's hard to see the games that inspired such outrage as anything other than nostalgic early amusements.

1 more annotation...

• That was certainly the case for Steve Jobs (born 1955), raised in the suburban Valhalla of 1960s Silicon Valley where your next-door neighbor could, and did, bring you straight-from-the-fab microchips to play with. He attended Reed College, dropped out, went to India, and wound up back in Silicon Valley, where he reconnected with his high school buddy Steve Wozniak (born 1950). Woz, as he was called, was a classic tech geek, relatively unaffected by the counterculture. When he showed Jobs the device he was working on--a computer he built to dazzle the wireheads at the Homebrew Computer Club--Jobs became his partner. Then Jobs convinced a reluctant Woz, who was married, to quit his job at Hewlett-Packard to form Apple, a company Jobs named on a whim.

  Naturally, the values of their generation were reflected in their approach to designing products (notably the Apple II that became the first mass-market PC) and building their company. When Jobs orchestrated the release of Apple's groundbreaking 1984 Macintosh computer, he struck the cultural chords familiar to his generation, urging people to view it not as a product but a movement.
• Even earlier in the game was Bill Gates (born 1955), who wasn't very political but with the help of his high school buddy Paul Allen (born 1953) put together the pieces and saw something big was about to happen. He was a Harvard sophomore in 1974 when Allen showed him that issue of Popular Electronics. "We said, 'Oh, my God, it is going to happen without us?' " and right then the two vowed to write software for the Altair. "We wrote our slogan--a very modest slogan--'a computer in every home and on every desktop--in 1975," says Gates. "We were kind of brash in a certain way." Very boomer-esque. Didn't he find it odd that people who actually ran computer companies couldn't see it that way? "There's some benefit to youth," he says. "It's a lot like physics--Einstein saw relativity, the others didn't--but then he didn't understand quantum dynamics, that next generation came along, and he became the old guard. There's something about these wild changes--a personal computer being software-centric and personal, and a software industry that was high volume and low cost--that are hard to see."

• Kenbak-1

  Looking like an audio preamp from Heathkit, this model was advertised in Scientific American in 1971, making it the first personal computer, according to The Computer Museum History Center. It was first, with an important disclaimer. The Kenbak-1 wasn't based on a microprocessor chip. In fact, the $750 computer system employed off-the-shelf integrated circuits in an ingenious design by John V. Blankenbaker. Nor was it particularly user friendly, with switches for input and lights for output, and a puny memory storing just 256 characters (less than the content of the last two sentences of this paragraph). Like many firsts in technology, it didn't exactly ignite the market. After selling a mere 40 computers over two years, the Kenbak Corp. pulled the plug.
• Micral

  Though most early personal computers were developed in the United States, the title for the world's first commercial nonkit microcomputer system goes to a French company, R2E, and its 1973 entry, the Micral. Priced at $1750 and intended to replace minicomputers in light-usage situations, the hardware built around an Intel 8008 microprocessor was developed by company founder and president Truong Trong Thi. Responsible for its software was Philippe Kahn, later a successful software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately for R2E, it took nearly three years for an American firm to license the Micral. When Truong tried to set up his own U.S. subsidiary he encountered financial difficulties, eventually selling the Micral to French business machine maker Bull.
• Scelbi 8

  The first commercially advertised microprocessor system made in the United States was offered in 1974. It came as either a do-it-yourself kit or fully assembled. Initially aimed at scientific lab applications, the Intel 8008-based Scelbi 8H set new levels of usability with 4KB of internal memory (more than enough for this short history of early personal computers) and a cassette tape for mass storage. Teletype and oscilloscope interfaces also were included as part of the package. This computer also innovated plug-in circuit boards in desktop systems. A year later, the Scelbi 8B model was configured with 16KB of memory for businesses, but once again a pioneering computer failed to take the market by storm. Scelbi sold about 200 systems in all, losing $500 on each one.
• Xerox Alto

  Completely ahead of its time, this 1974 machine was designed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the R&D lab legendary for developing key elements of today's Macs and PCs. The Alto high-end workstation featured the first windows-style operating system, complete with icons, pull-down menus and other graphical user interface (GUI) niceties that wouldn't appear on the market for another decade. Another first: This computer had built-in connectivity for a local-area network. Never sold commercially, the Alto did find its way into universities through donations from Xerox. Ultimately all of its features would become standard for personal computers--except its vertical screen for viewing text pages, still a rarity in a universe of horizontal monitors.

2 more annotations...

• The designer, who joined Square Soft back in 1995 and has worked on titles like Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn,

• [EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management is a body elected by the players of the game to interface with the developers and help drive the direction of the MMO's development in directions that appeal to the player base. What are the opportunities and dangers of having such a body? CSM chairman Alexander "The Mittani" Gianturco explains.]
• On the front line in the battle between CCP and its customers over the fate of EVE is the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a democratically-elected group of player representatives who have been granted stakeholder status in the company's development process. This body, at times, acts as a sounding board, an advocacy group, or in direct opposition to CCP's business plans.

• nitially written off by some as a PR stunt, the CSM has developed since its introduction in 2008 into a powerful advocate. Mostly the CSM functions as a sanity check for mid-level developers within CCP to bounce game design ideas off of; since EVE is such a complex universe, it's impossible for every game designer to have personal experience with every aspect of the game.

   

  At other times, however, the CSM has been an outside source of pressure against CCP's management when it makes decisions which overrule the desires of their customers and the game designers, marshaling an impressive nexus of contacts in the gaming media and the player base to get that point across.

   

  Because of that, the CSM project seems like a double-edged sword for CCP from a business perspective. At one level, the CSM has improved the quality of the game and the lives of the players -- and thus CCP's bottom line. On another level, it has shown that a player advocacy group will not be co-opted by the sponsoring developer, and can focus player dissatisfaction into concrete action that can impact the company's balance sheet. A little democracy is a dangerous thing.

1 more annotation...