Planet Sillicon

Decades of Gaming – 70’s

By blog on Jan. 10, 2010.

I was over on IGN a few days back and noticed an interesting series of articles about gaming throughout the past 40 years.

The first of the articles outlines the birth of modern video gaming. Most gamers are probably aware that gaming really kicked off in the 70’s with coin operated machines, primarily, with Pong which came out in 1972. Though Pong is often remembered as the original computer game, it was actually very similar to a game which had been released by Ralph Baer who created the Magnavox Odyssey home console, along with a Pong-like game only a few months before Pong hit the market.

In ‘71, Nolan Bushnell created the very first consumer video game, called Computer Space. Apparently the game was overly complex and somewhat abstract, which unfortunately meant that the game flopped, but hey, it was the first cab off the rank and that’s rather important.

There were games that kicked off entire genres in the 70’s, such as simulator games with Lemonade Stand in ‘73. There were also some of the most important advances in computer gaming in this decade. Gaming consoles for the home were first introduced in the 70’s, the Magnavox Odyssey, then a few years later the Fairchild F, and then the one that really made an imprint, the Atari Video Computer System was released in ‘77 for a hefty $US200.

During the 70’s there was at least one arcade game in every pub or gaming room, though towards the end of the decade they weren’t finding the popularity that they had once had.

What amazes me is that from the mid 60’s to the mid 70’s, the advances in home gaming were astronomical. The earliest computer games were built on mainframes the size of a room, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop. To look at that mainframe, and then the Atari 2600 in ‘77 which just plugged right on in to your television… well that’s just awesome in the eyes of this avid gamer.