Notable Video Arcade and Handheld games 1977-1979

Notable Video Arcade and Handheld games 1977-1979

Many innovations in games were still occurring in the video arcade industry and soon the release of the very same games on home video game systems would generate as much money as the arcades.

The game Space Wars was developed by Larry Rosenthal for Cinematronics. The company was a pioneering video arcade game developer and released games using vector graphics display. The idea of using vector graphics for game display was first seen in 1962 with Steve Russell’s SpaceWar! on the PDP-1. The game Space Wars was the first vector graphics arcade game. This game really took off selling over 30,000 units. The company Cinematronics goes on to build and sell some very popular video games based on vector graphics technology – Warrior (1978), Rip Off (1979) and many more.

In 1977, Mattel started to release handheld games. One very popular and novel game was Missile Attack. The game imagined for the player a City resembling New York City where the player must protect from ICBM’s raining down. The games were popular but the led display did not compare to the video arcade and home video look and feel of games. In addition, today handheld machines play many different games and are powerful enough to play games that were originally designed on 32-bit home video games systems.
By this time computers were connected together via networks, where software could easily move from machine to machine. “The global Internet’s progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet) of the U.S. Department of Defense.” ¹⁴ This network provided student with a love of playing and constructing their own games the opportunity to share their games with others across the country. William Crowther’s game Colossal Cave Adventure was made available via this network for many students to play and improve. The game made the rounds at MIT in 1977. It was at this time that Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Tim Anderson got together to create a new game involving maps, problem solving and of course the cast of characters expected in a computer adventure game, “..it had the thief, the Cyclops, the troll, the reservoir and dam, the house, part of the forest, the glacier, the maze,…”¹⁵ the game was named Zork and it too ran on a PDP-10. The game became very popular and well played from the user community called ‘net randoms’ that infested the MIT systems. The game was improved and redone for Apple II and Commodore 64 to much popularity and success.

At this time Kelton Flinn begins development on a text-based aerial combat game called Air, which is a precursor to the 1987 game Air Warrior, the first massively multiplayer online game. “If Air Warrior was a primate swinging in the trees, AIR whas the text-based amoeba crawling on the ocean floor. But it was quasi-real time, multi-player, and attempted to render 3-D on the terminal using ASCII graphics. It was an acquired taste.” ¹⁶

In Japan, the game responsible for an acute shortage of the Japanese equivalent of quarters and endless lost hours in 1978 was the game Space Invaders. The game was originally created by Taito. There is a story that components of the game originally served as test for incoming programmers and was not intended to be a game. The game was distributed in the United States by Midway. The game was one of the first shooting games or as we shall call them SHMUP (short for “shoot ‘em up”) . The graphics were simple and the aim was to move the user’s laser cannon left or right, while dodging behind ever deteriorating protective blocks on the screen while trying to destroy the ever faster rows of aliens coming down. The game was created, designed and programmed by Tomohiro Nishikado. Two notable features introduced by the game was

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  use of game “demo” screen or “attract” screen showing users how to play and enticing a passerby to drop a quarter into the slot
  
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  popularized the concept of maintaining a “high score”
  

The game is addictive as you try to clear the screen of the aliens all the while your barriers missiles are eaten away by both your own and alien the arsenal. The sweat on your brow increases as well as your heart rate as you notice the aliens taking more frequent and better aim as the ships march down the screen attempting to destroy your cannon. Once in a while a red “mystery ship” with a markedly different sound appears at the top tempting you to stop shooting at the white intruders and try to go for the points that will be rewarded for taking down what must be the mother ship. When you play the game you have to take into consideration that nothing like it was seen in arcades machines and this time period many themes involving aliens and space ships was becoming an ever increasing part of popular culture.

In 1978 Atari introduces the first use of a trac-ball for the game Atari Football. Players were represented as X’s and O’s on a black and white screen. Since the speed of the player in the game depended on how fast the player moved the trac-ball. Many players suffered hand injuries playing this game.

Cinematronics introduced another vector based game, Tailgunner in 1979. The premise of the game is that you are the tail gunner of a large space ship. Enemy ships approach the vessel for attack and you must aim you crosshairs and shoot them down before they slip past your cannons. The game ends when 10 ships get past your cannon. The game had a first-person perspective. It was the first video arcade game to feature three-dimensional animated objects.

Atari released their out vector-based coin-op game Lunar Lander in 1979. The object of the game is to pilot a lunar landing module to a safe touchdown on the moon.