Game Design, Birth of Games tutorial

The birth place of videos game was a computer laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT for short. The students at MIT developed a game called Space War in the 1960’s. This game was not a success because the hardware cost too much for the average player.

Atari’s Pong was also a first generation video game introduced in 1971. It was based on a table tennis or ping pong game. It used the “bat and ball” concepts and had an overwhelming response from the public. Throughout the next two years, multiple variations of Pong were released including Super Pong, Pong Doubles a two-player game, Super Pong Ten, and Ultra Pong.

In 1977, cartridge-based consoles were released. Atari, the developers of console video games, called the first cartridge system the Atari VCS. This system became the industry standard for years and provided the largest library of software for any console during this Golden Age of video games. The Golden Age is known for such classic titles as Adventure, Asteroids, Combat, Joust, and Space Invaders.

In 1983, the game industry crashed, largely because of the influx of cloned games and poor game design. Although major game developers like Atari, Magnavox, Mattel, and Coleco dropped out of the video game business, arcade-type games were still on the market. Commodore 64, one of the arcade-type developers were still in the market. However, many companies were developing similar kinds of console games and couldn’t compete with each other. This led to the crash in the game industry.

So, what went wrong?

Nobody was more surprised than Atari, who in 1983 spent millions bringing their biggest game title to market, a game for the Atari 2600 based on the movie ET, based on the highest-grossing film in history. They thought they were going to have a very popular game based on this most popular film. It was, in fact, a game for the most popular gaming system at that time.

Atari sent out seven million copies of game anticipating its popularity, and were shocked to find that six million of them sat untouched on store shelves. Legend has it that all the unsold games were buried in a landfill in New Mexico!

In late 1983, a number of companies who were marketing consoles went bankrupt. This “shakeout" was mostly due to the fact that there were few good game designers out there who could fully understand the market trends and design games accordingly.

The weak economy, low quality of games, and aggressive competitor marketing, predominantly with inexpensive home computers, caused the sudden crash. Inexpensive personal home computers like the Commodore VIC-20, Atari 800 XL, Commodore 64, Tandy Color Computer, and Texas Instruments TI-99 were suddenly affordable alternatives to the console gaming systems.

The influx of home computers created new competition in the video game market. Until early 1980s, personal computers had chiefly been sold in speciality computer stores and priced more than $1000, more than the average gamer could afford at the time. But in that decade, inexpensive computers came onto to the market with more memory and more sophisticated games. These computers also provided a means for word processing and home accounting tasks.

Though, critics say that the home computer was not the only cause of the 1983 crash; the influx of the same types of games were also part of the problem.

As the video game business flourished, video gaming became a popular way to promote other companies products. Companies like Chuck Wagon dog food collaborated with Spectravideo to produce “Chase the Chuck Wagon”, a game to increase the sale of dog food. Also, KoolAid collaborated with Mattel to create Kool Aid Man for both Intellivision and Atari 2600, which they hoped would increase their sales of KoolAid.

These are just two examples of how some non-gaming related companies were trying to get into the act of promoting their product through the use of video games.

Also, the success of video games like Pong resulted in the release of a “copy cat” games by less popular video game manufacturers. This ultimately confused the consumers who could not tell the difference between the original and the copy cat version. The increase in the sale of the replicas forced original manufacturers to sell their originals at a discount or even at a loss.

In 1986, The Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, brought the next wave in the video game world. Atari 2600 was replaced by the games created by NES which began to dominate the video game world. These players of these games had the option to save their game and resume it at a later time. This was revolutionary for this era.

The games were mostly travelling games which were visually amazing and gave the players a new experience. Space Invaders was one such game where the players shoot at the space ship symbols on a screen to increase their score. Legend of Zelda was another such game where the players could escape to another world when playing.

Many such kind of video games were released but as time went on, manufacturers realized that no one idea could hold the attention of the gamers for more than a few years at time. At this time, prettier graphics and character animations were introduced.

1985 was considered the beginning of the Renaissance for the gaming industry. The game industry’s rebirth was because of consoles like NES which released a game called Super Mario Brothers. Some of the other massive hits were Out Run, Donkey Kong, and Miyamoto.

Video games exist everywhere now. They are played using computers, consoles at home, on the Internet, and even on cell phones and hand-held computers. They are even seen in Video schools and movies. The gaming industry itself has been labelled “the fastest growing entertainment industry in America” by some financial experts.

Various surveys say that young people spend more hours playing video games in recent days. While the number was about 4 hours a day in the 1980s, it is up to 9 hours a day in the past few years. This high popularity and wide acceptance of video games have made more software developers turn toward creating higher-quality hardware for gaming.