The most popular games of his time, part 1: 1970s
When we talked about the best-selling games , you asked questions: why not tell about the games that were the most popular at the time? It is difficult to compare in terms of the number of sales a game from 2013, available on several platforms and in several stores at once, and an arcade game from the 1970s, which has been sold for a couple of years. So let's talk about those games that have played an important role in the development of the industry in certain years due to their popularity.
Computer Space was not so much the most popular for its 1971, as one of the first commercially available slot machines. By 1972, 1500 automatic machines were produced, but not more than one thousand were sold.
Nolan Bushnell was responsible for the development of the game, a former employee of Ampex, established in 1944 by Alexander Poniatov. He quit, developed a computer for his own game, and found a manufacturer, Nutting Associates. Bushnell nursed the idea of ​​the game for several years, but the sales of the machine showed that it was necessary to concentrate on such games that are understandable to anyone intoxicated, having a rest in a bar.
')
In the game, the spacecraft moved in space, turning in four directions, and fired at asteroids. By 1973, Nutting Associates released a two-player version.
In fact, the game was not quite original: it was a Spacewar version ! , a 1962 game for the PDP-1 computer.
The 1972 Oregon Trail proved that educational games can also be interesting. Initially, a game dedicated to American colonists was released for teletypes, then for Apple, and in the USSR it came in the form of an unlicensed, but Russified version for Electronics-60 and DVK .
Moreover, the new versions of the game were released under DOS, Macintosh, Windows, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, Android, Windows Phone, iOS. You can download it right now on your smartphone. Although, of course, from the first version there is not much left.
The game is dedicated to the life of American pioneers. The Oregon Route in the 19th century was an important road connecting the Great Plains with the western part of North America. Migrants should get from the state of Missouri to the territory of modern Oregon. The player for the members of the expedition chooses a profession, gives names and buys supplies. During the game, you had to repair the van yourself or change parts of it, defeat diseases, fight off the Indians or cooperate with them, depending on their mood, buy provisions or ammunition.
The main thing in the game is problem solving: what profession to choose, what kind of animal to put in a cart, how much money to spend on provisions, how to cope with the dysentery epidemic. But there was also an arcade component - to cross the Columbia River, it was necessary to control the raft, bypassing the stones, and hunt animals, moving in all directions along the playing field.
See the gameplay of one of the versions of the game.
To the father of the video games, Ralph Baer, ​​the idea of ​​creating the game came while waiting for the bus at the bus stop, in September 1966, he developed a flowchart for two people, in 1967 he created a prototype light gun, and in 1968 a working prototype of the game console called Brown Box. Then it was already possible to play ping-pong, volleyball and football. For the release of the console, Baer signed an agreement with Magnavox, and in 1972 Magnavox Odyssey entered the market.
Here we are talking about a whole home game console. The fact is that she used cartridges that did not have games in themselves, but included corresponding jumpers in the console to run the programs programmed in it.
A total of 330,000 consoles were sold, until the Odyssey 100 came to the place of Magnavox Odyssey.
Interestingly, Nintendo sold Magnavox Odyssey in Japan under its own brand - at that time it did not have its own developments in the field of gaming consoles.
In order to increase the number of games with graphics of that level, the manufacturer went for a trick: a special color plate was pasted on the TV screen, replacing the graphics. So on one console, which showed only glowing squares on the screen, it was possible to play football, hockey, tennis and table tennis, roulette, Simon Says and other games.
Unlike Computer Space, the Pong slot machines sold as many as eight thousand pieces from 1972 to 1975. This machine was the first to receive commercial success. And we are talking only about table tennis. But he had a soundtrack, from which some today would have a headache.
Due to the fact that the idea of ​​Pong developers Nolan Bushnell spied from Magnavox Odyssey, Atari had to speak in court by the defendant. The first game from Atari, founded by Bushnell , became so popular that it caused the appearance of various clones.
The screen of the first prototype was a Hitachi TV from a local store. The machine then put in the bar, with which one of the developers had friendly relations. After a couple of weeks, there were some problems. Their cause was a crowded coin acceptor.
In 1973, the history of racing games begins. That year, Atari released its second machine gun, Space Race, and Taito - a similar arcade car Astro Race. In both cases, the player needed to bring the spacecraft to the top of the screen, while not colliding with asteroids. The difference between the machine guns was that Atari controlled only up and down, while Taito controlled it in four directions.
The Tank slot machine, essentially the new Atari Pong clone, went on sale in 1974. During the year, 10,000 machines were sold.
The gameplay looked like this: two users drove tanks, drove through a maze, drove around marked mines and fired at each other.
The most interesting thing is that this particular game became the father of the game for NES about Battle City tanks, popularly called “tanchiki”.
And again we talk about Atari, and again about Pong. The popularity of arcade machines has forced developers to consider whether to enter the market for home gaming consoles. The result is a whole series of devices that connect to the TV through the antenna connector.
Atari had to buy a factory in 1975 to start the production of consoles in the right amount. The first batch included 150,000 copies.
Since the sales of Magnavox Odyssey were no longer high by this time, the sellers did not want to put a new console on the counter. Atari had to cooperate with the network of Sears stores and release the first installments under the network-owned brand Tele-Games.
Warm lamp morning after Christmas of 1975 with the prefix Pong. A source
Atari and in 1976, noted, releasing the game with one of the most famous gameplay. It was Breakout, another kind of Pong, which meant the destruction of multi-colored bars with the help of a ball and a racket. Although the screens themselves were black and white, some versions of the machine were colored due to the colored material pasted on the screen.
Nolan Bushnell, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took part in the creation of Breakout. Jobs, who worked at Atari, accepted the order for the project, and he himself hired Wozniak from Hewlett-Packard to develop. Due to the fact that Wozniak reduced the number of chips to 42 pieces, making them as compact as possible, it was not possible to introduce its version into production. Did Jobs receive a bonus of 5,000 US dollars at the rate of $ 100 for reducing the number of chips by one and paid Wozniak $ 350? half of the agreed amount of $ 700, due to the fact that the release of the machine has not started.
The name Breakout is not as well known as the name of one of its clones - Arkanoid from Taito, released in 1986.
Space Wars, released by Cinematronics in 1977, was the first black and white vector arcade game. As with Computer Space, Space Wars was inspired by Spacewar! 1962
It was a space shooter for two players - without the opportunity to play in single player mode. The player could turn the ship right and left, fly forward and shoot. There was also a hyper-jump function when the ship disappeared and appeared at a random point on the screen.
The Japanese company Taito in 1978 released the game Space Invaders. The game was so popular that it caused a shortage of 100 yen coins in Japan. In two years, 300,000 machines were sold in Japan and 60,000 in the United States.
In the US, one machine cost from 2,000 to 3,000 dollars. In 1982, a quarter two billion dollars was pulled from the Space Invaders machines. This is about five billion dollars for 2016.
When the game was ported to the Atari 2600, consoles sales quadrupled.
According to the IGN version, Space Invaders took the 3rd place in the “Most Important Games in the History of Mankind” rating in 2003 and the first place in the “10 most influential games” rating in 2007. In 2008, the game hit the Guinness Book of Records as the best arcade game. The image of the alien from the game has become one of the symbols of video games in general.
In the game you control a cannon, which aliens are shooting at. You need to kill them before they spend your lives or reach the bottom of the screen.
And again the popular game was connected with space. Asteroids has become the best-selling arcade machine gun from Atari. It sold more than 70,000 machines. The company earned about $ 150 million on the game, and machine operators $ 500 million in coins. It was necessary to increase the coin acceptors so that they would not get clogged too quickly.
The player moved in all directions on the screen and shot asteroids and alien space plates. The player's ship spun and allowed to send a gun in any direction. Large asteroids break up into smaller ones when hit, and some space plates go to a ram.
The graphics are poor at first glance: everything consists of white lines on a black screen. But here it is "not a bug, but a feature." Everything is tied to the gameplay, the geometry of the movement of asteroids and plates is perfectly calculated, the sounds of shooting and the engine are added.
The gaming industry began in the 1970s. Then the first computer gaming machines appeared, the first home gaming consoles . At the same time, personal computers became available, to which they soon ported games from machine guns.
Pioneer games are now symbols of the industry as a whole, like an alien from Space Invaders. In Breakout on mobile phones and Brick Game devices, probably, almost everyone played.
In the 1970s, the story of several key game genres also began. This quest, racing games and shooters. This article only included racing games - this is the Astro Race, and the Oregon Trail training quest. The first first-person shooters, one of which was Maze War and Spasim, are not yet on sale. About the evolution of shooters will be a separate series of articles.
Computer space
Computer Space was not so much the most popular for its 1971, as one of the first commercially available slot machines. By 1972, 1500 automatic machines were produced, but not more than one thousand were sold.
Nolan Bushnell was responsible for the development of the game, a former employee of Ampex, established in 1944 by Alexander Poniatov. He quit, developed a computer for his own game, and found a manufacturer, Nutting Associates. Bushnell nursed the idea of ​​the game for several years, but the sales of the machine showed that it was necessary to concentrate on such games that are understandable to anyone intoxicated, having a rest in a bar.
')
In the game, the spacecraft moved in space, turning in four directions, and fired at asteroids. By 1973, Nutting Associates released a two-player version.
In fact, the game was not quite original: it was a Spacewar version ! , a 1962 game for the PDP-1 computer.
The oregon trail
The 1972 Oregon Trail proved that educational games can also be interesting. Initially, a game dedicated to American colonists was released for teletypes, then for Apple, and in the USSR it came in the form of an unlicensed, but Russified version for Electronics-60 and DVK .
Moreover, the new versions of the game were released under DOS, Macintosh, Windows, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, Android, Windows Phone, iOS. You can download it right now on your smartphone. Although, of course, from the first version there is not much left.
The game is dedicated to the life of American pioneers. The Oregon Route in the 19th century was an important road connecting the Great Plains with the western part of North America. Migrants should get from the state of Missouri to the territory of modern Oregon. The player for the members of the expedition chooses a profession, gives names and buys supplies. During the game, you had to repair the van yourself or change parts of it, defeat diseases, fight off the Indians or cooperate with them, depending on their mood, buy provisions or ammunition.
The main thing in the game is problem solving: what profession to choose, what kind of animal to put in a cart, how much money to spend on provisions, how to cope with the dysentery epidemic. But there was also an arcade component - to cross the Columbia River, it was necessary to control the raft, bypassing the stones, and hunt animals, moving in all directions along the playing field.
See the gameplay of one of the versions of the game.
Magnavox odyssey
To the father of the video games, Ralph Baer, ​​the idea of ​​creating the game came while waiting for the bus at the bus stop, in September 1966, he developed a flowchart for two people, in 1967 he created a prototype light gun, and in 1968 a working prototype of the game console called Brown Box. Then it was already possible to play ping-pong, volleyball and football. For the release of the console, Baer signed an agreement with Magnavox, and in 1972 Magnavox Odyssey entered the market.
Here we are talking about a whole home game console. The fact is that she used cartridges that did not have games in themselves, but included corresponding jumpers in the console to run the programs programmed in it.
A total of 330,000 consoles were sold, until the Odyssey 100 came to the place of Magnavox Odyssey.
Interestingly, Nintendo sold Magnavox Odyssey in Japan under its own brand - at that time it did not have its own developments in the field of gaming consoles.
In order to increase the number of games with graphics of that level, the manufacturer went for a trick: a special color plate was pasted on the TV screen, replacing the graphics. So on one console, which showed only glowing squares on the screen, it was possible to play football, hockey, tennis and table tennis, roulette, Simon Says and other games.
Pong
Unlike Computer Space, the Pong slot machines sold as many as eight thousand pieces from 1972 to 1975. This machine was the first to receive commercial success. And we are talking only about table tennis. But he had a soundtrack, from which some today would have a headache.
Due to the fact that the idea of ​​Pong developers Nolan Bushnell spied from Magnavox Odyssey, Atari had to speak in court by the defendant. The first game from Atari, founded by Bushnell , became so popular that it caused the appearance of various clones.
The screen of the first prototype was a Hitachi TV from a local store. The machine then put in the bar, with which one of the developers had friendly relations. After a couple of weeks, there were some problems. Their cause was a crowded coin acceptor.
Astro race
In 1973, the history of racing games begins. That year, Atari released its second machine gun, Space Race, and Taito - a similar arcade car Astro Race. In both cases, the player needed to bring the spacecraft to the top of the screen, while not colliding with asteroids. The difference between the machine guns was that Atari controlled only up and down, while Taito controlled it in four directions.
Tank
The Tank slot machine, essentially the new Atari Pong clone, went on sale in 1974. During the year, 10,000 machines were sold.
The gameplay looked like this: two users drove tanks, drove through a maze, drove around marked mines and fired at each other.
The most interesting thing is that this particular game became the father of the game for NES about Battle City tanks, popularly called “tanchiki”.
Atari pong
And again we talk about Atari, and again about Pong. The popularity of arcade machines has forced developers to consider whether to enter the market for home gaming consoles. The result is a whole series of devices that connect to the TV through the antenna connector.
Atari had to buy a factory in 1975 to start the production of consoles in the right amount. The first batch included 150,000 copies.
Since the sales of Magnavox Odyssey were no longer high by this time, the sellers did not want to put a new console on the counter. Atari had to cooperate with the network of Sears stores and release the first installments under the network-owned brand Tele-Games.
Warm lamp morning after Christmas of 1975 with the prefix Pong. A source
Breakout
Atari and in 1976, noted, releasing the game with one of the most famous gameplay. It was Breakout, another kind of Pong, which meant the destruction of multi-colored bars with the help of a ball and a racket. Although the screens themselves were black and white, some versions of the machine were colored due to the colored material pasted on the screen.
Nolan Bushnell, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took part in the creation of Breakout. Jobs, who worked at Atari, accepted the order for the project, and he himself hired Wozniak from Hewlett-Packard to develop. Due to the fact that Wozniak reduced the number of chips to 42 pieces, making them as compact as possible, it was not possible to introduce its version into production. Did Jobs receive a bonus of 5,000 US dollars at the rate of $ 100 for reducing the number of chips by one and paid Wozniak $ 350? half of the agreed amount of $ 700, due to the fact that the release of the machine has not started.
The name Breakout is not as well known as the name of one of its clones - Arkanoid from Taito, released in 1986.
Space wars
Space Wars, released by Cinematronics in 1977, was the first black and white vector arcade game. As with Computer Space, Space Wars was inspired by Spacewar! 1962
It was a space shooter for two players - without the opportunity to play in single player mode. The player could turn the ship right and left, fly forward and shoot. There was also a hyper-jump function when the ship disappeared and appeared at a random point on the screen.
Space invaders
The Japanese company Taito in 1978 released the game Space Invaders. The game was so popular that it caused a shortage of 100 yen coins in Japan. In two years, 300,000 machines were sold in Japan and 60,000 in the United States.
In the US, one machine cost from 2,000 to 3,000 dollars. In 1982, a quarter two billion dollars was pulled from the Space Invaders machines. This is about five billion dollars for 2016.
When the game was ported to the Atari 2600, consoles sales quadrupled.
According to the IGN version, Space Invaders took the 3rd place in the “Most Important Games in the History of Mankind” rating in 2003 and the first place in the “10 most influential games” rating in 2007. In 2008, the game hit the Guinness Book of Records as the best arcade game. The image of the alien from the game has become one of the symbols of video games in general.
In the game you control a cannon, which aliens are shooting at. You need to kill them before they spend your lives or reach the bottom of the screen.
Asteroids
And again the popular game was connected with space. Asteroids has become the best-selling arcade machine gun from Atari. It sold more than 70,000 machines. The company earned about $ 150 million on the game, and machine operators $ 500 million in coins. It was necessary to increase the coin acceptors so that they would not get clogged too quickly.
The player moved in all directions on the screen and shot asteroids and alien space plates. The player's ship spun and allowed to send a gun in any direction. Large asteroids break up into smaller ones when hit, and some space plates go to a ram.
The graphics are poor at first glance: everything consists of white lines on a black screen. But here it is "not a bug, but a feature." Everything is tied to the gameplay, the geometry of the movement of asteroids and plates is perfectly calculated, the sounds of shooting and the engine are added.
The gaming industry began in the 1970s. Then the first computer gaming machines appeared, the first home gaming consoles . At the same time, personal computers became available, to which they soon ported games from machine guns.
Pioneer games are now symbols of the industry as a whole, like an alien from Space Invaders. In Breakout on mobile phones and Brick Game devices, probably, almost everyone played.
In the 1970s, the story of several key game genres also began. This quest, racing games and shooters. This article only included racing games - this is the Astro Race, and the Oregon Trail training quest. The first first-person shooters, one of which was Maze War and Spasim, are not yet on sale. About the evolution of shooters will be a separate series of articles.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/399483/
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