Replay: The History of Video Games (8 page)

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Dungeons & Dragons
– a fusion of tabletop war games, J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
books and amateur dramatics – had become a phenomenon since its 1974 launch, recruiting millions of fans who spent hours acting out adventures based on complex statistical rules and rolls of polyhedral dice.

Being a
Dungeons & Dragons
player required serious commitment, even if you were not the dungeon master – the player who had the job of designing the quest, running the game and handling the numerous probability equations that decide the outcomes of player decisions. Games of
Dungeons & Dragons
could take weeks with each play session lasting hours. Much of this would be taken up with debates about the calculations that accompanied the actions of players, said Richard Garriott, who joined the legions of
Dungeons & Dragons
fans in 1977 aged 17. “When you watch most people play paper
Dungeons & Dragons
they would sit down and go I’ve got a +3 sword, I’m standing behind you and I surprised you so I have initiative – that gives me +2,” said Garriott. “They go through this amazingly detailed argument about what the probability of a hit or miss should be. Finally, when they resolve that after five to 10 minutes, they roll a die and go ‘look I hit’ or ‘oops I missed’ and then they would start the argument all over. So the frequency of a turn of play is stunningly low.”

The amount of number crunching and frustration involved made
Dungeons & Dragons
perfect for computerisation. “It was so well suited to simulate on a computer,” said Daglow, who in 1975 created
Dungeon
– one of the earliest computer role-playing games after getting fed up with the difficulty of getting players together for a game of
Dungeons & Dragons
.
[3]
“With
Dungeons & Dragons
a lot of the things that were most frustrating on paper and time consuming, the computer does all that for you.”
Dungeon
gave Daglow the chance to make a game for the new computer monitor terminals that were arriving at Stanford at the time rather than for a teleprinter. These terminals, however, could only display monochrome text and it could take up to 20 to 30 seconds for the screen to change. But the screen allowed Daglow to give his game some visuals in the form of a map composed of punctuation marks and mathemical symbols. It was an approach many subsequent video games, particularly role-playing games, would revisit time and time again in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

TSR had paid no attention to Daglow’s game or many of the other computer role-playing games that copied
Dungeons & Dragons
, but when it got wind of MIT’s
Dungeon
it decided to send in the lawyers. “TSR had a trademark on the word ‘dungeon’, which they decided to defend,” said Lebling. “MIT’s lawyers told them at great length that they were being silly, but we decided to change the name back to
Zork!
anyway as it was more distinctive and unusual.”

By this time the idea of having an unusual name had grown in appeal since the game’s creators were thinking about forming a software publishing business to cash in on the latest by-product of the microprocessor: the home computer.

Kit computers such as the Altair 8800 and KIM-1 had already brought the idea of home computers closer to reality, but as more advanced microprocessors came onto the market in the second half of the 1970s the vision really began to gather momentum. Soon pioneering companies and technologically minded entrepreneurs were investigating the idea of creating computers small and cheap enough that everyone could own one.

One of the first people to really push the idea forward was Steve Wozniak. After completing his prototype of Atari’s coin-op game
Breakout
, he decided to make his own computer. He spent his evenings and weekends building the Apple I, a microprocessor-based computer that could connect to a keyboard and a home TV. He showed the prototype to his friend Steve Jobs, who had just returned from his trip to India. Jobs suggested they form a company to sell it to other computer enthusiasts and on 1st April 1976 they formed Apple Computer. The company produced more than 150 hand-made Apple Is but, by the time it went on sale in the summer of 1976, Wozniak was already close to completing work on a better computer that could appeal to a wider audience: the Apple II. Wozniak set himself the goal of designing a computer powerful enough to allow people to create state-of-the-art video games.

It would, he decided, have colour graphics, proper sound and connections for game controllers and plug into home TVs. In particular he wanted it to be good enough to run a version of
Breakout
created in BASIC – a slow but relatively easy programming language. It was a wildly ambitious goal. Home computers were still a new concept and the idea that he could make one that could run arcade video games and still have a price tag acceptable to the general public seemed crazy. But by August 1976 he, almost to his own amazement, had created just that. In his biography
iWoz
, Wozniak described getting
Breakout
running on his computer as “the biggest, earth-shaking, Eureka moment ever”. Being the canny businessman he was, Jobs saw that the Apple II was a machine that would appeal to more than just technically minded computer geeks and started searching for an investor who could help put it on the shop shelves throughout the US.

Apple’s first port of call was Chuck Peddle, an engineer at Commodore Business Machines. Jack Tramiel, a Polish immigrant who had survived the Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration camp, formed Commodore in 1955 as a typewriter repair shop in the Bronx, New York City, and built it into a leading manufacturer of office equipment. For Peddle, the call from Jobs was well timed. Commodore had recently bought microprocessor manufacturer MOS Technologies, the maker of the KIM-1, and Peddle was trying to persuade Tramiel to forget about pocket calculators and get into home computers. Peddle arranged for the two to present the Apple II to board of Commodore. Impressed, the board asked how much they wanted for it. Jobs demanded several hundred thousand dollars and the pair were promptly shown the door. Commodore decided it would make its first home computer itself instead. Undeterred, Jobs and Wozniak decided to see if Atari would back them. “The decision Nolan Bushnell and Joe Keenan came up with was that this was outside our area but we have this investor on our board – Don Valentine – and we’ll put you in touch with Don,” said Steve Bristow, Atari’s vice-president of engineering. Valentine also declined to invest, but arranged a meeting between Apple and Mike Markkula, a 30-year-old who had just left Intel having made his fortune working for the firm. Markkula was convinced the Apple II would be a success and provided the funds Apple needed to start manufacturing the computer and his business expertise.

By the time the Apple II finally started rolling off the production line, however, Commodore had already got its home computer on the market. The $599 Commodore PET was an all-in-one system that fused keyboard, monitor, tape cassette player and computer together in curvy beige plastic. Despite its monochrome visuals, the PET attracted $3 million of pre-orders enough to make it an instant success. Apple also faced competition from Tandy, the owners of electronics retailer Radio Shack, which had released another monochrome home computer: the TRS-80. As the smallest of the three companies, Apple could easily have struggled, but Wozniak’s video game-inspired inclusion of colour graphics and the company’s clever marketing gave it the edge. By 1981 the Apple II had claimed 23 per cent of the US home computer market compared to Tandy’s 16 per cent and Commodore’s 10 per cent.

The arrival of the Apple II, TRS-80 and PET brought a swift end to days when computers were only found in large institutions. Now anyone could potentially have a computer in their home. But while most people agreed computers were the future, few had any idea what households would do with them. Would they calculate their tax returns or catalogue record collections? Would they teach their children to program the machines in the hope that they would have the skills that would be needed in the workplace of the future? Or would they store family recipes or address books on a cassette tape?

It turned out that early home computers would be used almost exclusively for one purpose alone: playing video games. And many of the games they played were versions of those once locked away on the computers of academia, government and business. These games first started to migrate into the home through magazines and books that contained listings of computer programmes for people to type in line by line. Then these games began to be sold in stores. Computer Chess, arguably the original video game, was among the first to go on sale thanks to a Canadian company called Micro-Ware, which released
Microchess
on the KIM-1 in 1976. Other forms of computer game quickly followed, among them educational titles such as
ThOregon Trail
– a 1971 game developed by three student teachers to teach elementary school children in Minnesota about the life and trials faced by the settlers who led the US’s western expansion in the mid-1800s. It became a staple of classrooms across the US in the 1980s and early 1990s. But one of the most popular forms of computer game to reach the home was the text adventure.

Scott Adams, a computer programmer from Florida, brought the text adventure to the home after hearing work colleagues discussing
Adventure
while working at telecommunications firm Stromberg-Carlson. “I came in early and stayed late for a week and played it. I was hooked on the concept, it was great fun,” he said. Adams had already made a game on his TRS-80 computer that he was selling through a local Radio Shack store. “It was a dog racing game, with a random number generator and some text, that had you betting on which dog would finish first,” he said. “The game was a real dog itself. I sold maybe 10 copies. It was junk.”

Unsurprisingly, Adams felt an
Adventure
-type game might be more popular and set about making a similar game. His programmer pals thought he was wasting his time. “I was told it would be impossible to make anything like
Adventure
fit into a computer with 16k of memory space,” he said. His sceptical programmer friends had a point;
Adventure
took up 256k of memory, far more than the TRS-80 could cope with. But Adams figured out a number of memory saving tricks that allowed him to squash his game,
Adventureland
, onto the TRS-80, such as getting the computer to recognise the players’ commands from the first three letters alone.
Adventureland
played much like
Adventure
although the story was set outdoors rather than within underground caves. Adams did, however, drop the idea of fighting monsters and concentrated on the puzzle solving after objections from some of his friends. “In the very first version of
Adventureland
you ended up killing the bear after it fell off the ledge,” he said. “One of my friends said that was too harsh and could I change it? I did and thereafter all my games were more orientated towards full family fun.”

For a game-playing public used to action-based arcade games,
Adventureland
was an unusual and exciting concept. But while it eventually became a popular game, it took Adams some time to get it into shops. “There were very few companies making home computer software and even fewer selling games,” he said. “I started small with an ad in a computer magazine. I remember my first large order. It was from Manny Garcia who ran a Radio Shack in Chicago and he ordered 50 tapes. At the time I had no idea about wholesale-retail and he had to explain the concepts. It took a week to make all the tapes and send them to him. When he got them he called back and asked where was the packaging?” Adams was not alone.

Across the US, business-naive computer enthusiasts were beginning to write games they hoped to sell to the growing ranks of home computer owners. Few had any idea there building an industry. They copied their games onto cassette tapes or 5.25-inch floppy disks on their own computers. They drove or posted their games to shops, photocopied instructions and packaged their work in Ziploc bags that were more commonly used to keep sandwiches fresh. The shortage of games, however, meant many of these game makers started earning significant sums from their work. Bill Budge, a student at Berkeley University in California, was one. He started out by writing a bunch of simple games, including a copy of
Pong
, on his Apple II. After selling Apple the rights to three of his games, which got released in 1979 as
Penny Arcade
, in return for a $700 printer, he started selling his work to Stoneware, a small game publisher run by Barney Stone. “Barney said I think I can sell these games in computer stores, which were springing up all over the place,” said Budge. “I remember my family went on vacation to Hawaii and I was so interested in writing these games that I decided not to go. I just stayed with my Apple and programmed for two weeks solid with nobody to bother me. Then he turned up one day with a cheque for $7,000 – my monthly royalties.”