Gadgetory

let's take a step back into the 1950s computer the word dates back to 1613 actually and was used to describe a person who was skilled in carrying out calculations in World War two these computers were no longer people but complex machines their abilities to be reprogrammed and thus repurposed made them versatile reliable investments for both the public and private sectors of world economies this essentially made computers empty shells for programmers with endless possibilities insight and video games were no exception first I want to define the term videogame because there are several definitions out there and not all of them are frankly true I'll be using Merriam Webster's definition an electronic game in which computers control images on a television or computer screen a video game that can be played on a computer will be regarded as a computer game the first known game to be implemented onto a computer was birdie the brain which was a tic-tac-toe simulator it was built by Joseph Cates a Canadian engineer he's also famous for his automated traffic signalling system the world's first birdie the brain was developed in 1950 and presented at the Canadian National Exhibition the same year it featured a unique editor on tube and a large grid of lights used to display the circles and exes I personally regard this as the first quote-unquote videogame on a computer because it was the first to have a visual display even though technically the display wasn't a television or monitor other games before it used printers to inform players of current progress and thus don't qualify as video games I should also note at this point that the cathode ray tube amusement device was invented three years prior to birdie the brain but was never actually made commercially available nor presented to the public it also did not run on a computer but rather an analog oscilloscope these points by definition eliminate the CRT amusement device from the list of candidates for the first video game the next game on our timeline is a Nimrod it was a computer game built by Ferranti and engineering equipment firm the video game was again a competition between an artificial intelligence of sorts and the player and featured a light bulb display as well not a screen which would have been based on a cathode ray tube at the time that distinction belongs to the games of checkers and tic-tac-toe programs developed by Christopher Stracci and Alexander Douglas respectively both of whom were British computer scientists one thing that these four games have in common is the fact that each was invented not for the purpose of gaming believe it or not but for the purpose of showcasing the backbones the computers on which they ran by 1961 new super advanced computers featuring faster RAM and fancy new transistors for faster encoding were becoming widely available to college campuses which would prove to be the birthplaces for many video games to come students at MIT were gifted a computer with a point plot monitor known as the PDP one and give an open and unlimited access to its resources leave it to college students to invent the video game in their spare time by 1962 the soon-to-be famous space war was born the video game centered on a battle between two spaceships and used a controller the students built themselves needless to say the game was met with unrivaled success as CRT slowly became staples and household so too did space for this spark of the college gaming age a time during which college students all across the planet programmed both simple and complex games for the computers they were slowly gaining more and more access to without a doubt a PC gaming is where it all started did you did you guys see those things by 1970 something known as TTL of transistor to transistor logic made it possible to integrate multiple transistors into the same microchip for reference a single Xeon Broadwell EP chip contains over seven billion transistors we've come a long way but in the 1970s these increased transistor counts and decreased costs of production eventually made them viable for arcade gaming when designers began incorporating screen speakers and interactive control pads into single game cabinets these were regarded as coin-operated arcade games and will not be discussed in this video since they were built without the intent of ever being reprogrammed or repurposed or used for an entirely different purpose altogether games program on software the current standard and perhaps most noteworthy of those that existed during the 1970s was Colossal Cave adventure it was a puzzle and adventure game that became an icon for the personal computer market these kinds of games featured minimal graphics and were typically text-based believe it or not in which the player would simply respond and interact with a chain of text program into the game's code in 1975 gunfight was released in Japan as the first official computer game to take advantage of the microprocessor rather than hardwired circuits and transistors of the latter decade it was also the first game to depict human to human combat Call of Duty fans of battlefield fans it was distributed to arcade gaming cabinets and its source code was simultaneously implemented into various micro computers which is why it's still on this list all in this segment with an interesting take on the upturn and computer gaming at the turn of the decade savvy computer programmers were very open about sharing game code any computer that could be programmed could essentially play any game whose source code was made public in fact certain magazines were known to reveal entire game code so the programmers could play them on their personal machines it's a bit like torrenting except you're doing all the work and it wasn't illegal at the time they also fostered the sharing of newly developed game code to help stimulate the PC gaming community so what awaits us in the next segment of this series well plenty of market crashes bankruptcies and successes for sure but perhaps most importantly plenty of competition if you like this segment of the series give the video a thumbs up give it a thumbs down if well you know you hate everything about life click a subscribe but if you haven't already stay tuned for a future PC build here on the channel as well as part two of this series this is science to do thanks for learning with this you you