Friday, April 28, 2006
'The Good Old Days' of Games Development
When you consider that perhaps the driving force behind all computer games companies is their budget, it's almost amusing to think that probably the most famous game of all time, Pong, was created with a budget of $500 and a few white lies (Nolan Bushnell convinced one of his head programmers to join the Atari company saying it was subsidised by the government!). From the Pong arcade machines successful cleanup in a local pub to 100 machines p/day on the construction line, the computer games industry's foundations were built on very little - but the real worth is obviously in ideas. Ideas for games flooded the arcades with titles like Asteroids (Atari's take on Space Invaders, mentioned later) and even Donkey Kong the massively popular adversary of Mario, then called 'jumpman'.
Unfortunately, ideas are only as valuable as their creator makes them, and a copyright theft lawsuit chased Bushnell in the form of Ralph Baer - he had patented a strikingly similar version of the tennis version years beforehand.
The amount of money that was to be made in computer games had become apparant in the years preceding this trial, and set a trend for aggressive battle to cling on the these basic ideas. Atari released the first (successful) computer games console, the VCS, in 1977. Prior to this date, DAvid Crane a former Atari programemr and designer, had left Atari to start his own company - Activision. Activision fought in court with Atari for around 2 years to earn the right to make games for the VCS alone.
So ideas in the computer games industry by this bought were being snapped up, the majority of early video games such as Pacman and Space Invaders were made from very basic ideas - the novelty of playing an electronically sophisticated game was enough to sell the idea. Scores of games manufacturers and developers sprouted up from everywhere.
However in 1983, from a combination of bad press realting to truancy and a flood of poor-quality games. Personal Computers such as the Commodore 64 harnessed this bad press to sell more of their 'educational' machines and further pushed computer games into disrepute.
On the otehr hand, out of this PC age, the Oliver Twins and the DArling brothers, two sets of teenagers, used the Commodore machines and their like to create more and more games. These young boys would go on the make millions of dollars for their ideas and skills, and the youth of the eighties formed companies like Codemasters and Ocean.
Tthe console market was still in its feldgling years by the time the Video Game Crash of 1983 happened, because a mere 3 yrs after the toy companies cast off games as being a 'passing fad', the Nintendo Entertainment System was released, a machine we all remember from childhood (or early adulthood!) no doubt.
This machine brought with it the likes of Mario, Link and Kirby to the awed eyes of the worlds youth, and resurrected consoles and home computer games into peoples lives.
Unfortunately, ideas are only as valuable as their creator makes them, and a copyright theft lawsuit chased Bushnell in the form of Ralph Baer - he had patented a strikingly similar version of the tennis version years beforehand.
The amount of money that was to be made in computer games had become apparant in the years preceding this trial, and set a trend for aggressive battle to cling on the these basic ideas. Atari released the first (successful) computer games console, the VCS, in 1977. Prior to this date, DAvid Crane a former Atari programemr and designer, had left Atari to start his own company - Activision. Activision fought in court with Atari for around 2 years to earn the right to make games for the VCS alone.
So ideas in the computer games industry by this bought were being snapped up, the majority of early video games such as Pacman and Space Invaders were made from very basic ideas - the novelty of playing an electronically sophisticated game was enough to sell the idea. Scores of games manufacturers and developers sprouted up from everywhere.
However in 1983, from a combination of bad press realting to truancy and a flood of poor-quality games. Personal Computers such as the Commodore 64 harnessed this bad press to sell more of their 'educational' machines and further pushed computer games into disrepute.
On the otehr hand, out of this PC age, the Oliver Twins and the DArling brothers, two sets of teenagers, used the Commodore machines and their like to create more and more games. These young boys would go on the make millions of dollars for their ideas and skills, and the youth of the eighties formed companies like Codemasters and Ocean.
Tthe console market was still in its feldgling years by the time the Video Game Crash of 1983 happened, because a mere 3 yrs after the toy companies cast off games as being a 'passing fad', the Nintendo Entertainment System was released, a machine we all remember from childhood (or early adulthood!) no doubt.
This machine brought with it the likes of Mario, Link and Kirby to the awed eyes of the worlds youth, and resurrected consoles and home computer games into peoples lives.
// posted by PashionConscious @ 1:15 AM 
