Here we are week two of the blog, including now my summary of both the history of games 1950-1970 and a brief incite into my gaming history.

Task 1

History of games 1950 - 1970

The beginning of computer games started in 1952 by A.C Douglas at Cambridge university, where he wrote his PhD paper on human-computer interaction and created a the first graphical computer game, tic-tac-toe or noughts and crosses as its better known as on a . Then in 1958 William Higinbotham Developed the first real computer game as we know it today. It was a very simple game called "tennis for 2" and was developed and played on Brookhaven National laboratory Ocillioscope. His idea was to create an interactive game with an analogue controller where the computer could determine the projectile of the ball.

This is A screenshot of Tennis for 2
played on the ocillioscope.

In the 60's computer games were mainly creating using university computer mainframes by people who programmed them in their spare time. The first one of these to get acclaimed was "spacewar" created by a group of students at MIT in the USA, the team included Steve Russel on the new computer at the time "the DEC PDP-1" The game pitted two human players against each other, each controlling a space ship capable of firing missiles. It was then distributed with every new DEC machine and became the first "widely" available game on the market

Screenshot of Space war

The next significant step in the gaming world wouldn't come until 1966 when Ralph Baer created the first playable game on a TV set beginning the revolution that is the games console. It took him 18 years to develop and the final result was a game called "Chase" . This was merly the beginning and Baer went on to produce a prototype console that included a table tennis and target shooting type game.
It wasn't until 1972 that the first games console for home use was available to by, it was called the odyssey and came programmed with no less than 12 different games. This was generally known as the first generation console.

The second generation consoles came out in the mid 70's, and no longer were games hard wired onto microchips like the Odyssey. This brought the birth of cartridges. A program loaded onto a ROM (read-only-memory) chip that were cased and could be added to the console. The 1 machine which outsold all their competitors and really started the mass buying of games consoles was the Atari 2600, released with 9 available Games during the holiday season.The Atari became the most widely sold console of the 70's and was a real step towards the mass popularity of gaming.


Arcade Gaming

• Computer space was widely regarded as the first arcade game and its founders would later go on to start up the Atari company.
  
  
• Pong - 1973 became a huge hit and was shown at various expos and traveling fairs alongside various other mechanical games.
• Space invaders 1977 changes the way arcade games were played

Thus concludes my brief history of games from 1950-1970 I hope you found that inciteful.