Chapter 2 – A stroll down memory lane

Gaming goes as far back as 1947 when Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann designed a game for a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube). This was obviously a very simple game where you had to fire a missile at a target, in fact it was so simple that only the missile was drawn on the CRT and could be controlled by a few knobs where as the target you where shooting at had to be drawn out on an overlay and placed in front of the monitor. Did someone say fun…?

Even though Thomas and Estle were the first to design a ‘computer game’ there were others that were bound to do the same and that’s when a man called A.S. Douglas developed ‘OXO’ which is a graphical version of what we call noughts and crosses aka tic-tac-toe which was programmed to be used on a EDSAC, a vacuum-tube computer for a CRT display back in 1952. Douglas was inspired to make this game whilst studying in the University of Cambridge where he was writing his thesis on human-computer interaction. Now just to give you and idea about how big this whole idea of gaming was back then, here’s a picture of the EDSAC computer that was used to play ‘OXO’

Pretty big huh?

Six years later in 1958 William Higinbotham created the so called first ever ‘video game’. The game was called ‘Tennis for Two’ and was used to entertain visitors’ at Brookhaven national Laboratory in New York. Now as you would imagine this game was a big step up from the classic ‘Shoot a missile at nothing’ and ‘OXO’ and it wasn’t just because of the graphics but because of a feature called gravity. The game showed a side view of a simplified tennis court and was played by hitting the ball over the net using bulky controllers that affect the trajectory of the ball. Sadly enough it had its glory for only two seasons before it was dismantled in 1959.

We owe a lot to these fellas because without them someone else would have thought of their ideas?

Gaming for me is like having drugs, same buzz, excitement, same high but without the fear of it being illegal, matter of fact in some cases games should be illegal. For me personally gaming goes as far back as around 1990, it would be a lie to say I remember the game and I enjoyed playing it but let’s just say that anyway. The first official game I actually remember playing was Sonic the hedgehog back when it was first released in the summer of 1991 on the amazingly entertaining ‘Mega Drive’. That game for me was my night and day because it just simply made sense to say to yourself “do nothing but play sonic and when you’ve finished playing it, play it some more” for me that game will never get old. Funny how now games are like a million light years ahead of the games that I used to play back then mainly because of the graphics but games now are hard to compare to games in the early years because of their sentimental value. I also remember playing my first ever PC game which was ‘Quake’. I remember going away on a week’s trip with my middle school class mates only to return to some sort of brand new machine that gave me endless hours of entertainment. I think back then it was something along the lines of a 355Mhz Pentium and seeing how that machine could do all what I needed it to do and the computer I have now, 3.2Ghz AMD, can’t run applications and software I want it to run makes you think are computers going to get better or worse?

Nowadays I play games along the lines of ‘Need for Speed Carbon’, ‘World of Warcraft’, ‘GTA: San Andreas’, ‘Half-Life 2’ etc….and it’s because of the old school games that remind me that the games I’m playing now are also soon to become classics and the classics I’ve played before are soon to become legends.