Spacewar! [1962]

Spacewar is still the first video game. Not technically: the developers of Spacewar were already aware of a playable Tic Tac Toe implementation on the very computer they were working on, which by that point was already a more-than-decade-long tradition for computers, not to mention Tennis For Two [1958]. (For greater detail on this cascade …

The Oregon Trail [1971]

(Content Warnings: Cannibalism, Genocide.) In these early days of gaming, it’s hard to walk in a straight line without tripping over “firsts.” Looking for the first this or the first that is a hook, it’s exciting to uncover, you feel like something recognizable of our present-day condition is emerging from the strange, foreign world of …

Magnavox Odyssey [1971] + Pong [1972]

The most famous Magnavox Odyssey game is Table Tennis. It was the direct inspiration for Pong, and there is an infamous lawsuit decided in Magnavox's favor to that effect, which became famously the first of decades of copyright trolling putting up a hundreds-of-millions tollbooth on the mere concept of video games at home. If we …

Death Race [1976]

(Content warning: Vehicular homicide.) Cliche when it comes to the game is to sensibly chuckle at the quaint moral outrage that made it infamous: all this over some crudely-drawn stick figures! This condescending ahistorical reaction doesn't just sell short humanity's ability to read abstraction and process media, and thus really the medium of video games …

Colossal Cave Adventure [1977]

There is no other game of its era or the next one, all the way up to Super Mario Bros [1985], that is anywhere near as celebrated and long-lived as Colossal Cave Adventure [1975/77]. In 1995, Graham Nelson, author of Curses [1993] and of the Inform programming language in which he implemented the port I …

Space Invaders [1978]

It's more about time than it is space, not that those can ever be fully disentangled. Space only finds actuality in relative positions, and you're not being challenged to judge the length of the gap between your cover shields or navigate a maze. If the titular were not engaged in constant horizontal motion, the game …

Lunar Lander [1979]

Lunar Lander [1979], at first blush, seems an incongruous fit for the arcade. It must be intentional as an attempted marketing strategy for floorspace in the ever-more competitive competitive arcade ecosystem. It's austere, maybe serious, adult, even intellectual. Slow, certainly. Methodical: Twitchy, nick-of-time reactions will get you nowhere here, you need to commit to medium-term …

Pac-Man [1980]

Since Space Invaders [1978], the game in the arcade has become more clear: it's all about managing and producing tension. If Space Invaders was a jazzed-up marching band tune, Pac-Man is an Alfred Schnittke all-out orchestral assault. It could not be a starker contrast to the stately Lunar Lander [1979], in its loud poison-frog colors …

Berzerk [1980]

Not too close, not too close. I'm too big for where. Am I a knight? Right through the neck please. Hercules for a moment, then lament the blue brush. There's no room and there's no rooms. Gives green around the gills. KILL IT. The base place intruder. Regular 6-point figures trace the forever now and …

Rogue [1980]

I have always considered the video game RPG in purely negative terms, and I don't simply mean that I don't like them. What I mean is that I have mostly perceived them as the phantom of tabletop RPGs, or more accurately, their exorcism. By taking the aspects of tabletop RPGs that computers can easily replicate, …

House Of Usher [1980]

Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall Of The House Of Usher [1839]'s first paragraph, carried by dizzied, wavering prose that later on gives easily into poetry, foregrounds it as a work of architectural critique firstly — Gothic of course being the vital architectural term — but one that understands the unit of the building as something …

Zork [1980]

As far as Popular Game History is concerned, Zork [1980] is the first and last text adventure game ("interactive fiction" sadly never fully filtering out to mass consciousness,) a cute stage-setting for the graphical adventure genre that completely superseded it on technical grounds. This is a perception deeply beholden to a progress narrative and commercial …

Adventure [1980]

Taking stock of my Class of 1980, I have a mixed bag of diamonds-in-the-rough-at-best. Across the board, we see ambition and innovation that I think exceeds the actual quality of the work, the spirit of the Magnavox Odyssey [1971] more than its honed descendant Pong [1972]: Pac-Man is overstimulating, Rogue is understimulating. House Of Usher …

Mystery House [1980]

Humans are such fragile meat, no? And they're past their expiration date... Life itself is proof of guilt.

The Prisoner [1980]

(Content warning: torture mention.) In the 1300s, there was a game called Obligations. It was played in the early Latin Christian universities by the friars, the bishops, the Franciscans, the students and teachers and such, and its structure informed much of the underlying phrasing and logic of the century's theology and philosophy. Obligations is a …

Protected: Qix [1981]

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Galaga [1981]

(Content warning: war.) The first thing that strikes me on booting up Galaga [1981] is that it is a beautiful game. Games I've written on up to this point have been eyesores. (They mostly make a virtue of it.) Even the prior entry in this franchise, Galaxian [1979], a visual tour-de-force, looks pretty drab, predominated …

Donkey Kong [1981]

(Content warning: Racism.) Donkey Kong [1981] is not only the start of a long-running genre-defining game franchise, but also the creation myth of an industry titan. It becomes overburdened with significance: I had to go and delete from Wikipedia the bizarre and preposterously incorrect claim that Donkey Kong was straight up the first video game …

Castle Wolfenstein [1981]

(Content warning: Nazis, genocide.) Wolfenstein is one of the longest-standing names in video games, typically trading off positions on Wikipedia's ranked list with Mario depending on which had the latest release. It has a much stranger path there than anything in that top tier other than arguably The Oregon Trail [1971]. The series lays pretty …

Wizardry [1981]

On my last-played RPG, Rogue [1980], I wrote, "I have always considered the video game RPG in purely negative terms, and I don’t simply mean that I don’t like them." But that was a cowardly way of veiling the truth: I have always considered the video game RPG in purely negative terms largely because I …

ET [1982] + Pitfall [1982]

The Video Game Crash Of 1983 wasn't. It wasn't a video game crash nor even "the Atari Crash," it was a crash of the entire North American consumer computing industry, from Atari to Radio Shack to IBM. Every American computing firm fell prey to, yes, offering a slate of sub-par products, many with confusing naming …

Sokoban [1982]

The puzzles we've seen in Colossal Cave Adventure [1975/77] and its immediate children aren't puzzles in the sense that a jigsaw puzzle is. They're either lock-and-key dependencies, mapping, or wordplay. In most cases, solving these puzzles relies not on putting together what you know, but on what you don't know: how do I get past …

Q*Bert [1982]

It's hard to tell what Q*Bert [1982] is. It's literally at a 45 degree angle to other games. It seems at first like it's going to be a puzzle game, but it never gets off the runway and introduces an actual puzzle. It forgoes even as much narrative contextualization as Pac-Man [1980]. Instead of words, …

Robotron 2084 [1982]

The screen is enclosed by rainbow flashing that snaps open and shut like a curtain between levels. There's one sound channel but it's overloaded with buzzing and bipping and screaming. There's dozens of robotic enemies closing in on you from all sides, and their colorshifting teletextural bullets travel faster the further they are away from …

Robotron 2084 [1982]

Text version, for legibility and slow connections.Music: Front 242 - U-Men (Instrumental) [1982]