In the early days of the 1970s, computer games were little more than a fantasy to most of the world’s population.
Only the very few hardcore computer tech specialists had even the faintest inkling that computers could be used for more than calculating complex equations and filling huge rooms with noise, heat, and the faint stink of unwashed code math majors. While it would be nearly impossible to cover the history of the PC in a magazine-length article, I will try to cover the history of pc gaming, at least as far as I had contact with it, from the mid-70s to the mid-80s.
It’s difficult to pin down what the first true PC game was. Broadly defined, early computer games date back to primitive missile simulators (circa 1947) and Tic-Tac-Toe games on very early computers with analog electronics. These computers were essentially glorified calculators with a bit of storage (in some cases, “storage” meant the position of a physical relay as big as your fist, or the on/off condition of a vacuum tube).
The first playable, reproducible and complex game that I could find was Spacewar. This was a 2-player game written by Steve Russell and assorted other programmers referring to themselves as the “Higham Institute.” The game was developed at MIT for the PDP-1 mainframe. Initially it was written as a way to kill time in the mainframe room, but soon became part of the PDP-1 package, used by field technicians as a diagnostic aid. Once a new PDP-1 was set up, field techs would run Spacewar as a diagnostic to test the PDP-1s functionality. This game actually found its way into arcades some 10+ years later, but even the early versions strongly resembled the first Asteroids game: Two ships, swirling around a central gravity well, attempted to shoot each other. I actually played the arcade version of this at a Kansas City area amusement park as late as 1978 and found it fairly sophisticated: Players could choose ships and game settings such as black hole gravity on or off, shots could be set to respond to gravity or not, etc. Ships could be partially damaged, with bits of debris following along for a short time, and degrading maneuverability as bits got knocked off.
Even as early as the 1960s, console games and PC games were beginning to diverge. The first versions of Pong were developed with analog TV equipment rather than complex and expensive computer electronics. While Pong began to move video gaming into the public consciousness, PC games were still the plaything of the elite computer science community.
Much like the early years of the auto industry, once electronics, computer, and game manufacturers got the idea that people would actually buy computers for their homes, more and more manufacturers started cranking out their version of a “home PC,” with widely varied success. With every year, there were new machines from new computer makers on the market, until the initial crazed demand was satiated and buyers became more discerning. A handful of models gained popularity and many manufacturers either went out of business or focused their efforts in other areas. To the best of my limited investigative abilities, the first PC marketed to the home was the Honeywell H316 “Kitchen computer,” sold in the 1969 Neiman-Marcus catalog for a paltry $10,600. This thing was built into a pedestal base desk sort of thing, with the “Jetsons” design sensibilities of the late 60s. It even came with its own, permanently attached director style chair and a cutting board, what convenience! The H316 is mentioned here only to give an idea of where home computing started; this thing was only good for storing recipes and nothing else. No games (unless you enjoyed playing “Find the kielbasa recipe”), no graphics, no fun.
Into the early and mid-70s, we had the Altair and Apple-1 and similar ventures. These were pre-built kits for consumers. You could get the Altair as a pre-built box for a couple of hundred more, but to have any sort of storage and a monitor, you were looking at $2,000 and a room full of ugly metal boxes. While home-made text games could be written for anything with a language and a display, most PCs at this time were at best text-only display models (the Altair only came with binary display LEDs), and couldn’t handle even text output without a lot of add-ons.
In 1977, the home PC market truly exploded. Complete PCs could be purchased with monitors and even -gasp! - software! 1977 saw the release of the AppleII, Commodore PET, and Radio Shack TRS-80 model 1 (“Trash-80”). Graphics were either ASCII (text) character based or low-resolution blocks, but at last there were graphics based games, some even had sound! Prices ranged from about $600 for the TRS-80 to about $2600 for the AppleII with the full 48k of RAM. While the PET was not really expandable, it did include a built-in monitor and storage system (cassette tape drive). The TRS80 included a monochrome monitor, the AppleII only included the CPU, but had eight internal expansion slots and could handle six color display output right out of the box.
My first experience with a PC-based game was on a Heathkit H89 around 1979. This was a monochrome all-in-one “PC”, the monitor was built into the huge tan plastic case that also housed the disk drive, CPU and keyboard. Did I mention this was built from a kit? In the fine tradition of the Altair and the Apple-1, Heathkit offered this CP/M based machine as an electronics kit, bringing the price well down from a manufactured equivalent. The H89 sported anywhere from 16 to 64k of RAM, a 90K 5 ¼” floppy drive, a blazing 2 MHZ Z80 processor and no hard drive, but at the time it was one of the most advanced PCs you could buy for your home (for a mere $2,000). And what could one do with all this amazing technology and the dazzlingly bright silk-covered amber monochrome display? Well, I have no idea; all I did with it was played Colossal Cave Adventure, later re-incarnated as Zork I. This was an all-text adventure that was essentially in the public domain at the time (how many of you remember “you are lost in a maze of twisty little passages all alike”?)
Like most games of the era, Colossal Cave Adventure was on a low-density 5.25” floppy disk. As it happens, the Heathkit’s operating system was also partially on a 5.25” floppy disk, as there were no hard drives at the time that were practical for home use. This of course led to the scourge of 70s and early 80s gaming: the Disk Swap. Basically it goes like this, put in your OS disk, startup the computer and after about 10, 15, or 20 minutes, when the PC is up and running, pop out the OS disk and put in the Game Disk and load that up. This may also require swapping back to the OS disk if the PC needs to look up some disk or memory commands while loading the game. While the game is running, you may need to swap to another disk to save. Of course, PC gamers who have played Riven or any other multi-CD game are familiar with the disk swap, but probably not with swapping out disks every time you save.
Around the time the Heathkit came out, several other home computers popped up on the market as well: The Apple II+, the TI 99/4a, and the Commodore Vic-20, for example. As illustrated in the chart, each of these computers had their advantages and disadvantages. The Apple had loads of expansion slots, a half-decent processor, and immense popularity. At this stage of PC gaming, most of the games available were cheap little amusements written by some deranged coder in his parent’s garage/basement/Rumpus Room and published at low cost on floppy disks with black and white labels in plastic bag packaging. Games were getting more of an arcade feel, but most of the popular games were written by other gamers. Apple of course sported the first version of Castle Wolfenstein, a 2D low resolution monochrome Nazi-hunting game with a crude attempt at voice synthesis (“did that guy just say SS or wiener schnitzel?”) While the Apple II+ had ‘color’ graphics, the colors were all faded looking pastels, even on Apple’s own monitors. Apple probably had the lead on available games, as anyone who had an Apple II+ could write games for the Apple II+. The downside was that the II+ was pretty damned expensive for those of us who weren’t pulling in $25 per hour in high school and didn’t have parents who gave money on a regular basis.
While most home users couldn’t create their own cartridges, we could write some pretty nice arcade style games with the Extended Basic cartridge and a tape or disk drive. TI was the first home computer that let users define “Sprites,” icon-like graphics in blocks of 256 pixels with 16 available colors that could move smoothly across the screen. The TI also handled collision detection for Sprites. Collisions with other sprites or with set locations on the screen could be handled quite quickly, even if the program were written in TI extended basic. Any schmoe could sit down and write their own space invaders or asteroids style game in a short afternoon.
The downside to the TI, apart from the lack of outside game developers that lasted until the TI was shoved to the background by the C-64, was the difficulty in expanding the thing. Initially, you could buy individual peripherals, such as a pretty damned effective voice synthesizer, 48k memory expansion, floppy drive, RS/232 (serial) interface and a few others. The problem with this, apart from the $150-$250 price tag of each add-on was that they all plugged into a single port on the right side of the console, or into the right side of another peripheral. This meant that if you wanted speech synthesis, an RS/232 interface, memory expansion and a disk drive, you needed a desk about 7 feet wide with a kneehole to sit at on the left end. Fortunately TI came out with the Peripheral Expansion Box, a $450 35+ lb. 2ft. by 1ft. by about 10 inch steel box that accepted expansion cards and a floppy drive for all of the above listed functions, except the speech synthesis module. At the bottom end of this range came the Timex/Sinclair 1000. For a meager $99 you got a notebook computer-sized black box with an astounding 2k of memory, low resolution black and white graphics and probably serious carpal tunnel syndrome from the tiny membrane keyboard.
One characteristic that disappeared soon after the AppleII series, the TI and the Vic-20/C-64 was the ability to write or just type in your own games. Magazines like Byte and 99er would publish programs, written out in basic, every month or quarter. It’s hard to relay the satisfaction of writing your own game, or even just typing one in from the pages of a magazine. Debugging the code was almost more enjoyable than some of these games. Now, of course, you can download infinitely more sophisticated, flashier games in a matter of seconds onto your cell phone, but we’re talking about a time when cell phones were about half the size of a cinderblock and weighed about 4.5 kilograms.
Radio Shack introduced the first TRS-80 in 1971. For a reasonable, at the time, price of $599, you received the computer, basically an undersized keyboard in a thick case that housed all the works, a monochrome monitor and a cassette tape recorder for storage. Initially without any external peripherals, crude level 1 basic and only 4k of memory, the first tras…er TRS-80 was fairly limited, as were most computers in this price range at that time. Radio Shack subsequently released an upgrade kit, where a hobbyist with some soldering and electronics know-how could up the memory to 16k and Level II basic. Radio Shack would do the upgrade to your new TRS-80 for no charge if you didn’t feel up to the task of soldering bits onto your new $599 computer. An expansion interface was subsequently released for $299 that added an expansion port, printer port, serial port, expansion slots for up to 32k and two tape drive connectors. It also included a disk drive controller that could handle up to four drives, each of which would set you back another $500!
The TRS-80 was unremarkable at the time in terms of graphics and processor speed (1.77 MHz), but in 1980 Radio Shack became a true contender in the home game-worthy PC market with the release of the TRS-80 Color Computer, affectionately known as the CoCo. With a whopping four colors and a mind-numbing processor speed of 0.87 MHz, the first CoCo didn’t have much going for it beyond the $399 price tag. While it set no records for performance or innovation, the CoCo spawned a fierce and fanatical following. User groups and Bulletin Board Systems sprang up rapidly across the country. Sadly, Radio Shack had no Killer Application for the CoCo or the TRS-80. Radio Shack continued to improve and released new TRS-80 models, but would take a serious shot in the balls in the early 80s, as would many home computer manufacturers.
Only the IBM PC jr and the Apple III had 128 k of memory stock at the time, and while the Mac costs about twice as much as the PC jr, it included a monitor, a revolutionary operating system, and astoundingly high resolution albeit monochrome graphics. Oh and it came bundled with the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processor anyone outside of the Xerox PARC facility had ever seen. Microsoft was to hop on the WYSIWIG rip-off bandwagon the following year with the release of Microsoft Windows. Now computers for the home were becoming not only fairly powerful, but also fairly easy to use. Any schmoe could operate a PC and play games until his fingers bled. This then is the beginning of the first golden age of PC games; home computers were no longer toys or curiosities, but potentially useful items. While you could do some word processing on the PCs of the mid-70s, most of them could only handle forty characters per line, and most printers were both crappy looking dot matrix and crappy looking unreadable thermal image printers.
About this time, competing manufacturers were dropping out of the game. TI had killed its 99/4a production around 1983, as even its cheaply made “beige” model couldn’t keep up with the fast-moving advances in PC technology. Any manufacturer unable or unwilling to make a significant leap forward to a windows-capable architecture was squeezed out of the market. A few manufacturers tried to copy the Macintosh (cough, cough*franklin*cough), and soon found themselves attacked by Apple’s formidable legal team.
It’s difficult to pin down what the first true PC game was. Broadly defined, early computer games date back to primitive missile simulators (circa 1947) and Tic-Tac-Toe games on very early computers with analog electronics. These computers were essentially glorified calculators with a bit of storage (in some cases, “storage” meant the position of a physical relay as big as your fist, or the on/off condition of a vacuum tube).
The first playable, reproducible and complex game that I could find was Spacewar. This was a 2-player game written by Steve Russell and assorted other programmers referring to themselves as the “Higham Institute.” The game was developed at MIT for the PDP-1 mainframe. Initially it was written as a way to kill time in the mainframe room, but soon became part of the PDP-1 package, used by field technicians as a diagnostic aid. Once a new PDP-1 was set up, field techs would run Spacewar as a diagnostic to test the PDP-1s functionality. This game actually found its way into arcades some 10+ years later, but even the early versions strongly resembled the first Asteroids game: Two ships, swirling around a central gravity well, attempted to shoot each other. I actually played the arcade version of this at a Kansas City area amusement park as late as 1978 and found it fairly sophisticated: Players could choose ships and game settings such as black hole gravity on or off, shots could be set to respond to gravity or not, etc. Ships could be partially damaged, with bits of debris following along for a short time, and degrading maneuverability as bits got knocked off.
Much like the early years of the auto industry, once electronics, computer, and game manufacturers got the idea that people would actually buy computers for their homes, more and more manufacturers started cranking out their version of a “home PC,” with widely varied success. With every year, there were new machines from new computer makers on the market, until the initial crazed demand was satiated and buyers became more discerning. A handful of models gained popularity and many manufacturers either went out of business or focused their efforts in other areas. To the best of my limited investigative abilities, the first PC marketed to the home was the Honeywell H316 “Kitchen computer,” sold in the 1969 Neiman-Marcus catalog for a paltry $10,600. This thing was built into a pedestal base desk sort of thing, with the “Jetsons” design sensibilities of the late 60s. It even came with its own, permanently attached director style chair and a cutting board, what convenience! The H316 is mentioned here only to give an idea of where home computing started; this thing was only good for storing recipes and nothing else. No games (unless you enjoyed playing “Find the kielbasa recipe”), no graphics, no fun.
Into the early and mid-70s, we had the Altair and Apple-1 and similar ventures. These were pre-built kits for consumers. You could get the Altair as a pre-built box for a couple of hundred more, but to have any sort of storage and a monitor, you were looking at $2,000 and a room full of ugly metal boxes. While home-made text games could be written for anything with a language and a display, most PCs at this time were at best text-only display models (the Altair only came with binary display LEDs), and couldn’t handle even text output without a lot of add-ons.
In 1977, the home PC market truly exploded. Complete PCs could be purchased with monitors and even -gasp! - software! 1977 saw the release of the AppleII, Commodore PET, and Radio Shack TRS-80 model 1 (“Trash-80”). Graphics were either ASCII (text) character based or low-resolution blocks, but at last there were graphics based games, some even had sound! Prices ranged from about $600 for the TRS-80 to about $2600 for the AppleII with the full 48k of RAM. While the PET was not really expandable, it did include a built-in monitor and storage system (cassette tape drive). The TRS80 included a monochrome monitor, the AppleII only included the CPU, but had eight internal expansion slots and could handle six color display output right out of the box.
Like most games of the era, Colossal Cave Adventure was on a low-density 5.25” floppy disk. As it happens, the Heathkit’s operating system was also partially on a 5.25” floppy disk, as there were no hard drives at the time that were practical for home use. This of course led to the scourge of 70s and early 80s gaming: the Disk Swap. Basically it goes like this, put in your OS disk, startup the computer and after about 10, 15, or 20 minutes, when the PC is up and running, pop out the OS disk and put in the Game Disk and load that up. This may also require swapping back to the OS disk if the PC needs to look up some disk or memory commands while loading the game. While the game is running, you may need to swap to another disk to save. Of course, PC gamers who have played Riven or any other multi-CD game are familiar with the disk swap, but probably not with swapping out disks every time you save.
Around the time the Heathkit came out, several other home computers popped up on the market as well: The Apple II+, the TI 99/4a, and the Commodore Vic-20, for example. As illustrated in the chart, each of these computers had their advantages and disadvantages. The Apple had loads of expansion slots, a half-decent processor, and immense popularity. At this stage of PC gaming, most of the games available were cheap little amusements written by some deranged coder in his parent’s garage/basement/Rumpus Room and published at low cost on floppy disks with black and white labels in plastic bag packaging. Games were getting more of an arcade feel, but most of the popular games were written by other gamers. Apple of course sported the first version of Castle Wolfenstein, a 2D low resolution monochrome Nazi-hunting game with a crude attempt at voice synthesis (“did that guy just say SS or wiener schnitzel?”) While the Apple II+ had ‘color’ graphics, the colors were all faded looking pastels, even on Apple’s own monitors. Apple probably had the lead on available games, as anyone who had an Apple II+ could write games for the Apple II+. The downside was that the II+ was pretty damned expensive for those of us who weren’t pulling in $25 per hour in high school and didn’t have parents who gave money on a regular basis.
The Greatest Home Computer of all time (from 1979 until maybe 1980)
Thus was I relegated to the faithful but downtrodden ranks of TI 99/4a users. The TI had quite a lot going for it. Because of failures in Texas Instruments’ development section, a “dumbed-down” processor specifically designed for the 99/4 and 99/4a was not going to be ready by the targeted production date. TI’s solution was to use the TMS9900 CPU. This was a 16-bit processor TI had used, in one incarnation or another, in their business computers since the early to mid-70s. My high school in fact had one of the original TI business machines, a TMS 990 mini computer. This was basically a huge, heavy metal desk with a computer built into it. It had two 8” floppy drives and a monochrome monitor built into the desk surface. This machine was fantastic for holding down buckled floor tiles and occupying about 18 sq. ft. of floor space. Because of the 16-bit processor, we wound up setting it up to figure prime numbers and let it go for two semesters. The 16-bit processor, at the time, was significant overkill for a home computer, particularly for a small, toy-like PC with a slightly substandard sized keyboard and a cartridge deck. However, it was fairly fast and durable, and with the editor/assembler cartridge that allowed users to write in assembly code and compile their own programs, allowed the average Joe to write some pretty decent games. This was damned lucky for the rest of us TI users, as TI kept a stranglehold on development of cartridges for this machine. Most of the games you could get in the early days of the TI were simple, unsophisticated games that quickly became repetitious. One exception was Tunnels of Doom, a very early RPG game that came on a cartridge and a cassette tape or 5.25” disk. Dungeon levels were generated randomly as the game progressed, and provided endless hours of distraction. Of course, about ¼ of that time was waiting for the next level to generate, but that wasn’t so bad at this stage of PC development.While most home users couldn’t create their own cartridges, we could write some pretty nice arcade style games with the Extended Basic cartridge and a tape or disk drive. TI was the first home computer that let users define “Sprites,” icon-like graphics in blocks of 256 pixels with 16 available colors that could move smoothly across the screen. The TI also handled collision detection for Sprites. Collisions with other sprites or with set locations on the screen could be handled quite quickly, even if the program were written in TI extended basic. Any schmoe could sit down and write their own space invaders or asteroids style game in a short afternoon.
The downside to the TI, apart from the lack of outside game developers that lasted until the TI was shoved to the background by the C-64, was the difficulty in expanding the thing. Initially, you could buy individual peripherals, such as a pretty damned effective voice synthesizer, 48k memory expansion, floppy drive, RS/232 (serial) interface and a few others. The problem with this, apart from the $150-$250 price tag of each add-on was that they all plugged into a single port on the right side of the console, or into the right side of another peripheral. This meant that if you wanted speech synthesis, an RS/232 interface, memory expansion and a disk drive, you needed a desk about 7 feet wide with a kneehole to sit at on the left end. Fortunately TI came out with the Peripheral Expansion Box, a $450 35+ lb. 2ft. by 1ft. by about 10 inch steel box that accepted expansion cards and a floppy drive for all of the above listed functions, except the speech synthesis module. At the bottom end of this range came the Timex/Sinclair 1000. For a meager $99 you got a notebook computer-sized black box with an astounding 2k of memory, low resolution black and white graphics and probably serious carpal tunnel syndrome from the tiny membrane keyboard.
One characteristic that disappeared soon after the AppleII series, the TI and the Vic-20/C-64 was the ability to write or just type in your own games. Magazines like Byte and 99er would publish programs, written out in basic, every month or quarter. It’s hard to relay the satisfaction of writing your own game, or even just typing one in from the pages of a magazine. Debugging the code was almost more enjoyable than some of these games. Now, of course, you can download infinitely more sophisticated, flashier games in a matter of seconds onto your cell phone, but we’re talking about a time when cell phones were about half the size of a cinderblock and weighed about 4.5 kilograms.
Changing the market
In August of 1982, Commodore introduced the successor to the Vic-20, the Commodore C-64. With 64k of memory right off the bat, a $595 price point, a $100 rebate for buyers sending in their old computer, and a market strategy involving selling C-64s at department stores, toy stores, and discount stores and authorized dealers, the C-64 became the best selling home computer of all time. The C-64 lacked the expandability of the AppleII line, but blew it away in terms of graphics. The C-64s only competition at the time was the Atari 800, which required added memory to hit 64k and had a higher starting price point. Both the C-64 and the Atari 800 had separate video processors to handle more complicated graphics tasks without taxing the CPU. This design concept first showed up on home computers in 1979 in the original TI99/4 and two years later in the less costly TI 99/4a. The C-64 was conceived as a business machine as well as a gaming machine, but was thought to have led to the crash in console sales in the early 1980s. Why buy a game-only console when you can have a PC that does word processing, gaming, and spreadsheet balancing for just a little more green? Most of the PC’s mentioned here fit somewhere between a business-oriented design and a home gaming console. There are several models and manufacturers not mentioned due to space restrictions, but there is one line that must be mentioned: the TRS-80.The TRS-80 was unremarkable at the time in terms of graphics and processor speed (1.77 MHz), but in 1980 Radio Shack became a true contender in the home game-worthy PC market with the release of the TRS-80 Color Computer, affectionately known as the CoCo. With a whopping four colors and a mind-numbing processor speed of 0.87 MHz, the first CoCo didn’t have much going for it beyond the $399 price tag. While it set no records for performance or innovation, the CoCo spawned a fierce and fanatical following. User groups and Bulletin Board Systems sprang up rapidly across the country. Sadly, Radio Shack had no Killer Application for the CoCo or the TRS-80. Radio Shack continued to improve and released new TRS-80 models, but would take a serious shot in the balls in the early 80s, as would many home computer manufacturers.
The Birth of a Legend, and The End of an Era
In 1984, while still struggling with marketing its first shot at a “Graphical User Interface” based PC, Apple made other PC manufacturers annoyed just a little with the release of the Macintosh. The first Mac had an astounding 128k of RAM and a 32-bit processor, unheard of at the time for a home computer, well the 32-bit processor anyway.Only the IBM PC jr and the Apple III had 128 k of memory stock at the time, and while the Mac costs about twice as much as the PC jr, it included a monitor, a revolutionary operating system, and astoundingly high resolution albeit monochrome graphics. Oh and it came bundled with the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processor anyone outside of the Xerox PARC facility had ever seen. Microsoft was to hop on the WYSIWIG rip-off bandwagon the following year with the release of Microsoft Windows. Now computers for the home were becoming not only fairly powerful, but also fairly easy to use. Any schmoe could operate a PC and play games until his fingers bled. This then is the beginning of the first golden age of PC games; home computers were no longer toys or curiosities, but potentially useful items. While you could do some word processing on the PCs of the mid-70s, most of them could only handle forty characters per line, and most printers were both crappy looking dot matrix and crappy looking unreadable thermal image printers.
About this time, competing manufacturers were dropping out of the game. TI had killed its 99/4a production around 1983, as even its cheaply made “beige” model couldn’t keep up with the fast-moving advances in PC technology. Any manufacturer unable or unwilling to make a significant leap forward to a windows-capable architecture was squeezed out of the market. A few manufacturers tried to copy the Macintosh (cough, cough*franklin*cough), and soon found themselves attacked by Apple’s formidable legal team.
