Everyone Has a Best-Games List. However You Rank Them, It's a History of Video Games (Part 1)

This art form has existed for only about 50 years, but it has grown so fast that it has all but redefined entertainment.

Wherever there's a ranking, there's an argument. The BBC ranked the best films since 2000, and the objections came fast — In the Mood for Love at No. 2 was probably worth ten forum threads on its own.

Games are no different. At the end of last month, Time put out its list of the 50 best video games of all time: Tetris at No. 1, Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time at two and three.

There's plenty here to argue with. Dota 2 players will want to know why their game sits at No. 49, behind a phone game like Angry Birds, and League of Legends players will want to know why theirs isn't on the list at all. Blizzard fans may think StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty should have been the original StarCraft. Or take the winner, Tetris: we all agree it's a classic, and that it can kill any amount of dead time, but first place?

Time never explained how it chose. For a ranking put together by a publication that doesn't cover games, one line that circulates widely among players covers it: "Trust yourself on the high scores, trust the media on the low ones." Everyone judges by different standards. That's true of games, and it's true of films.

But games differ from film in one way: as a product and as an industry, they are very young. The Lumière brothers held the first public film screening at a café on the Boulevard des Capucines in 1895; 67 years later, in 1962, the first video game, Spacewar!, was born in a lab at MIT. Stretch it as far as it will go and the history of video games runs a little over 50 years — and if you start from Pong, the first video game to be commercialized successfully, it's ten years shorter than that.

So whether it's Time's Top 50, the Top 100 IGN once made, or any of the other lists out there, "all time" means games picked from 40-odd years of limited options. A history this short means that every video game ranking is, in effect, a history of video games.

Tennis for Two and Spacewar!: When Games Were Only About the Technology

Plenty of people assume video games were invented to be fun. At the start, a video game was a way of showing off — proof of a computer's raw power, and of the minds of the programmers behind it.

This was just after World War II. In the 1950s, scientists used games to probe at artificial intelligence: Alan Turing tried to write a chess program before he died, though the technology of the day meant he never finished it. William Higinbotham, an American physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, built a tennis game on an oscilloscope at Brookhaven National Laboratory: Tennis for Two. A single vertical line stood for the net, an arc traced the ball's flight, a knob set the angle of the shot, and a button swung.

The thing was only meant to be shown to visitors on the lab's open day. It ran on complicated machinery and had never been intended to entertain anyone, and two years later Tennis for Two was entirely forgotten.

So when we talk about the first video game, we usually mean Spacewar!. It arrived in 1962: two players, two spaceships shooting at each other in space.

Steve Russell and his classmates wrote it. They belonged to the same club, the Tech Model Railroad Club, or TMRC — the club where the earliest hacker culture took shape, full of an appetite for technology and invention.

Spacewar! came out of that appetite. The club had just acquired a new computer, a $120,000 PDP-1 the size of a small car but fitted with a keyboard and a display, and they decided to build something that would show what it could do. What they got was a game heavy with computation: the gravity and the vacuum of space were modeled precisely, a ship's path bent under the pull of nearby planets, fuel and ammunition both ran out, and a player needed some grounding in physics to shoot down the other ship within the time limit without crashing into a planet. Video games at this point were still a playground for geeks.

Unlike Tennis for Two, which was forgotten, Spacewar! had the luck to be born on a campus. It spread among students and faculty, its name traveled past MIT, it circulated officially at schools such as Stanford, and DEC, which built the PDP-1, ended up shipping Spacewar! installed on every PDP-1 it sold.

Still, not everyone could afford a $120,000 PDP-1, and between the physics and the bulk of the machine, the first widely circulated game stayed, for a long time, something known mainly to computer professionals — only 55 PDP-1s were ever sold. One other curious thing: beyond playing it, people were even keener to rewrite the code, so the game would take more players and let them steer more ships at once.

This was still another world, far from the general public.

Computer Space and Pong: The Video Game Industry Is Born

One of the foundations under the evolution of video games was the hardware that carried them, and the technology around it.

Once medium-scale integrated circuits and similar technologies pushed the price of a computer below $10,000, video games finally had a shot at commercialization — and something that had lived on high-end precision equipment began to turn into entertainment. People were still playing Spacewar!, but who played it, how they played it and why had all changed.

In 1971, the first video game arcade cabinet put on public display appeared at Stanford. What makes an arcade machine an arcade machine is the coin slot. Coin-operated "game machines" had existed since the 1920s, but the traditional cabinet was mechanical — think of a claw machine. The earliest video game to reach a cabinet in coin-operated form traces back to that machine at Stanford: built out of a converted mainframe, it ran an arcade version of the familiar Spacewar! called Galaxy Game, at 10 cents a play or 25 cents for three.

This was also the first time a video game made money. Two months later, Galaxy Game's designer, Nolan Bushnell, and a teaching-equipment company called Nutting Associates formally released another game along the lines of Spacewar!: Computer Space. The player steered a rocket, shooting at enemies while dodging their fire.

This was the first video game aimed at the widest possible public. The manufacturer built 1,500 machines loaded with it and sent them to entertainment venues of every kind, so that ordinary people drinking in bars could finally try what the top students at MIT and Stanford had been playing for years. The verdict was mixed: some found it thrilling, others found the physics in it too complicated. In the end the game earned them $100,000 — a decent-looking figure, and far below what Bushnell and his partners had expected.

Bushnell saw the problem himself. As he put it: "Of course I loved it, and my friends loved it — but my friends were all engineers. For the guy drinking beer in a bar, it was a little too hard."

In today's language, this game that had walked out of the lab and the hacker clubs was unfriendly to beginners: too steep to pick up.

So it was 1972's Pong that became the first video game the public knew. Ask most people today to name the first video game and this is probably the answer.

Next to Spacewar! and what followed it, this table-tennis game — a scoreboard, a dot and three vertical lines, nothing more — is what most lists use to mark the beginning of video games. Time's ranking put Pong at No. 40, and among the six games in the first class of the World Video Game Hall of Fame, Pong got in alongside Super Mario Bros., Doom and Pac-Man.

The man behind Pong was Nolan Bushnell again. After the not-quite-success of Computer Space, he and his former colleague Ted Dabney set up a company to license and develop games, and put out Pong. They tested it for the first time in a bar called Andy Capp's Tavern. A few days later the owner called the designer over: the machine had broken. He checked it and found the fault — the cash box was so full of coins that they had overflowed and jammed the coin mechanism.

Pong was a commercial success beyond question; within two years they had sold 8,000 machines like it. The market filled up with knockoff Pongs, one of them from Nutting Associates, Bushnell's former partner. A home version followed.

The old employer hardly mattered by then. Bushnell's own company — the famous Atari — would become one of the most important companies in games over the next decade. They were the first to commercialize the standard arcade cabinet, the box with a coin slot, a joystick and a screen, and it would let them rule the games market for a long time.

Space Invaders: The Golden Age of the Arcade

That stuffed cash box at Andy Capp's Tavern pointed to the golden age of arcade games ahead.

Space Invaders raised the curtain on it. Its developer, Taito, had been a Japanese import-export firm; after seeing how hot arcade games had become in the United States, it decided to open arcades of its own, and then to make its own arcade games.

Which is how Tomohiro Nishikado and Space Invaders came about. Nishikado handled all of the game's art and music, and even the shooting hardware fitted into the machine, and it launched in Japan in June 1978. The player worked a cannon that could move left and right, sheltering behind bunkers to destroy flying saucers, squid and other monsters.

The game was so successful that by the end of 1978 Japan alone had more than 100,000 machines running Space Invaders, and the game itself had taken in more than 600 million yen. Two years later Taito had sold 300,000 Space Invaders units in Japan, and another 60,000 in the United States.

The pixel monsters became a cultural marker. Contests over who could post the higher score were born with this game and turned into fixtures at game shows and on television. Its signature electronic music could be heard all over the street, countless small coffee shops added Space Invaders cabinets to keep up with the times, and in Japan there appeared arcades that ran nothing but Space Invaders — "Invader Houses."

There was also a rumor that the game caused a shortage of 100-yen coins in Japan, since one play of Space Invaders took a 100-yen coin — though the currency-circulation and bank figures from those years show it was only an exaggeration.

As Space Invaders took off, the arcade boom swept the world. By 1982, North America had twice as many arcades as two years before, 100,000 of them. Bars, fast-food places, supermarkets, liquor stores and even gas stations put in cabinets of one kind or another to earn a little extra.

Besides Space Invaders, before the golden age of the arcade ended in 1982, plenty of games every player knows were born: Namco's Pac-Man, Nintendo's Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong created a plumber. He was called Jumpman then; later he was renamed Mario.

Set these classics against what came before and one change stands out: games got more complicated, and they got color. Processor technology could handle heavier computation, so the character a player controlled could move in any direction, and the screen could open out along more than one axis. And RGB, which spread through the games business from 1979, gave games color for the first time.

This era also produced the first idea of "competition." Not esports between players as we think of it now — what mattered was posting a higher score on an arcade machine and breaking the record. The arcade was entertainment in a public place: anyone who has been to one has stood behind an expert watching him play, and has played with one eye on the onlookers. That mix of socializing, showing off and competing produced no end of fanatics and champions. Billy Mitchell, a Pac-Man player, set a perfect score of 3,333,360 in 1999. He is still one of the holders of the highest score; his story was made into a documentary, and he has collected prize money, honors and endorsements.

The odd part is that when Chinese players in the last decade of the twentieth century were being hauled out of arcades by the ear, arcade games had already passed their peak and begun to slide. By 1998, the number of arcades in the United States was down to 4,000.

After years underground and a brush with death, the home console finally took the arcade's place in gaming.

Super Mario Bros.: The Home Console Dies and Comes Back

Just as Space Invaders and Pac-Man and the rest were at their height, home consoles and video games were heading for a crash.

The home console market had a short boom after 1977. That year Atari released the Atari 2600, a console that changed the terms: it ran games off cartridges rather than built-in circuits. For the first time a console separated software from hardware.

That turned the whole industry over. Splitting the software out lowered the price of the console and let the games be updated and swapped. Most important, it split the software business from the hardware business — companies that did nothing but make games could now exist, and both Activision and Electronic Arts date from this moment.

A huge market followed. In the five years after launch, with far more games to play and arcade hits like Pac-Man and Galaxian successfully ported over, the Atari 2600 sold more than 10 million units, a figure that reached 19 million by 1984.

But because publishing a game had become so cheap and easy, a crowd of unrelated companies rushed in. Shoddy games filled players' screens, and in the end nobody trusted games and nobody wanted to play them.

The mess that began around 1983 is known as the Atari Shock, or the video game crash of 1983. Atari, which had no idea how to police quality, went down together with its console; the whole North American games market collapsed almost to nothing, and Atari went bankrupt.

It took Super Mario Bros. and the NES, the North American version of Nintendo's Famicom, to create a new video game market.

We told the story of the Famicom and Super Mario Bros., start to finish, in our piece marking the NES's 30th anniversary.

For a long stretch after 1985, no question, the games market belonged to this plumber in overalls. The imagination in the character, the pipes and brick walls and coins and mushrooms, the platform-jumping genre, and music anyone could hum made it the hottest game in the world at the time. Across all platforms it has sold 40.24 million copies to date.

At the same time, side-scrolling platform action games in the Super Mario Bros. mold became a genre you couldn't ignore. Many of the genre's classics were born then, whether Nintendo's own Metroid (1986), Konami's Contra (1987) or Capcom's Mega Man (1987). It was an age when everyone walked to the right, jumping and rolling across platforms.

We usually call this the start of the modern console market. After that death, Nintendo drew the lesson and wrote a set of policies for working with third-party publishers, with Nintendo itself monitoring and controlling the quality of the games.

That policy kept evolving and became one of the fixed commercial rules of today's games market. Why do so many important games get announced at PlayStation events? Why does every big console maker keep a few studios of its own? Nintendo, 30 years ago, is the answer to that question — and the reason we get to see as many games as we do.

In the next installment we'll tell the story of the 1990s, when games developed at speed. Japanese games ruled the console market for a time; in the West, plenty of familiar titles were being born on the PC.