A Brief History of Videogames
Far from being flippant, beeping, coin-gulping, child-snatching, attention-sucking, digit-eroding, epileptic soul-vortexes, mankind has been playing videogames from the dawn of time.
From the mysterious side-scrolling cave paintings recently discovered in Africa showing a small Italian plumber jumping over barrels towards a big ape, to the coin-operated mayhem of Tom Brown’s School Days, to ground-breaking “issue” titles like Antiretroviral Bomber Man - games have always addressed the concerns of their age.
Emperor Nero famously created the world’s first beat-em-up, using a complicated system of pulleys and levers to make Christians kick each other to mushy giblets in the coliseum. To this day, as a mark of holy remembrance, followers of Christ will never unleash a dragon-punch or fireball unless in the company of other Christians or at a Christian-oriented urban youth outreach centre. For this reason, boxing referees are now paid to attend Sunday services and increasingly, fundraising cake sales are held to send parishioners to fight Guile on an US airbase (where discipline has laxed like a deflated sex-doll), hire M. Bison to give communion or pay Blanka to fix a leaking roof.
The word “game” first came into common usage in 1960, derived from the military term “wargames” when the Army of a developed nation annually practiced fighting a real war by invading France. The first electronic videogame showcased at Festival Of Britain in 1951 was Tennis Test Prog. #175847, programmed and played with a computer made out of a Labrador and some plates of tripe. So successful was this game amongst exhibition-goers, that the private sector immediately invested all of its money into tripe and Labradors, but failed to spot that it was the game element causing the enjoyment and not the individual dogs or cow guts. This caused all of Britain to simultaneously declare bankruptcy and it was forced to sell all the stationary in Whitehall and re-mortgage Wales.
For decades the world of computer gaming remained the preserve of lab-coat technicians with personality disorders. A brief foray into coin-operated insanity proved fruitless and nearly sounded the death-knell of gaming once and for all. Civil rights’ joystick-wigglers Malcolm X: Sniper School and Rosa Parks’ Segregated Bus Simulator ’55 were two notable exceptions during that hiatus of concentrated bum-bile, but it was only with the emergence of home computing that videogames forced their way into the homes of families while they were sleeping and held them hostage with their addictive level design, memorable characters and psychosis-inducing soundtracks.
Titles like 51 Squares Allowed Each, Falklands/Malvinas Ultimate Warrior, Myra Hindley Super Stareout, HRH Edward and The Harlot Mrs. Simpson, The Hundred Busy Hands of David Gilmore and Bring Back Hanging! came flooding into the hearts and minds and supermarkets of people everywhere. Videogames became the ultimate status symbol for a stereotypical 80s family of nasties. In order to pay for increasingly more elaborate and expensive graphics, children were often forced into prostitution from as young as six and in many cases, market-trading.
The giddy hedonism of the 80s succumbed to a more moderate tone, as the hangover of spending a decade playing games with the only playable characters being Huey Lewis and The News began to set in. The introduction of console gaming encouraged moderation rather than endless upgrading towards oblivion and dour-faced titles such as Live Within Your Means 64 (Pounds A Week) entered the mix. Political correctness paved the way for a slurry of games tackling real social issues and videogaming giants adjusted their parameters to include progressive programmers into their talent pool. During the 90s, videogamers were shocked by the frank depiction of Sonic The Anorexic Hedgehog; consoles were shipped with a hypodermic-needle controller as standard; and many gamers caught their first glimpse of a gay/interracial kiss between Luigi and Pac-Man.
Next Time: The rebirth of gaming continues for the soul-blighted dystopian noughties; key gaming moments throughout history.
