Author’s note: I originally intended for this post to cover adventure games, computer role-playing games, wargames and other simulations, a brief look at the home video game market, and finally the rise of hybrids that fused home video game systems with personal computers. In the grand scheme of the story about personal computers that I am trying to tell, it probably does not make sense to lavish nearly 7,000 words on early adventure games alone, but it’s a topic of personal interest to me and the tale grew in the telling.
Play was central to the formation of personal computer culture. For the early hobbyists who were fascinated by the guts of the machine, the computer was a plaything in and of itself. Many of those who joined the hobby in 1975 or 1976 did so because of games: they had experience with the extensive BASIC game culture that circulated in the time-sharing systems of universities, high schools, and even corporations, and wanted to keep playing at home.
Even after the rise of commercial personal computer software, when the first truly useful applications began appearing, games remained by far the most popular software category (counting by number of titles produced and number of units sold, although not by dollar value). One 1980 catalog of Apple II software, for example, lists 265 titles, of which roughly two-thirds are games, from Ack-Ack (an anti-aircraft target shooter)to Wipe Off (a Breakout clone). The rest of the catalog comprises demos, educational programs, and a smattering of business software. Whatever they might say about the practical value of the personal computer, buyers had an evident hunger for games.[1]
The Early Games and Their Market
Computer owners got their hands on games in one of three ways. In the early years, the most common means would be simply copying a paper or cassette tape from a friend or colleague, whether with the permission of the original author or not. In the early years, most hobbyists treated game software as a commons to be freely shared, just as it had been in the time-sharing culture through cooperatives like DECUS. This peer-to-peer copying would never entirely go away, despite the commercialization of game software and various schemes by publishers to try to prevent it.
Many magazines and books also published “type-ins,” complete computer programs (almost always written in BASIC) intended to be manually entered at the keyboard (and then saved to tape or disk), and these, too, were most often games. Dave Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games (first published in 1973 by Digital Equipment Corporation), a collection of over 100 type-ins, reputedly sold one million copies by 1979. Though type-in publication continued through the 1980s, the inherent limits on the length of such programs (only the most dedicated would tackle a type-in that was more than a few hundred lines long) and their reliance on the universality of BASIC (rather than more performant compiled languages) meant that their significance waned as the sophistication of the game market increased. They could serve as fun demos or educational tools for learning to code, but could not compare to similar games available commercially.[2]
Selection from a state capital guessing game type-in, from the first issue of Softside (October 1978). The median type-in was a simplistic game or graphical demo like this.
A selection from a type-in for a much more complex adventure game, published in the September 1980 Softside. This goes on for two-and-a-half more pages, and is about the limit of what was feasible in the type-in format for all but the most steadfast of typers.
Finally, of course, there were the commercial titles offered by software publishers. The game business began in the same way as the personal computer hardware business: with hobby-entrepreneurs selling their creations to fellow hobbyists. In July 1976, for example, D.E. Hipps of Miami, Florida offered a Star Trek game written for MicroSoft’s Altair BASIC for $10 (no one at this stage of the industry paid any attention to niceties such as licensing agreements for the use of the Star Trek name). No common standard data storage standard existed; hobbyists employed a mix of paper teletype tapes, cassette storage, and (for the most extravagant) floppy disks. So Hipps opted to distribute his game as printed source code: a type-in! SCELBI (creators of one of the early, pre-Altair hobby computers), offered another Star Trek variant called Galaxy in the same form. By the late 1970s, the convergence of the industry on a small number of popular storage standards (with CP/M dominant) resolved this problem, and most games were distributed in plastic baggies containing instructions and a cassette or floppy disk.[3]
Contents of a typical computer game package circa 1980. The instructions, command reference, special instruction sheet, and cassette would have come together in a plastic baggie.[Ernst Krogtof, retro365.blog]
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