It’s difficult to say with certainty what the most popular titles or genres were in the early years of computer games. Many of the games were sold directly by mail-order, or through tiny single-proprietor stores, and no software trade organization was collecting comprehensive sales statistics. In 1980, the magazine Softalk began running a list of the top-thirty best-selling Apple II programs based on retailer surveys. It did not (and could not) provide absolute sales figures, but, although VisiCalc sat at the top, twenty-two of the titles were games. Most were CRPG, adventure, and arcade action games (including Automated Simulations’ Temple of Apshai, Sierra’s Mystery House, and a maze game called Head On). Microsoft Flight Simulator and the chess game Sargon II took second and fourth position, while the wargames Computer Bismarck and Computer Ambush, from Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), could be found in the twenties.[1]
The earliest glimpse of hard numbers comes from a 1982 survey of software publishers by Computer Gaming World. Some firms refused to release sales numbers, but the highest selling title among those who did, the (now utterly forgotten) action game K-RAZY Shoot-Out, had sold 35,000 copies to date. Adventure and CRPG games made a strong showing: Infocom claimed 32,000 sales for Zork, Automated Simulations 30,000 for Temple of Apshai¸ Sierra 25,000 for The Wizard and the Princess, Sir-Tech’s Wizardry came in at 24,000 and Richard Garriot’s Ultima at 20,000.[2]
Softalk software sales ranking, October 1980 Computer Gaming World industry sales figures, September/October 1982
However, within the parallel universe of home video games, which had grown up simultaneously with but independently of personal computers, selling 30,000 units would hardly be something to brag about in 1982. Sales for hit video games regularly hit six or seven figures—Atari’s 1982 E.T., for example, which is retrospectively considered a flop because of excess production, nonetheless sold nearly two million copies.[3]
The lure of this massive market of encouraged both video and computer game makers to create mass-market hybrid devices, typically called “home computers,” by combining the programmability and flexibility of a personal computer with the plug-and-play software cartridges of video game consoles. These third-generation personal computers (following the second-generation 1977 Trinity), were corporate creations—necessarily so, because where the second generation had wired together multiple off-the-shelf transistor-transistor logic chips to render the display or generate sounds, the home computers used dedicated, custom-made integrated circuits. Those bespoke hardware chips required a large capital investment to produce. The days of auteurs like Woz designing a new computer single-handedly from existing parts were over.[4]
The Origins of Home Video Game Systems
Atari began its existence in 1971 as Syzygy Engineering, a partnership between Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney with the goal of releasing a coin-operated version of the game Spacewar, created at MIT in the 1960s. They intended to put a digital foot in the electromechanical door of coin-operated amusements, a well-established industry, albeit one with a seedy reputation, associated in the public mind with gambling and the Mafia. Amusement makers manufactured everything from pinball games and shooting galleries to fortune tellers and love testers. Bars and restaurants would buy a machine or two to supplement their income, but there were also dedicated arcades whose entire revenue depend on the coin collectors of electromechanical amusements.[5]
Meanwhile, in 1972, the television maker Magnavox released the first home video game system, the Odyssey, based on a concept conceived by Ralph Baer, an engineer at a New Hampshire defense contractor, back in 1966. The Odyssey could display only three dots and a line, and relied on plastic overlays stuck to the screen for most of its visual flair. Bushnell and Dabney (now calling themselves Atari) assigned newly-hired engineer Al Alcorn a starter project to learn the ropes of video games: recreate the Odyssey Ping-Pong game. Alcorn exceeded his remit and made a significantly improved game (adding a running score, extended paddles, and dynamic bounce angles), and the result was so fun that Atari turned his tutorial into a real product. Atari Pong became a smash arcade hit, selling 8,000 machines. With no moving parts outside the coin box, it was far easier to maintain than traditional amusements, and the shadowy reputation which had long clung to the industry failed to adhere to the modern sheen of the video game.[6]
Whereas the video games of the early 1970s were built out of many solid-state chips or components wired together, by 1974 Atari engineers realized that integrated circuits had gotten cheap enough to put a video game on a single chip, and package it for the home consumer market, connectors to send the video signal into a television set, through the inputs normally used by the owner’s antenna. They designed a home version of Pong, and made a deal with Sears to release a white-label version for $99.95 for the Christmas 1975 season. The following year, semiconductor maker General Instruments released the AY-3-8500 chip, with built in circuitry for six different ball and paddle games, making it trivial for other companies to create their own Pong knock-offs. By Christmas 1977, thirteen of the seventy-four million households in the U.S. owned a Pong-type game: nearly eighteen percent. (In this same time period, from 1974 to 1977, Steve Jobs went from an Atari technician, hired as a teenager by Al Alcorn, to launching the Apple II.)[7]
The Atari Pong console in action. [Interfoto/Alamy Stock Photo]
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