Prehistory I: Draughts & OXO

This is the first in a series of mini-articles on the early history of video games. The games featured here will not receive review scores, and thus will not appear on the Tier List.

My endless curiosity over history and origins naturally leads me to desire to write concerning the origins of video games. Endless debates circle the question of what can be truly considered the first video game ever made. I am not here to throw my two cents into that ring, since the question already stirs up enough chatter. Besides, I think the question has been admirably answered by Stuart Brown (Ahoy) with his video essay on the question of the first video game. He provides a solid set of definitions for what constitutes a video game, and I am inclined to agree with his conclusion on what the first one really is.

So, what am I interested in here, if not the question of the first video game? My interests in history are in development: developments in culture, society, religion and - most importantly here - technology. As such, my interest here, this short series of articles, is to explore the early history and development of video games - a time period I am henceforth dubbing the 'prehistory' of video games. This era of gaming history, for my purposes, begins with the creation of the first video game (I will be following Ahoy's determinations on that subject), and ends upon the commercialisation of video games with the first arcade games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space, in 1971. This results in a time period spanning approximately 20 years, which might be significantly longer than what some of you may have first thought.

I have spent some time trawling through the internet annals of gaming history, primarily utilising Wikipedia, MobyGames and Gaming-History to come up with a selection of seventeen* games of historical significance or interest that I'll be covering through this short series. Their selection may come from the technology that enabled their development, their popularity and later influence, or other assorted curiosities. But I think that's enough of an introduction, this won't be a short series if I ramble on much longer, so let's get into the first selection of games.

*Addendum: Revised list is now at eighteen games, having added The PDP-10 Timesharing World Series. This is possibly the first game ever written in BASIC, and someone recently discovered the source code, making it playable on DOS-based systems. Exciting stuff!**

**Addendum 2.0: Another revision has occurred, removing a game and including a few more early BASIC games playable courtesy of their inclusion in David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games book. I suspect there will be quite a few more, which will inevitably blur the neat lines I've placed, but that's what history is like.

Draughts (1952)

Our first (and second, for that matter) game comes from jolly old England. Turns out the Brits invented video games, too (sorry America), along with Heavy Metal, Progressive Rock, Chocolate Bars, and the Internet - all things no doubt part-and-parcel of the life of the average gamer (they are for me, at least.)

The story of video games begins with computer science in the 1950s. Computer technology had been heavily invested in during the Second World War as a means of codebreaking, the most notable of these machines being the Colossus series of computers utilised for codebreaking during the latter years of the war.

However, the interest in the capabilities of computers did not cease alongside the war, and inevitably computer scientists would start considering what else could be achieved with computers outside of assisting with mathematical calculations. One such computer scientist was Christopher Strachey. Now, Strachey was a bit of pioneer in computer programming, having been one of the first to program a computer to play music, and also pioneering computer-generated text (which for him took the form of love letters.) 

In 1951, however, he had the idea to try and program a computer to play a simulation of a simple board game. He settled on the game of Draughts (or Checkers, for all us non-Brits), and had a program ready for testing on the Pilot ACE computer at the National Physical Laboratory in London by mid-1951. It didn't work, however, as the program required more memory than the Pilot ACE had available.

So what was Strachey to do? Well, he did what most of us would do if our computer wasn't good enough for the job: get a new one. The University of Manchester had their own computer, the Manchester Mark 1, which had memory storage far superior to the Pilot ACE. Strachey decided he would take a chance on this machine, and reprogrammed his Draughts game to run on it instead. Success! And video games were born.

King me!

All that appears to remain of Strachey's Draughts program today is this screenshot of the game display, unfortunately. I haven't found any sort of simulator for it, nor is there much detail in the way of describing how the game played, outside of MobyGames' description of "The player had to use switches to select their move." Not a terribly helpful description, if I'm being perfectly honest. If there's any more information out there that I'm not aware of, feel me to leave a comment directing me towards it and I'll add it in here.

OXO (1952)

Another draw...

Staying in 1952, but moving a little further south in England to Cambridge, we have OXO, an implementation of the pen-and-paper game Noughts & Crosses (or Tic-Tac-Toe, again, for all of you on the other side of the Atlantic) on the EDSAC at Cambridge University. The game was programmed by Alexander S. Douglas as part of his academic thesis in human-computer interactions. We're not up to the time where video games were being made purely for entertainment yet, most games of this period were technological showcases, academic experiments or for private corporate/military training. 

It's not the first time Noughts & Crosses had been played on a computer, however. That would be 1950's Bertie the Brain, a machine built for the express purpose of playing Tic-Tac-Toe and showing off a new design of vacuum tube. It's also another arguable contender for first video game, but is disqualified by some for its use of a lightbulb-based display, as opposed to OXO and Draughts' CRT displays.

Unlike Strachey's Draughts, OXO has been simulated and is therefore playable! An EDSAC simulator has been available online since 2002, would you believe, courtesy of Martin Campbell-Kelly of the University of Warwick. It's a full-blooded simulator of the entire computer, and doesn't just play OXO, for those of you curious.

It's a rather crude-looking simulator, but it's simulating some rather crude technology, so you must give it some grace. For instance, you make your inputs via a rotary telephone dial (anyone remember those?), with each number (except 0) corresponding to a different square of the game board.

When the game first loads up, it'll ask whether you want to go first or second. OXO plays Noughts & Crosses perfectly, so you'd be daft to go second as you'll always lose, or draw if you play perfectly yourself. Going first ensures a draw if you know the basic winning strategy as EDSAC will counter you the same way every time. I played maybe half-a-dozen rounds and drew all I went first in, and lost the only round where I played second. I honestly don't think it's possible to win. Keep in mind, however, that OXO was never intended for public consumption - it was only part of an academic experiment, so it never really mattered whether you could beat the computer or not. I must admit, I find it utterly fascinating that EDSAC has been simulated and that a video game over 70 years old is still playable today.

That takes care of the first two of the seventeen games of this overview of the prehistory of video games. Yes, these games start out as crude simulations of pre-existing, simple board games, but there has to be a humble starting point somewhere. You don't get to the Skyrims of the gaming world instantaneously. Ultimately, however, Draughts and OXO would have limited influence, or possibly no influence at all on future games due to their complete lack of interaction with the world outside the universities in which the computers they resided on were built. We will yet have to wait a little while before the games of the university become the games of the people.

#001: Galaxy Game

Release Date: September/November, 1971

Platform: Arcade

Genre: Space Combat Simulation

Developer(s): Computer Recreations (Bill Pitts, Hugh Tuck)

Publisher(s): N/A

The chronogaming journey begins here in 1971 with what is arguably the first coin-operated arcade video game, Galaxy Game.

Galaxy Game is essentially an coin-operated adaptation of Steve Russell's 1962 game, Spacewar!, a space combat game that had become massively popular and well-known in university circles. The idea to adapt Spacewar! into a coin-operated game came from Hugh Tuck, who suggested the idea to his friend Bill Pitts, both of whom played Spacewar! together frequently at Stanford University. 

Tuck's idea made a lot of sense, considering the growing popularity of Spacewar! throughout the 60s. A commercial, coin-op version would've probably made good money. The problem was that the computers of the late 60s that ran Spacewar! were far too expensive, making the production of a coin-op version completely unviable.

However, once 1970 rolled around, and DEC had released the next minicomputer in their PDP lineup, the PDP-11, things suddenly weren't quite as unviable as they were before. Granted, the PDP-11 still cost ~US$14,000, but that was still an awful lot cheaper than anything else around at the time. Seeing this, Pitts and Tuck decided that now it was worth building a prototype to test their idea, and so Galaxy Game was born.

The first prototype. A PDP-11 was able to run two simultaneously. Source: Gaming-History

Galaxy Game was installed in Stanford University's Tresidder building in 1971. There appears to be some confusion online regarding when exactly it was installed. Wikipedia's article states it was November 1971, however there are numerous other sources that say September instead. The MobyGames page sums this confusion up pretty well, having the release date as November, but just down the page in the game description it says September. I haven't dived too deep into this, and I don't think it's all that important, either, but I generally prefer earlier dates if there's enough sources to support it.

The second prototype at the Computer History Museum. Source: Wikipedia

Galaxy Game became quite the hit at Stanford, with people waiting for up to an hour at times just to play a single round. A second version (see image above) was produced in 1972 that allowed 4 cabinets to play simultaneously (though it appears this was never implemented due to space limitations). This version remained until 1979, when it was disassembled due to the processor becoming faulty. It was restored in 1997, and since 2000 has resided at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. 

Now let's get into the game itself. I'm playing it through MAME for this, though it is also available to play online.

After selecting how many games you want to play, the options menu appears. These options can be changed using the DIP switches. The choices are:

1. Positive or Negative Gravity
2. Sun or No Sun
3. Slow or Fast Speed
4. One or Two Player

On the surface it seems like there's quite a decent array of choices to customise your gameplay experience. In practice, however, it doesn't quite work out like that.

Naturally, I select the "one player" mode, assuming that there will be some form of computer opponent for me to face. Why else have a one player mode? But no, there is in fact no AI opponent. I control the ship starting in the bottom left, and the other ship perpetually travels a steady course south until I blow it up. It doesn't even shoot. Once I fly over to it and destroy it, that's it. Game over. I'm really not sure why the game even has this option, it's completely pointless. 

Galaxy Game gives you a few game settings to choose from.

As for the other options... well, let's discuss the gravity mechanic. The sun in the middle of the screen is supposed to have, like Spacewar!, gravity that pulls the ships toward it. Negative gravity would make it push the ships away. Note that I say supposed to. Gravity appears to not work at all. I've tried all manner of combinations and there simply isn't any gravity no matter what I try. Now, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt here and assume that this is an emulation issue, although I did try the archive.org online version as well, and there was no gravity there, either. Does it make much of a difference? Well, not really, since there's barely any game for me to play to begin with, but it is still an issue that one of the game's core mechanics is straight up non-functional.

It certainly looks like Spacewar! Fuel meters are in the bottom corners.

As for speed control, slow is fine if you enjoy watching snail races, otherwise I'd stick with the fast speed, it's far more exciting. I should also mention that there is fuel to manage and hyperspace like in Spacewar!, but they're a non-factor when playing alone. 

You can also, much to my amusement, blow yourself up, since the missiles wrap around the screen and travel quite the distance before disappearing.

There's not a whole lot left to discuss at this juncture, so on to the scores.

Play Time: Approx. 35 minutes (cumulative over several sessions)

Difficulty: 0/10

For Game Design, I can only give a 1, considering that a non-functional one player mode was included. Remember, I judge based on single-player experience, and this completely fails at providing a meaningful one.

Controls get a 7. The control layout transfers well onto keyboard for MAME. The Newtonian physics are sluggish, however, and even more so if running on the slow speed option (I don't know why anyone would ever willingly play on slow speed.)

Sound & Audio: There is no sound, so N/A.

Visual: The game doesn't look horrible; the starfield gives a sense of the vastness of space, and the particle effects after a ship is destroyed are particularly memorable. There is a lot of flickering going on, however, and it's quite distracting. The ships aren't drawn very well, either, with the bottom left one, being more wire frame-like in appearance, having lines disappear and merge constantly, yet another visual distraction. 4.

Story: N/A.

Functionality: Giving it a 1 because the game itself is still playable, even if one of the core mechanics doesn't work, invalidating several of the game options.

Accessibility: It's not a difficult game to access or understand how to play, but I did initially have some trouble figuring out how to change settings and to actually get a game started. 3.

'Fun' Factor: There's not really any point, so not really any fun to be had, therefore it gets a 0.

Overall that gives Galaxy Game a score of 16/70, or 22.8%, putting it in the F-tier. It's rather unfortunate that I give such a historically important game such a low score, but I can only judge what I can play. Out of historical interest, I'd say it's still worth a try, just bring a friend so that it can be appreciated properly.