Sorry for being gone for a while. Life's been very busy recently. I had the family visit, got sick, then started a second job, quit said job, and then got another second job which has been flat out since. I'm also going back to my home state next week for a family event, which involves two full days of driving to get there.
All this, along with having problems with the PLATO article, kind of sucked all my energy and motivation out of working on the blog for a while. I've had a mind to get back to it, but have only had the time and motivation to slowly put together the list for 1973 over the past week or so.
The good news is, that my 1973 coverage is officially starting! However, there will be some slight changes to how I run things. Number one, is that I'll be dumping the one-article-per-week commitment I set out previously. Work is currently busy and unpredictable, and I have a busy-enough social life to suck all my introvert batteries dry most days, meaning my time is limited to work on the blog. Articles will just come out whenever they're ready for now.
As for the promised PLATO overview article... I still intend to finish it, but it won't be the next thing to come out, as it's a massive project, even compared to the Odyssey project. PLATO has an overly-messily-documented development history, and I have stacks of games to play and record. There aren't any new systems to cover for the entirety of 1973, so I'll be working on it periodically with the aim to have it complete by the conclusion of my 1973 coverage - which shouldn't be too hard to do, since we'll be in 1973 for quite a while.
1973 is, as I've determined from my research and planning, the first real year of video games. What I mean by that is, that the scope of video games expands exponentially in 1973, both in terms of development complexity and popularity. The number of countries producing games is increasing, the scale of the arcade industry is increasing, and the sheer number of games being developed increases dramatically. For reference, 1971 and 1972 had 10 games between them that I covered. 1973, on the other hand, has at least sixty-four games (hah, funny number...) I'll be covering - potentially a few more. These games (on the computer end of things especially) are expanding in complexity, and new genres are being invented, such as adventure games.
A significant contributor to this expansion is the initial release of David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games book of type-in programs. I've been relying on this book (and its 1978 update) quite a lot already, but many of the games from 1973 find their origins in this book. The People's Computer Company newsletters and magazines also contribute significantly to the spread of video games, as they often feature several innovative games. Expect to see these two resources appear frequently throughout the year. All are free to view on the Internet Archive, if you're keen to follow along with me.
Righto, that's all from me for now. Expect to see the first game of 1973 soon!
Developer(s): Sharon Dugdale, David Kibbey, Barry Cohen, Helen Leung
Publisher(s): CERL
Time for the entrance of PLATO onto the video gaming scene. There's been a couple of PLATO programs on my list previously, but were either lost or multiplayer-only (you can't play most multiplayer games at all on PLATO alone.) So Darts here becomes the first PLATO game I'll be covering for this incredible system.
Before getting into Darts, if you'd like to try out PLATO, it's being kept alive by the small, dedicated team at Cyber1.org. It's free to sign up, and they also provide PLATO emulators. I use Pterm, which is considered by Cyber1 as the best option. If you'd like to know more about PLATO, I'm currently in the process of writing an overview article, which I'll link here once complete.
In doing research for Darts, the most exciting thing about it for me was not actually the game itself, but rather the existing documentation and information available for it. It's a relative treasure trove compared to the games I've been dealing with up to now, for the most part.
What doesn't excite me, however, is the fact that two versions of this game exist on the Cyber1 system, one titled Darts, and the other Decimal Darts. The existing documentation provides absolutely no details as to why this is the case. I could not find anything online to help me decipher this strange riddle, meaning I had to make a decision on what to do. Which version do I play? Or do I play both?
Before getting to that question, I'll treat both games as one for the development history section of the blog, as it's largely unaffected by the existence of two versions of the game.
Darts is a game (or "lesson," as the game calls itself) that's in line with the original spirit of PLATO - a computer system for education. It's a mathematical game designed to teach younger children basic fractions.
Naturally, then, Darts was developed by individuals with an education mindset. It comes to us from Sharon Dugdale and David Kibbey, research assistants at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL), stationed at the University of Illinois - the very same place PLATO was created. The game is part of a larger "Fractions Curriculum" Dugdale and Kibbey developed as part of an even larger "PLATO Mathematics Project" which was being developed after the PLATO IV system was introduced in 1972. The game has a handy information page where much of this background information comes from. Both versions of the game have an additional credit - Barry Cohen for Darts, and Helen Leung for Decimal Darts. Both were also part of Dugdale and Kibbey's team, and are given special thanks in both versions of their curriculum as having programmed games for it.
CERL's Darts write-up.
Dates for Darts get rather complicated at this juncture. According to Brian Dear's book, The Friendly Orange Glow, the game was one of Dugdale and Kibbey's "elementary math project" team's (which included Cohen and Leung) earliest games, which may have been developed as early as the Summer of 1972. However, the information and credits pages in-game have different years listed. The first edition of Dugdale and Kibbey's curriculum was published in 1975, with the second edition following in 1980 (both versions of the curriculum feature the exact same screenshots of Darts), and both dates are listed in-game. Even more confusingly, both games are copyrighted to Control Data Corporation, 1980. Darts, the only of the two to include a credits page, notes that a revision of the program occurred in 1993, attributed again to Control Data Corporation.
What exactly is going on here? How do these pieces fit? The CDC attribution is simple to explain. CDC had taken a keen interest in PLATO early on, and had purchased the rights to make PLATO a commercial product in 1976 (which didn't exactly work out, by the way). With the second edition of the curriculum being published in 1980, we can put these pieces of the puzzle together.
However, there's still no explanation for the two versions of Darts. All there is are theories, of which I have one.
Based on the differences between Darts and Decimal Darts, it can be reasonably assumed that Decimal Darts is the later version of the two. It has more content and is far less buggy than Darts. In fact, Darts is a buggy mess and seems to be more of a first draft than a complete game. It always starts you at level 3 instead of 1, and the graphics often won't load properly, leaving you literally shooting in the dark. Decimal Darts seems to me the "complete" product, for lack of a better term. The difference in credits would suggest that Barry Cohen may have contributed the "first draft" of Darts, which makes sense as Brian Dear notes that Cohen was unfamiliar with computers upon his joining the Fractions Curriculum. Helen Leung perhaps came to Cohen's game afterwards, fixing the bugs and turning it into a more complete game. When all these things occurred, I have no way of knowing, unless I were to contact people directly - provided they're still alive, of course. I don't exactly think I have the clout to consider doing so yet. I'm still small fry when it comes to video game blogging.
The differences in the games, especially after testing them, enabled me to come to a rather simple conclusion regarding how I'd be approaching this particular blog. The Cohen Darts is clearly incomplete, therefore I'll be playing the complete Decimal Darts for this blog. This choice will also be reflected in the Master List, where I'll be changing the main title of the game to Decimal Darts (for those coming later, the original title of the game was just Darts).
We need to talk about some of the formalities of running PLATO games prior to actually playing Decimal Darts. As it exists, to run a game in PLATO after signing on, you need to do one of two things:
Type in the lesson code at the "Author Mode" screen, or
Type in "bigjump" at the Author Mode screen, which will open to a list of all the available programs, all keyed to a number. Find the lesson you want to run, press J, then the program's number code.
How to load Decimal Darts in PLATO.
Darts and Decimal Darts sit next to each other in the bigjump list, at 32 and 33, respectively. Darts' lesson code is simply "darts", whereas Decimal Darts is "0ddarts". There's an added step if you type the lesson name in, as shown in the screenshot above - you'll have a screen asking you if you want to play or edit the lesson. Simply press Control-D to run the lesson on this screen.
"DATA" is keyed to Ctrl-D"
After doing all that, the game itself will finally get going. It asks first for your name, then the part of the lesson you want to play, and lastly asks if you want to include negative numbers. This is the game's one customisation option, and partly functions as a difficulty option, as including negative numbers makes the game slightly harder.
My initial settings.
Once all these choices are made, we're brought to the title screen, featuring a balloon being popped by a titular dart.
Welcome to the game. Finally.
From here, there are two choices, both with the same final destination. Pressing NEXT (Enter) will take you straight into the game. Pressing DATA (Ctrl-D) will take you to the game's credits and information page, from there you can press NEXT to go straight into the game. There's no way to go backwards in these programs - your only choice is to press the SHIFT-STOP (Shift-F10) button combination to exit the game, requiring you to reload the game completely. It's a rather cumbersome system in that regard.
The information page provides some brief background information on the game's development. I won't go over it again, as I already covered it at the start of the article.
The history straight from the horse's mouth.
Beginning the lesson proper, we are greeted with a tutorial screen explaining how the game works. There's a slight typo here - the opening line incorrectly calls the game Decimals Darts. A very minor mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.
Now this is an interactive tutorial, too. It explains how to write fractions in game, and then expects you to show your understanding in a very simple manner. You're not allowed to use the "?/" key, so you must write fractions using decimal points instead. I must point out that this contradicts the Darts write-up in the CERL Fractions Curriculum (both versions), which show that the game does accept proper fractions. Or rather, that it used to. If you try to use the "?/" key, the game will tell you off. More evidence that Decimal Darts is a later revision.
The official curriculum says otherwise.
After completing the tutorial, the game starts in earnest. There are 8 levels in Part 1 of Decimal Darts, increasing in complexity as they go along. I think this may be the very first game to use level-based gameplay. It's the most logical choice for this type of educational game, but is still groundbreaking if my belief is correct.
Each level presents you with a vertical number line, on which there are cute, styled balloons. Your aim is pop the balloons with your darts by guessing where on the number line the balloon sits, and inputting that guess as a decimal, as shown in the tutorial. The game doesn't actually tell you what the objective is, but it's made obvious enough from the title screen and tutorial.
Level 1 starts you off as simple as can be: 3 balloons sitting on a number line that starts from the bottom at 0 and ends at the top at 1. It's always this setup for level 1, though the positions of the balloons are random, as is the case for all levels. They all sit at tenth intervals here - this won't always be the case, however. My level 1 had the balloons sitting at .1, .2 and .4.
Starting you off nice and simple, with cute and friendly balloons.
Level 2 also had 3 balloons, however the number line went from 0 to 2, with a point for 1 in the middle. An incremental step in complexity - it's slightly harder to judge where the balloons sit, bit still not particularly challenging.
Level 3, on the surface, seems to be a step backwards. It reverts to Level 1's layout, but upon playing it, I realised it wasn't what it seemed. The first two balloons went down simply, but when I went for the balloon nearer the top of the number line, something interesting happened. I went .8 first - missed. Must be .9, then? Missed. The balloon was in between .8 and .9 - .85. Level 3 introduces more precise fractions, and does so in a wonderful manner - through making an unassuming mistake. The first two levels and tutorial train your thinking to only input tenth decimal points. Then, level 3 comes along. You do what you've been taught, only to find out that there's more to the game than you expected. It seems obvious that the game would do this, in hindsight, but in the moment it's rather exciting to make an unexpected discovery.
D'oh I missed...
What happened next was something I only noticed upon reviewing my footage: I was playing level 3 again. Hmm. It would seem that the game will have you replay a level if you missed enough times on the first go around. To my memory, this never happened again in any of my subsequent playthroughs.
Strange Deja Vu.
I understand this kind of design from an educational standpoint; if a student is struggling to grasp a lesson or concept, you'd have them try it again. However, it doesn't really work the same way in this game in particular. Figuring out where the balloons are is 90% guesswork. There's no certain way of knowing where exactly the balloon is unless it's right on a whole number (which does happen in later levels.) While it does take practice and repetition to make better guesses, that's actually having you learn the game, not so much fractions. It's the game's major fault as a whole - it's not really teaching fractions at all, merely number lines.
Anyway, I didn't miss on the second go around. On to level 4. This level ups the complexity once again, having five balloons now. They're also smaller, making them harder to hit. Each balloon has its own unique graphic - they're much less detailed than the larger balloons, but are still distinct.
More balloons, more trouble
I also noticed a graphical glitch occur during level 4. If a balloon is too near the top of the screen, when you hit it it will cause the level text to mostly disappear. I could still see the tops of the letters, but the rest had been erased like a dodgy MS Paint job. I'm guessing it has something to do with how PLATO draws its graphics. It's a rather distracting visual bug.
What level is it??
Level 5 reverts to three balloons again, only this time the number line goes from 0 to 3, making it once again harder to precisely determine what points the balloons are at. It's not too difficult, and I didn't miss once.
Level 6 is the same as level 5, but with five balloons. This one was pretty easy for me, as all the balloons were on tenth decimals.
Level 7 introduced negative numbers - if selected at the beginning of the game, of course. The main challenge with them is that the number order is essentially reversed - -0.1 is in the same relative spot as 0.9. I regularly got disoriented by this small detail.
Don't be a negative nelly.
I didn't have any issues with the negative numbers this time around. So, on to level 8, right?
Wrong. My game ended right there and then, without even going to level 8. I initially only noticed this occurring in Part 2, but not here. Part 2 has 10 levels, but the game would always stop me at either level 7 or 8. I replayed both parts several times to see if I could get to these other levels, but had no success. My original thought was that the game would end early if you were doing poorly on the previous levels, but now I'm not so sure.
While it's typical game design for a game over to occur if you're doing poorly, Decimal Darts' major issue is that it gives you no indication for if/when that'll happen. There's no real feedback - no lives, no scoring system or any other clear indicators. Yes, the game occasionally has you replay a level, but it still doesn't clearly indicate to you why it's doing that. That is, of course, if it's not just a programming error. For me, at least, there's no way of knowing.
So, we move on. Completing Part 1 ejects you out of the game back to the lesson selection screen, which is rather annoying. Having to type in the lesson code every time wears thin after a while, especially considering how many times I actually played through the game.
This time, I select Part 2, and include negative numbers once again. The title screen is the same between parts, but pressing NEXT jumps you straight into the game, rather than the tutorial.
Difficulty wise, Part 2 picks up right where Part 1 left off - or even slightly ahead. Level 1 starts off with five balloons, but the number line is even more precise - starting at .0 and ending at .3.
Diving into the minutia now.
Functionally it's not all that different to the previous levels. The only difference is that all the numbers are behind the decimal point. I had no trouble with this level.
Level 2 reverted back to three balloons, and the number line was only between .2 and .3. This seems far easier than level 1. It asked for a little more precision, as one of the darts sat at .265.
Easier or harder?
Level 3 is a more difficult version of level 2. Same concept, with the number line being between only .0 and .1, but with five balloons instead of three. All of mine were in the top half of the line, and I could instantly tell more precision was being required of me. After hitting the first balloon at .09, I saw that the game wanted me to move away from the multiples of 5 I had been sticking to thus far.
More accuracy required.
I fumbled around with my next couple of throws before figuring out where I needed to aim. I then discovered that it was possible to take out two balloons with one dart (don't think that'll become a new metaphor any time soon), provided I was precise enough. The two middle balloons in the above picture both popped at .075. Neat.
Level 4 then reverted to level 1's style. The number line for this one was between .6 and .9. Nothing crazy going on here, a very easy level.
Level 5 was back to three balloons, and whole numbers returned. The number line was 7.0 - 7.2. This was also a very easy level. Kind of strange that levels 2 and 3 were harder, requiring more precision from the player.
However, level 6 changed things up a bit. While the number line was small, .0 - .2, there was no middle point at .1 present. Now things are getting more challenging!
But... where the middle point?
The first part of the level wasn't too bad, with only one of the bottom-half balloons being off of a tenth point. Hitting the top balloon was more of a stab in the dark, as my reference points from the bottom half weren't all that useful. It took a couple of darts to get it.
Level 7 seemed like a backwards step. It was like level 5 - only three balloons and a small number line, 7.8 - 8.0. However, I could immediately tell this level wanted more precision just from how the middle balloon was positioned ever so slightly under 7.9.
This resulted in what I can only describe as a "happy accident," as this level was wanting even more precision than I first thought. I figured that the middle balloon was at 7.89, considering its proximity to 7.9. But, it was probably more like a 7.899, as inputting 7.89 resulted in me taking out the two bottom balloons at once. I mean, I'll take it, but that wasn't exactly what I meant to do.
Popping two balloons with one dart... why does that sound familiar?
And then... the game ended. Again. Despite the game saying there's 10 levels, it ended in the same manner as Part 1 - after level 7. Now that's really strange. After I finished recording, I had a few more goes at Part 2 to see what happened. Interestingly, I sometimes got to level 8 (as in my YouTube run), but no more. Part 2 would always end either at level 7 or 8 for me.
Another oddity I noticed was that in my first recorded playthrough, no negative numbers appeared - despite me selecting to include them. Subsequent playthroughs did have negative numbers appear, so it must've been the luck of the draw not seeing them.
I wanted to see if there was any gameplay on YouTube of Decimal Darts that might help me solve this missing-level phenomena, but had no success. Any search of "PLATO Darts" comes up with hordes of videos about this hokey-looking mobile game literally called Plato Darts. I thought "You must be joking??" Talk about frustrating. No other search parameters worked, either.
Anyway, there's one more part of Decimal Darts, and that's the "Decimal Darts Checkup" segment.
I'm here for my yearly checkup.
The checkup is basically a practice mode. It gives you two rounds of balloons on random number lines, and counts your hits and misses. It would've been nice to have this feature in the main game, as it might enable me to test more fully what's going on with those missing levels.
These checkup sets can be quite tricky, as I didn't do too well with them the first time around. They're functioning at the back-end of Part 2's difficulty level for sure.
At the end of the two rounds, the game will grade your performance. If you do poorly, like I did, the game certainly lets you know about it.
Thanks for the encouraging words...
I tried the checkup again and got a much better result the second time around. Several more playthroughs of each part followed, mostly because I wanted to see if I could access the missing levels (as I've already detailed, it didn't work.)
Right, so with all that said and done, it's time to score Decimal Darts.
Time Played: 1 hour
Difficulty: 3/10 (Easy)
It's meant for primary school-aged kids, so it's not exactly a challenge for adults.
Gameplay: 9/20
Might be a surprising score, but Decimal Darts does a lot of things right for a 1972 game. It's possibly the first game to have levels, a standard difficulty curve and interactive tutorials. There's additional difficulty customisation in the choice to include negative numbers or not, and the option to have the game help you out if you're struggling. The latter of those two being a very modern innovation. A point of standout game design is the introduction of the hundredth decimal point in level 3.
However, there's also quite a few problems. Most notably, the fact that there are missing levels in both parts of the game. It ends early without any explanation as to why. Additionally frustrating is that the Checkup mode has a score counter, but the main game does not. There is therefore no indication in the main game as to how well you're doing by its standards. The difficulty curve is wonky, with later levels being repeats of earlier levels that end up being significantly easier than immediately previous levels. The main game also lacks any sort of ending or satisfying conclusion. This may be due to Decimal Darts' intended use as part of an education curriculum, so lesson feedback may have been intended for teachers to do.
The isolation of the game from it's original context also makes it suffer in its chief design - to teach fractions, of which I think it fails at this brief as a standalone game. It's good at teaching kids to read number lines, but I don't see its relation to fractions.
Controls: 6/10
The input is fairly standard for this type of game - numerical input with decimal points. It does have one neat little innovation, which is that, with regards to zero points, the game will accept them regardless of whether the zero is present or not. You can type in a number like 0.46 as that or as .46, and the game will accept both. This also applies to negative numbers.
Visual: 7/10
For a 1972 game, its visuals are quite advanced. The balloons are all well-detailed and distinct. Even when the five smaller balloons are on screen, all have a different and distinct design.
There is, however, a graphical bug where the level text at the top-left of the screen will be cut off if a dart is fired at the very top of the number line. It's small, and not detrimental to gameplay, but it is rather distracting.
Functionality: 4/5
The missing levels are a problem, as well as the visual bugs. The main problem with the missing levels as there's no way of knowing if they're intentionally blocked off or if it's a programming error.
Accessibility: 4/5
It runs on antiquated technology that's a bit cumbersome to get up and running, but the game itself is easy to understand and play. It's a kids' educational game, so this is to be expected.
Fun Factor: 8/20
It's pretty surprising for an educational game. The main draw is that the balloon positions are always randomised, meaning no two playthroughs are the same. Number lines later in the game are also randomised (which can mean that negative numbers might not appear at all, even if turned on), adding to replayability. I'd honestly come back to this over the majority of games I've reviewed thus far. There is something compelling about wanting to come back and do better, even if there's no score counter. It's quite repetitive, however, so it's not that compelling, but there is reason to come back.
Decimal Darts earns a rather surprising score - 38 [54.28%] - which is enough to put it into second place on the tier list at the time of writing. It's crushingly short of a C-tier placement, so it'll have to settle for a spot at the very tip top of the D-tier. A decent, innovative educational game that features a few gameplay elements taken for granted today.
That marks the last game of 1972! There's one more item to cover for 1972, which is the PLATO computer system itself. I've decided to scale back production on the blog, so there'll only be one article a week for the foreseeable future. This article took much longer to complete than anticipated due to Decimal Darts having a lot more content that previous games, and the content levels are only going to increase from here. The timeline is that the PLATO overview will be next Saturday's feature, and the following week will have no article, as I'll be planning and preparing for 1973's coverage, as well as having my mum visiting for the week, meaning much of my time will be focused there instead.
Back to the guessing-game train. This is another number guessing game coming to us from Bob Albrecht. It's a little bit different to Albrecht's previous number guessing game I covered last month, Trap, but the foundation is basically the same.
Stars was initially published in People's Computer Company's second newsletter, published in December 1972, two months after the company's debut newsletter in October 1972. A full page is dedicated to Stars, with it being described as "for small people, but big people like it, too." In other words, Stars is designed for young children.
PPC's Stars feature. I fear how many variations can be made on number guessers.
PPC's article (as does BASIC Computer Games' page) encourages the reader to adjust parts of the code - want to change the number of guesses? Edit line 160. Want it to run on a HP 2000 instead of the EduSystem 20? Delete line 130. It's ultra base-level programming, but is a way for primary school-aged kids to get their feet wet with programming and to understand how parts of BASIC code worked. Otherwise, you'd just be typing in the program code and watching the game somehow run like it's witchcraft.
Not too soon after PPC's publishing of Stars, David Ahl picked it up, including it in 101 BASIC Computer Games. It's in both editions of the book, and is also unchanged between versions (the code is always adapted for microcomputers in the 1978 edition. I think I should've mentioned this ages ago. Whatever games are carryovers from the first edition of the book always have their code updated to work for whatever version of BASIC microcomputers use, so they're technically not identical. Functionally identical, code not identical.)
Circling back to the beginning, Stars is a simple number guessing game. Like Trap before it, the computer randomly selects a number between 1 and 100 for you to guess. Stars gives you only 7 guesses. Where Stars differs is in how it tells you your proximity to the correct number. The titular stars function as those clues telling you how close you are to the correct number. The more stars shown after each guess, the closer you are to the number.
Seven stars, seven rings, seven chaos emeralds... any more I'm forgetting?
It's a very quickfire game to go through, as there's nothing to it, really. The standard instructions are there to explain the game and what the stars mean. Then, you get to guessing. The standard strategy with most number guessing games of this ilk is to guess 50 first, and then the game would tell you if the number is higher or lower than that, then keep going for the middle (75 -> 87/88 or 25 -> 12/13) until you get it. It doesn't quite work like that in Stars, as the game doesn't tell you if the number is higher or lower than your guess. You'd have to pick a direction and see what the stars say.
The standard strategy given a mediocre review by the game.
I used this standard strategy as my base, picking 50 first, which generated 3 stars. I decided to go up from there, choosing 75 for my next guess. Seven stars. Hello. Being unsure as to how close seven stars meant, I opted to hedge my bets and rule out some of the surrounding numbers. 80 generated five stars, and so did 70. This suggested to me that seven stars must indicate an adjacent number (this is in fact the case), so I made 76 my fifth guess - success!
That's more than seven stars, game...
For fun, I decided to see what happens if you fail to guess the number in seven attempts. It's not as exciting as I hoped, as the fail message was anticlimactically plain, "Sorry, that's 7 guesses." Boo, I was hoping for something a bit more interesting. Designing a game for young kids doesn't mean you suck all the personality out of it.
Sorry? That's all you have to say?
You might be surprised to know that I played a couple more rounds after this. My curiosity for knowing exactly what the stars indicated needed to be satiated. It seems clear to me that seven stars indicate that the guess is directly adjacent to the correct number. Six stars seems to either be 2 or 3 numbers away, and five stars are given for being 4 to 8 numbers away. You'll even get two stars if the number is 50 off!
That's all there is for Stars. Really not much to discuss - same case with the scores.
Time Played: 5 minutes
Difficulty: 1/10 (Very Easy)
Gameplay: 1/20
There's hardly a game here. It's just a basic, first-week-of-coding number guessing game. I've written them before. The only point of difference is the stars
Controls: 5/10
Standard integer input for text-based games.
Visual: 5/10
Very, very plain.
Functionality: 5/5
Works perfectly as intended.
Accessibility: 4/5
Being designed for young children, it's a very simple and easy game to understand for text-based standards.
Fun Factor: 0/20
I don't know how much more I can take of guessing games. PPC's Stars article promises more in their next issue, which I'm dreading. How many more variations of this can there possibly be? I'm yearning for something of more substance. Soon.
Stars receives a total score of 20 [28.57%]. I do find Trap's method a little more interesting. Just a little. Stars is sitting near the bottom of the E-tier, next to Roulette and 1970 Batnum. The tiebreaker leaves Stars at the bottom of these three. It's not really worthwhile playing Stars - it doesn't provide much of value.
So, next up is Darts, which marks the last game of 1972, and also marks the debut of a new platform - PLATO - and one I'm very excited to dig more into. We're going to start getting actual graphics, new genres and even online multiplayer. I'm also currently writing up an Overview article for PLATO, which will hopefully be ready for Saturday. If not, Darts will be the Saturday article, Lord willing. Either way, the entrance of PLATO will cap off my coverage of 1972.
What can be said that hasn't already been said about Pong? Commonly misidentified as the first video game - it's not even the first arcade video game ever made - due to its overwhelming status as the game that truly launched the arcade industry, if not the entire video game industry (I know Ralph Baer had a word or two to say about that...) Pong is simply legendary, and a defining part of the legacy of a company that would dominate the much of the arcade and home console space all the way up till the infamous video game crash of 1983.
Much of the story of Atari's founding I've already covered in my Computer Space article. The short version is, Atari was originally founded as Syzygy Engineering by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, after Bushnell got the idea to make a commercially sellable version of Spacewar!, which would eventually turn out as Computer Space, developed in partnership with amusement manufacturer Nutting Associates.
Computer Space didn't do terribly well with the public, and was considered too complicated for drunk bar patrons and the like to understand - a hilarious statement to make nowadays considering Computer Space only had 4 buttons. Regardless, Bushnell was forced back to the drawing board. He needed a simpler game.
The idea he needed came in May of 1972, although maybe not quite as he thought it might. Bushnell was attending a demonstration of an innovative new device that could play games through a TV set - the Magnavox Odyssey. He observed, and played the Table Tennis game. He was not impressed by what he played. Bushnell is quoted by Ralph Baer (creator of the Odyssey) as saying,
"..it had no scoring... [or] sound effects... the motion was erratic and difficult to control. I felt that it was not a satisfactory game playing device."
Regardless of what Bushnell thought, it's clear that what he saw at that demo stuck with him. Atari had recently hired a young, talented engineer in Al Alcorn. While Bushnell had a contract to create a driving game for arcade manufacturer Bally, he thought that would be too much for the greenhorn engineer who'd never seen a video game in his life. Instead, Bushnell wisely wanted him to get his feet wet with game design, and so set him a test project - replicate the Odyssey's Table Tennis with arcade hardware.
Bushnell had a few different ideas in mind for this test project. Initially he wanted the two paddles to be more akin to two people holding racquets with a button press making them swing the racquet (more akin to later tennis games.) He also wanted sound - he wanted to hear something akin to the cheers and roars of a tennis crowd. Ted Dabney asked for boos and hisses when you missed the ball. What Alcorn came up with - in a week-and-a-half - was much simpler than that. He had two paddles, controlled with rotating dials, a score counter, and little beeps and boops for when the ball hit the paddle and for when you missed. Crucially, the game also had a mechanic that sped up the ball every so often. The circuit board was connected to a black & white TV set, with Dabney constructing a small wooden cabinet around it.
Bushnell was happy with this, and Atari employees found it quite fun to play. However, it was still a test project, and Bushnell stated that it wasn't seen as a viable product. Atari had contracts for more complex games (like that driving game.) Still, it had piqued Bushnell's interest, and so he decided to give it a public test run anyway. This first test was done at Andy Capp's Tavern, an establishment Bushnell had already built a solid friendship with - Computer Space was first tested here. The Pong box was placed on a barrel, with a rudimentary coin box glued to the side.
The first Pong prototype.
There's this legendary story about this first Pong cabinet that's akin to a prophetic utterance for the future of the video game industry. The story goes that, after two weeks, Atari gets called up by Andy Capp's owner saying that the game is broken. It was stuck on attract mode, and a game couldn't be started. The tavern owner was getting rather frustrated, by all accounts. What happened, in actual fact, was that the game wasn't broken - it was, rather, so popular that the coin box mounted to the side of the game was full to overflowing with quarters!
Another story from Pong's can be summed up in the meme "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" There was an issue in the way Al Alcorn designed the game, resulting in the paddles not being able to reach the very top of the screen. This meant that, if you were skilled enough, you could get the ball into this gap and always score a point, preventing an endless rally between equally skilled players. While testing the game, it was decided that this little error actually enhanced the gameplay, and so the choice was made to keep it in the game. Al Alcorn recalled in one interview that he learned from this that, "if you can't fix it, call it a feature." I'm sure that's happened a countless number of times to many a game developer.
From here it's actually a bit difficult to piece together a timeline of what happened. Unlike Ralph Bear, who meticulously documented everything, Bushnell did not. He was a more spontaneous, haphazard individual (which would have consequences later in dealing with copycats.) There's plenty of information about the time between the Andy Capp test in August 1972 and Pong's official debut on November 29, 1972. It's just that there are no dates attached to anything, so putting the information in order is a tough task.
In one interview, Bushnell recalls that the incident at Andy Capp's convinced him to invest into Pong. He marketed the game to big name arcade companies Midway and Bally, who where interested initially. Bushnell tricked them into pulling out by telling the respective companies that the other one was interested in making a licensing deal. Bushnell had decided Atari could make more profit out of Pong if they manufactured the game themselves. Atari at first could afford to produce eleven cabinets of Pong. Bushnell searched for financial backing, but no banks were willing to invest, as they viewed Pong in the same way they viewed pinball - a game associated with the Mafia. Eventually, they found Wells Fargo willing to give them $50k. This money, from what I gather, was used to expand Atari's business offices, and to purchase an abandoned roller skating rink to set up as an assembly plant. On November 29, 1972, Pong was officially unveiled. Early on, production of cabinets was slow and of substandard quality, as they had hired unskilled workers who often stole parts and were involved in heavy drug use.
Meanwhile, Atari had an established contract for pinball machine maintenance in the Sunnyvale area. There was already an established "Atari pinball route," and Bushnell utilised that route to advertise Pong to their existing clientele. Orders began coming in. Ten units here, ten units there. The snowball had begun. By the end of 1973, they had 2,500 units of Pong on order. 1974, it was 8,000. These kinds of numbers were unheard of at the time, and Pong was raking in thousands upon thousands of quarters. Atari even began exporting Pong internationally, most notably to Japan, where the imports would be first handled by Atari Japan, and later by a little company called Nakamura Manufacturing Co., otherwise known as Namco. I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about them later on.
Now, one of the consequences of Bushnell's haphazard management style is that he didn't really get around to patenting anything. What this resulted in is only what I can describe as complete anarchy. Everyone took notice of Pong's success, and they wanted in on that sweet, sweet coin. So, what did they do? Well, they stole, of course! Every electronics and arcade manufacturer (both in the US and overseas) known to man copied, copied copies and copied copies of copies of Pong over the course of just a couple of years. These weren't just loosely-based versions of Pong - no - they were exact replicas, only in different garb. Every company out there had their own reskin of Pong.
Without patents, Atari couldn't to a thing to stop all the chaos. Even just a cursory glance at Wikipedia's best-selling video games charts for 1973 and 1974 will show that Pong clones were not only rampant, but dominated sales. The insanity of the Pong clones was even more extreme in the first home console generation. For reference, the first generation of home consoles, according to Wikipedia, had 997 consoles. Almost a thousand consoles. And, I'd say maybe at least 75% of those were Pong clones. Such was the money-making machine Pong was perceived to be. In the end, Atari only manufactured roughly a third of all "Pong-like" games in circulation.
As for what Atari could do, it could capitalise on its new found success by expanding on the Pong brand. Sequels were created for Pong, such as Pong Doubles and Quadrapong. A home console version was made. Some of the more unusual ideas they came up with were Puppy Pong and Dr. Pong. These were just Pong, but with redesigned cabinets for business use. Puppy Pong had a more childlike design, and was meant to be placed in the waiting rooms of pediatric offices to help kids pass the time while waiting for appointments, and was free to play. Dr. Pong was the same concept, only for adult waiting rooms. It had a sleek, wood-grain finish design, and could also be purchased with a specially designed bookcase. It could also play a Volleyball game. Neither of these products gained much traction, and sales were very limited. There was also the humorous Barrel-Pong, which is exactly what you think it is. Predictably, this one was an Aussie creation.
Beer Pong taken to its logical conclusion.
Naturally, Pong has seen about as many re-releases as Sonic the Hedgehog over the years. The many Atari compilations, as well as flashback consoles, other anniversary-or-otherwise collections. There's even web browser and mobile ports. You could probably play Pong on a toaster these days, such is its ubiquity.
One more notable incident in Pong's legacy is, of course, the infamous lawsuit between Magnavox and Atari. I've already gone into the details of the lawsuit in the Odysseyconsole overview, so I'll keep it short. Magnavox took notice of Pong and the various clones on the market, and sued Atari for infringing on several patents. It appears Bushnell originally attempted to hide his attendance of the May 24 Odyssey demonstration at deposition hearings, however Magnavox lawyers had evidence proving his attendance. Bushnell, seeing that Atari could not afford the legal expenses of the case, settled with Magnavox. The terms were very light, with Atari paying a small, upfront license fee, becoming the sole licensee of Magnavox. Magnavox would then zealously go after other competitors, forcing them to pay royalties to Magnavox.
While Magnavox were in the right to sue - Atari had directly recreated the Odyssey's Table Tennis - the settlement worked out very well for Atari in the long run. Atari were able to maintain their position as one of the most dominant video game developers / publishers until the 1983 crash. Magnavox, on the other hand, were relegated to only a minor player on the scene that cashed in on all those sweet, sweet royalties.
There's an interesting little footnote to add here; another layer to the already twisted and fractured dynamic between Pong and the Magnavox Odyssey. Fans of Pong saw the Odyssey as a means to play a Pong-like game at home. The success of Pong, therefore, had resulted in an upsurge of sales for the Odyssey. Funny how that worked out, considering that Atari would make their own home Pong version later on... but that's a story for another day.
I did actually opt to play Pong for this article, in spite of it being a multiplayer game. I might as well, seeing as it's very simple to play, and I've played both sides on my own before. As I just mentioned, there are several means available to play Pong, including trusty old emulation. I also had a proper play of it with my girlfriend through my Switch copy of Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration. As a side, that is how you honour a company's legacy.
Sometimes you get stuck in a back-and-forth loop.
And I must say, it was nice to play a game that's not text-based for a change. Even if it's not exactly in an optimal form. Paddle controls don't translate particularly well to a keyboard or analog sticks. Nor does playing against yourself. Fortunately, the rounds with my girlfriend were more enjoyable, and she - not a gamer - also rather enjoyed herself. Nolan Bushnell noted in one interview that women tended to be quite good at Pong, and that it broke a few social barriers. He claims several marriages were started from a man asking a woman to play Pong with him.
No score for Pong, as it's a multiplayer game. Part of me is also thinking that there wouldn't be much point to critiquing Pong in my usual style anyway. It's just so foundational to the very core of video games that I wouldn't know how to score it. Maybe I'm just making excuses, I don't know.
What I can say that this is an essential video game everyone must play at least once in their life. If I were to compile a "1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die" type of list, this would probably be the very first game on that list. If I wasn't doing it chronologically.
I don't know how I got on this train of thought, but here we are anyway.
I was revising the master list, and revisiting some online game collection websites I used to peruse, and somehow Digital Championship Football from my seventh Prehistory article got stuck in my mind.
There were a few things I realised from this that I want to address in this quick post. The first is a pretty minor one, but from now I'm going to refer to Digital Championship Football as DartmouthChampionship Football. The latter of these is what the original game actually calls itself, the former title is from the Sol-20 microcomputer port. In the interest of being historically accurate and precise - even in minutia such as these - I needed to make this change.
I also made a slight error in the original article. I said that the version of Dartmouth Championship Football in the 1978 version of 101 BASIC Computer Games was credited to Raymond Miseyka. This isn't actually true. This game is clearly credited to John Kemeny in the book, while a second football game was included, which was the one developed by Miseyka. I was misled by the title on the web version of the book hosted at Atari Archives. This second game by Miseyka was also in the original 1973 version of the book, alongside a different football game made in-house by DEC. Interestingly, Kemeny's game wasn't there. An easy solution for this omission would be that Kemeny's game simply wasn't known about; it hadn't been discovered at that time.
The evidence in question.
However, the most important lesson that I gleaned from these reflections was that I was being inconsistent. Comparisons with PDP 10 Timesharing Basketball started flooding my mind while I was prepping a new profile on a certain site, and I realised that these two games are actually very similar. Both have very similar gameplay in how you choose plays, and the outcomes of both are likely random, or at least semi-random, as far as I can tell. (I don't know anything about Grid-Iron or Basketball strategy to know what plays are better when, and if choosing good real-life strategies correlates to better outcomes in the game. Any of my more sporty readers - feel free to enlighten me in the comments.) You even choose the name of your opponent in the same way. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if John Kemeny re-used much of the Dartmouth Championship Football code for PDP Basketball.
Yet, in spite of these similarities, I saw it appropriate to change my mind on PDP Basketball and score it, but didn't do the same for Dartmouth Championship Football. Why did I do this? I have no idea, to be completely honest. Chalk it up to inexperience and a bit of laziness.
I have to admit, I was quite lazy with those early articles in terms of research and whatnot, so maybe I just couldn't be bothered; threw it into the "too hard" bucket. I had little idea what I was doing - how I wanted to review games, or what I wanted the blog to be back then.
With over a year of experience under my belt now, I see things quite differently. Having a better understanding now of how I want to score games, I see that Dartmouth Championship Football probably is game enough to warrant giving it a score (it's final score will justify my stance.) It's more game than some other later titles I've done, I can certainly say that (looking at you, War...)
Therefore, I've decided to give Dartmouth Championship Football a score. This does necessitate me playing it again, which isn't too much of a problem as matches are very quick to complete. I played out two matches for this - the first ending in a nil-all draw, and the second I won 15-0, including a Touchdown and a Safety. I know enough about Grid-Iron that I've heard of a Safety before, but I still don't understand the concept entirely. We actually get some NFL games broadcast on free-to-air TV in Oz, so I've seen a few games. My former pastor is from the US, so we watched a couple of the more recent Superbowls together also. I think I maybe saw a Safety occur once in all of those matches. Fun facts.
Time Played: Maybe around 20 minutes, all up. Playthroughs are so spread out for this game that I have no idea anymore.
Difficulty: 0 (N/A)
Doing this because the game determines the run of play mostly at random, as far as I'm aware.
Gameplay: 3/20
For being only the second ever game written in BASIC, it has a surprising and appreciable amount of detail. It adheres to the basic rules of Grid-Iron/American Football, but also includes some additional rules I didn't expect or see in my first go around. The Safety is in the game (as I just mentioned), as well as penalties (which you can choose to accept or refuse), and the opening coin toss. Players can fumble the ball in various ways, and the game can even be delayed by a dog on field. Bizarre, but also hilarious that this was included.
The chief, overwhelming issue, of course, is what I've been harping on about during the article - the (potential) illusion of choice, as I've begun to call it. It's my new number one pet peeve in video games. I hate being presented with a situation in a game where there's a perceived significant choice (or choices) to be made in a game, but the actual outcome of said choice(s) doesn't actually matter, as the outcome is already predetermined (or completely randomised), regardless of your choice. That's likely what we have here, as the outcomes of your selected play are either completely or partially random. I have no way of knowing, as I don't know BASIC, so I can't look into the code, and I'm not playing this game for hours to test the theory, either. There's enough detail in the game to disguise it a bit better than, say, PDP Basketball, but not by much.
Controls: 5/10
Controls are regulation for an early text game. The plays are all integers - no irrational decimals in sight - so that makes things pretty easy to manage. However, the game also has you type in full words for the coin toss and penalty accepting/refusing, which is a little different.
Visual: 5/10
Very plain, but that's to be expected for one of the first text-based video games. One interesting little detail is that your opponent's plays are all indented one space. I don't know exactly why this would be, but perhaps to help distinguish between your and their plays when scrolling back through the game timeline.
Functionality: 5/5
Nothing to see here.
Accessibility: 3/5
It's standard for text-based games, provided you understand Grid-Iron on a fundamental level. I do, but just barely.
Fun Factor: 4/20
I think all the random extra details in the game sway me to give this an extra point or two, despite the ever-present illusion of choice. It does make replaying the game of some value, just to see if there are any other extra hidden details or events that may occur. It's actually kind of impressive, considering Dartmouth Championship Football was developed at the infancy of BASIC. Most games after this for several years don't include anywhere near as much detail as this one.
Dartmouth Championship Football justified a score, as it ends up with a 25 [35.71%], which actually places it at the top of the E-tier, believe it or not. The 1965 game outperforms several games developed years after - some significantly so.
That does this odd little bonus article. Currently, looking down my list, it's unlikely that any other untiered Prehistory games will get this same treatment. I still disqualify the playable ones for various reasons. I'll only revisit this era when new discoveries are made from now on, I think.