The History of Video Games: 1974
145Looking back on it, Maze Wars isn’t the prettiest game around. The gameplay is rather sluggish, and it’s kind of slow. But that doesn’t matter because in 1974, Maze Wars was ahead of its time. It was the first first-person-shooter. If not for Maze Wars, there’d be no Call of Duty, no Halo, no Battlefield. In this video, i’ll be going over the events that transpired in 1974 in the history of video games. This is… The History of Video Games: 1974.
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The History of Video Games: 1974 (in text form)
1974 is a big year for video games. Come to think of it, I could say that for every year from 1974 until this year. Oh well. Last year’s big game was Pong. This year, it’s all about Maze War, the first first-person-shooter.
If we’re being true to history, Maze War was really first created in 1973 by Steve Colley for the Imlac PDS-1 computer at a NASA research center in California. Colley would go on to found nCUBE in 1983. Originally, Maze War wasn’t a first person shooter at all, rather it was just a maze game where the player navigated the mazes in a first person perspective. Colley would account the creation of Maze War some 30 years later in a 30 years retrospective on Maze War:
“Maze was popular at first, but quickly became boring. Then someone (Howard or Greg) had the idea to put people in the maze. To do this would take more than one Imlac, which at that time were not networked together. So we connected two Imlacs using the serial ports to transmit locations back and forth. This worked great, and soon the idea for shooting each other came along, and the first person shooter was born.”
The multiplayer mechanic of Maze War, as Colley briefly mentioned in the previous quote, didn’t come about out of want, but rather out of need, as a single computer wasn’t powerful enough to have multiple people in the maze. At least, that’s true for the early version of Maze War.
In 1974, Greg Thompson, a friend of Colley who helped develop Maze War, took the game with him to college. He worked with fellow student Dave Lebling to modify the game into the multiplayer game they envisioned. In JCR Licklider’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Project MAC Dynamic Modeling Laboratory, they got the game’s multiplayer mechanic working over ARPANET. ARPANET could be it’s own video, but all you need to know is that it’s the predecessor to the internet we know today.
Soon, the game would expand to allow 8 players through the use of a client/server system using 56 kbit/s serial connections at MIT. People from other colleges could connect to ARPANET and then to MIT to play the game against people across the country. Today we take that sort of thing for granted, but at the time it was revolutionary. Over the next few years, Maze War would go on to get a level-editor, a computer dedicated solely to playing Maze War, a version that could use vector graphics, levels with different levels or floors, and bots that the player could play against. Maze War laid the foundation for every first person shooter to follow it.
1974 also saw another first, again, from Atari. On July 24, Atari released Gran Trak 10, the first car racing video arcade game. The player raced against the clock, rather than other cars. The game had a steering wheel, a gear shifter, accelerator and breaks. Atari competitors also released spin-offs of Gran Trak 10, as was common back in those days.
Midway Games also threw their hat in the ring with another first in 1974, with the first japanese game licensed for North American releases. They licensed Taito’s Basketball, and released it in North America under the name TV Basketball.