The History of Video Games: 1976
135In 1976, Atari released another one of the most popular games of all time, Breakout. Their classic brick breaking game has been on virtually every video game. Later in 1976, Fairchild Semiconductor would release their first console, the Fairchild Video Entertainment System, which brought us into the 2nd generation of video games. In this video, i’ll be going over the events that transpired in 1976 in the history of video games. This is… The History of Video Games: 1976.
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The History of Video Games: 1976 (in text form)
In April 1976, another classic game was released, Breakout. Another Atari game, what a surprise. We all know how Breakout works, you must keep the ball from reaching the bottom of the screen, below the paddle. Your goal is the break the bricks to score points across various levels. Breakout was designed by Nolan Bushnell, Steve Bristow, and Steve Wozniak. Bushnell saw the success of Pong, but he wanted a single player version of the game, and he was certain that it’d be a success. Al Alcorn was assigned as project manager and Steve Jobs was assigned to design a prototype. Yeah, that Steve Jobs. Bushnell offered Jobs $750 to design the prototype but he told Jobs that he wanted it done with less than 50 TTL chips. Jobs convinced Steve Wozniak to work on it with him, and the got it down to 44 chips. Because of how small and complex their design was, Atari wasn’t able to manufacture Jobs and Wozniak’s version of Breakout. Atari ended up redoing the entire game, using 100 TTL chips.
A predecessor to the ColecoVision was released in 1976, called the Telstar, manufactured by Coleco. Like the previously mentioned Odyssey 100 and Odyssey 200 systems, the Telstar was a dedicated console that played hockey, handball, and tennis. It used General Instruments microchip that made manufacturing simple consoles pretty inexpensive, all things considered. A lot of these early consoles, like the Odyssey 100 and Telstar were all ball and paddle games. In 1975 there were less than 400,000 ball and paddle systems in the United States. And by 1977, there’d be over 5 million.
While it’s they weren’t as influential in the history of video games as company’s like Atari or Nintendo, Apple was founded on April 1, 1976. In the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, Apple would take over the mobile gaming industry with their iPhone and iPod Touch line of products.
Kids today have probably never heard of it, but Colossal Cave Adventure was one of the most influential games of the 70’s. It was developed by Will Crowther in 1976 for the PDP-10. Crowther combined his love of caving with ideas from the recently released Dungeons & Dragons to create this text adventure game where the player takes control of their character who is tasked with traversing a cave system filled with rare treasures. You earn points for finding treasures, with the ultimate goal being to get as many points as possible. The cave system featured in the game is loosely based on a cave system in Kentucky called Mammoth Cave.
The backstory for Colossal Cave Adventure is basically that Crowther and his wife both loved caving, and after their divorce, Crowther wanted a way to connect with his daughters, so he built the game, which originally consisted of roughly 700 lines of FORTAN code and 700 lines of data.
Another first for 1976, as if there weren’t enough, was in the form of the first hand to hand fighting game, Heavyweight Champ, released by Sega. For the time, the graphics are surprisingly good. The game featured a side perspective fight between two fighters who could move up and down for low and high punches, as well as moving forward for strikes. It would be remade in 1987.
1976 is going out with a bang. In November 1976 Fairchild Semiconductor released a home video game console in North America for $170, called the Video Entertainment System. The Video Entertainment System is the first video game console to use programmable ROM cartridges as well as the first console to use a microprocessor.
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At this time, Mitten Squad has 6,391 views for Breakout spread across 1 video. Less than an hour worth of Breakout videos were uploaded to his channel, less than 0.06% of the total video content that Mitten Squad has uploaded to YouTube.