1970-1979 · 22 entries
Ten years that took games from a university hobby to a business with factories, distributors, imitators and lawyers.
Two things had to meet before a business could exist, and they met in 1971. The laboratory tradition supplied a game that people demonstrably wanted to play, and the amusement trade supplied a way to charge for it. Both attempts that year were versions of the same space duel. One was a single hand-built installation in a university student union, paid for out of its builders' own pockets and never replicated. The other was a manufactured cabinet produced in modest numbers for the coin-operated market, and it sold poorly. Its controls asked far too much of a stranger holding a coin, and the lesson that a paying player will not read instructions was learned immediately and permanently.
The correction came a year later from a new California company whose founders had watched that failure closely. A ball, two paddles, a score, no manual. Tested in a tavern and then built in quantity, it worked in exactly the way the coin-operated trade already understood: high turnover, short sessions, and an audience that included people who had never touched such a machine before. Because the distributors, route operators and location owners were all in place, the format spread with startling speed, and so did imitations from nearly every manufacturer in Chicago. It also drew a patent claim from the company that had licensed those earlier television prototypes, which was settled by taking a license.
Getting into the living room took longer and was harder to explain to buyers. The first home system, sold through a television maker's dealer network, came with plastic overlays, plug-in circuit cards, dice and score pads, and it suffered from a widespread and entirely wrong belief that it worked only with that company's television sets. Three years later a dedicated ball-and-paddle box sold through a national department store chain proved the household market was real, at which point the deeper problem became obvious. Dedicated hardware can only ever play what it is wired to play. Interchangeable cartridges and a general-purpose processor answered that, and within a year the industry had copied the idea wholesale.
The microprocessor is the technical hinge of the decade. Before it, a game was a circuit, laid out by hand and impossible to revise cheaply. After it, a game was a set of instructions, and identical hardware could sell an unlimited number of different products. Development got faster, ambitions got larger, and a job appeared that had never had a name outside research laboratories. The same components made small computers possible, and in 1977 three complete machines aimed at ordinary buyers reached American stores at once. Their owners traded programs on cassette tapes through user groups and magazines, building a second software market with no gatekeeper of any kind.
Where the money came from changed too. A media conglomerate bought the leading American company midway through the decade, supplying the capital for cartridge hardware and signalling that entertainment executives now saw games as a category rather than a fad. Machines were everywhere by then: bowling alleys, pizza parlors, laundromats, and the shopping malls of the new suburbs. That visibility brought the first national argument about content, when a driving game that ran over figures on the screen reached network news. Late in the decade an alien-shooting cabinet from Japan tipped the trade's balance eastward, and four programmers who wanted credit for their work invented third-party publishing.
The decade's founding commercial insight was that a paying stranger will not learn anything before playing. A cabinet had to be legible from several feet away and playable within seconds of the coin dropping. Everything that looks primitive about early arcade games, from the tiny rule sets to the absence of story, follows from a design constraint imposed by the coin slot itself.
Replacing hand-wired logic with a programmable processor changed the economics of the whole trade. Hardware became a platform rather than a product, revision became cheap, and the value of a game moved out of the factory and into the work of the person writing it. Cartridges then extended the same logic into the home, where one purchase could grow a library over years.
Once games shipped separately from hardware, someone other than the console maker could write them. A group of programmers who felt uncredited and underpaid proved it, and the litigation that followed ended in a licensing settlement rather than a ban. Independent publishing on someone else's machine became legitimate, and the relationship between platform owners and publishers has been negotiated on those terms ever since.
Rather than hand another design to an outside manufacturer, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney set up their own company in California to engineer, build and sell coin-operated games. Its name came from the board game Go.
Atari's first product reduced a video game to one knob, one rule and a single line of on-screen instruction. It became the first commercially successful arcade video game, drew a wave of imitators, and triggered a patent fight.
Atari squeezed its arcade hit onto a single custom chip and sold the resulting console through Sears under the store's own brand. It became one of that Christmas season's successes and proved the home market was real.
Warner Communications bought Atari, supplying the capital needed to finish and market a programmable console. It was an early sign that entertainment conglomerates had begun to see games as a mainstream media business.
Atari answered the question of what a lone player does with a ball-and-paddle game by standing the court upright and filling the top of it with bricks. The result was a hit, heavily copied, and it left marks on computing.
Atari's programmable console arrived with nine cartridges and an unusual, demanding design. Sales stayed slow for two years, then a licensed arcade hit turned it into the dominant machine of its era.
Denied credit and royalties for cartridges that sold in the millions, four Atari programmers formed a company to publish for the same console without permission. The lawsuit that followed legitimized independent publishing.
Atari's vector game of splitting rocks and drifting inertia earned more than anything else the company put in arcades. Its three-letter high-score entry turned a private achievement into a public claim.
In ten years, games went from a curiosity that had to be justified as research into a category with factories, distributors, retailers, lawsuits and a moral panic of its own. The structures that mattered most were commercial rather than technical: the cartridge, the license, the third-party publisher, and the platform owner's power over both. Read the entries below for how fast a whole industry can be assembled once the money has been proved to exist.
