Getting bigger and sleeker and wider and brighter
Do you ever find yourself trying to remember what life was like before Apple’s iPhone arrived? Tough, isn’t it? How on earth did we ever waste so much of our time when we didn’t have high-powered touchscreen computing devices constantly at our fingertips? It’s even more difficult to visualise the time before videogames, because their invention feels like a lifetime away. It was 50 years ago this month that Nutting Associates’ Computer Space became the first videogame to be played in exchange for money, thus marking the birth of a modern industry. The futuristiclooking arcade machine wasn’t entirely original, having taken inspiration from an existing computer game, but crucially it was first to market, giving the team behind it the opportunity to build Atari, a company that grew at lightning pace, broke the rules and dominated its competitors.
In some respects, the shape of the fledgling Atari in the early ’70s brings to mind modern-era Apple, but with a crucial difference: Atari’s productions were the work of a few lone engineers, versus the hundreds that contributed to the original iPhone design in 2007. Computer Space
was scrabbled together in a makeshift lab through cigarette smoke and solder fumes, its creators entirely unaware of what would follow down the track half a century later. Sadly, brilliant engineer Ted Dabney isn’t alive to see how far we’ve come since, but fellow Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell pays tribute to his work in this issue’s Collected Works (p68), which harks back to where everything began (and when two emerging engineering talents named Jobs and Wozniak were keen Atari game-makers).
Certain aspects of today’s interactive entertainment landscape might not earn Dabney’s approval, but his inventor’s mindset would ensure he‘d appreciate the diversity of videogames on offer, especially those crafted by independent studios, with independent values. A game such as Stray,
for example, featuring a wide-eyed cat navigating an exquisitely rendered world populated by robotic humanoids. Our cover story begins on p52.