They Create Worlds

The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry, Vol. I: 1971-1982

Alexander Smith

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138389922
• eBook ISBN: 9780429752612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Ciencias computacionales general

They Create Worlds: The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry, Vol. 1 is the first in a three-volume set that provides an in-depth analysis of the creation and evolution of the video game industry. Beginning with the advent of computers in the mid-20th century, Alexander Smith's text comprehensively highlights and examines individuals, companies, and market forces that have shaped the development of the video game industry around the world. Volume one, places an emphasis on the emerging ideas, concepts, and games developed from the commencement of the budding video game art form in the 1950s and 1960s through the first commercial activity in the 1970s and early 1980s. They Create Worlds aims to build a new foundation upon which future scholars and the video game industry itself can chart new paths.

Key Features:

• The most in-depth examination of the video game industry ever written, They Create Worlds charts the technological breakthroughs, design decisions, and market forces in the United States, Europe, and East Asia that birthed a $100 billion industry.
• The books derive their information from rare primary sources such as little-studied trade publications, personal papers collections, and oral history interviews with designers and executives, many of whom have never told their stories before.
• Spread over three volumes, They Create Worlds focuses on the creative designers, shrewd marketers, and innovative companies that have shaped video games from their earliest days as a novelty attraction to their current status as the most important entertainment medium of the 21st Century.
• The books examine the formation of the video game industry in a clear narrative style that will make them useful as teaching aids in classes on the history of game design and economics, but they are not being written specifically as instructional books and can be enjoyed by anyone with a passion for video game history.

1
Searching for Bobby Fischer

The definition of the term “video game” remains unsettled as digital entertainment continues to evolve. Broadly speaking, the term encompasses any entertainment experience powered by electronic logic circuits that requires a player to manipulate an input device to interact with objects presented on a display. By this definition, the development of the first video games coincided with the rise of digital computing in the latter half of the twentieth century. While computers had existed for well over a century by that point, their function had been markedly different and unsuited to playing a game. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a computer was merely a person doing basic addition and subtraction to complete mathematical tables.¹ In the late nineteenth century, human computers were augmented by analog devices like Lord Kelvin’s tide predictor that physically simulated specific phenomena through the aid of mechanical devices like levers, pulleys, and gears. In the early twentieth century, the analog computer largely become the domain of the electrical engineer, who used room-sized machines full of resistors, capacitors, and inducers to simulate the operation of power grids as the developed world rapidly electrified. Analog computing reached its high-water mark in 1931 when MIT professor and electrical engineer Vannevar Bush completed his differential analyzer, which could solve a wide array of differential equations, but remained limited to a relatively small set of problems.²

As the first digital computers entered development in the late 1930s, the goal of their creators remained solving specific equations, making them little more than complicated and expensive calculating machines. A computer created under this philosophy merely replaced human computers – laborers undertaking arithmetic tasks that required little independent thought. By the conclusion of World War II, which saw the construction of the first electronic digital computers, there was a small group of engineers, mathematicians, and logicians who felt it should be possible to create a computer that could think for itself. When it came time to prove to the rest of the world this dream was possible, these thinkers felt the most effective way to do so was to craft a computer program able to match a human opponent in a strategy game.

¹ Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, and Jeffrey R. Yost, Computer: A History of the Information Machine, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014), 3–4.

² Ibid, 50–54.

Over the next decade and a half, multiple individuals undertook the challenge of creating an artificial intelligence (AI) that could play a convincing game of checkers or chess, all in aid of a larger goal of creating a computer program that could learn and think for itself. By the early 1950s, these pioneers had determined the basic obstacles they would need to overcome to achieve this goal and had developed shortcuts like decision trees and alpha-beta pruning derived from the nascent field of game theory to overcome these difficulties. Applying these methods to fashion a credible intelligence took longer, with engineers hampered primarily by the capability of the hardware architectures and programming languages with which they were forced to work. These engineers were not striving to create entertainment products, but their research represents some of the earliest instances of developing a computer program to play a game on a computer against an artificial opponent.

***

In early 1935, a recent mathematics graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, named Alan Mathison Turing attended a course taught by King’s College fellow Max Newman regarding certain foundational principles of mathematics and logic while awaiting word on his own application to become a fellow at the college. One topic Newman discussed was systematic procedures that can be accomplished step-by-step by following instructions without any real understanding of how the procedures work. According to Newman, these tasks required so little knowledge or insight that even a machine could undertake them successfully.³

Unlike many of his mathematical peers, Turing was not content to confine his studies to purely philosophical constructs. Possessed of both a love of invention and a desire to explore abstract concepts through the material world, Turing found his imagination fired by Newman’s concept of a machine performing calculations based on instructions. For the next year, he attacked the Entscheidungsproblem originally posed by David Hilbert in 1928 through the lens of a theorized mathematical device inspired by Newman’s lecture.

³ B. Jack Copeland, Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), kindle, chap. 2.

Hilbert, the dean of the international mathematics community, had long believed that no problem in mathematics was unsolvable, and his Entscheidungsproblem posited that any mathematical formula could be proven through formal logic to be universally valid. To examine this assertion, Turing envisioned a universal machine consisting of a scanner reading an endless roll of paper tape. The tape would be divided into individual squares that could either be blank or contain a symbol. By reading these symbols based on a simple set of hardwired instructions and following any coded instructions conveyed by the symbols themselves, the machine would be able to carry out any calculation possible by a specialized machine, output the results, and even incorporate those results into a new set of calculations. In April 1936, Turing completed his paper, entitled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” and demonstrated that his universal machine proved Hilbert incorrect. While merely a hypothetical device employed to serve a theoretical purpose, Turing’s universal machine defined the basic attributes of the general-purpose digital computer.⁴

With the onset of World War II, Turing joined His Majesty’s Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to decipher high-level German military codes and took part in the construction of increasingly elaborate cryptographic machines – called bombes for the ticking noises they emitted while decrypting – to crack the German military’s Enigma code. With what had once been a hobbyist interest in cryptology now transformed into his primary vocation, Turing increasingly turned to math and logic problems to unwind in what little leisure time his work afforded him. In particular, he began pondering whether there might be a machine method to play a “perfect” game of chess.⁵

Game theory was still in its infancy in the 1940s, but the concept of “minimaxing,” the idea that in any contest where both participants possess complete information regarding the state of play there exists a pair of strategies that allow each player to minimize and maximize his losses, had already been articulated in 1928 by one of the founders of the discipline, John von Neumann. In 1941, Turing began discussing with fellow mathematician Jack Good on how a device akin to his universal machine might employ minimaxing theory to play a game of chess. Turing and Good went so far as constructing a basic decision tree for chess and determining that the number of moves the computer would have to “look ahead” needed to be variable so that the computer could accurately identify potential capture moves, but then set the problem aside.⁶

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Vintage, 2014), 266.

In early 1943, Turing traveled to Washington, DC to share information with the cryptographers employed by the U.S. Navy. While abroad, he called on Bell Labs, where he discussed his universal machine with Claude Shannon. An electrical engineer with a master’s degree from MIT, Shannon combined a passion for logic with practical experience working with Bush’s differential analyzer to conceptualize a calculating device incorporating Boolean logic to not just solve mathematical problems but also to carry out symbolic logic tasks as well. Shannon’s work paved the way for machines that could not just perform a rote operation, but actually decide how to tackle problems on its own, for almost any decision, no matter how complex, can be broken down into a basic series of yes or no, on or off, 1 or 0 propositions. Published in his master’s thesis in 1937, Shannon’s framework for the binary digital circuit proved instrumental to transforming Turing’s idea of a universal machine into reality. Turing and Shannon held several discussions during their time together at Bell, which helped crystallize both their desires to build machines that could go beyond the computing devices of the day and actually reason.⁷

Shortly after returning to Bletchley, Turing struck up a friendship with newly arrived Oxford student Donald Michie, who had begun his course of study in the classics, but ended up at Bletchley Park when he took a cryptology course in the hopes of making himself useful to the war effort and discovered a heretofore unknown aptitude for code breaking. In Michie, Turing discovered a kindred soul interested in chess and probability and teaching machines to think.⁸ By now, the Bletchley cryptologists had turned to breaking more complicated German ciphers than Enigma for which even the elaborate bombe machines proved insufficient. In a new section headed by Max Newman, electrical engineers were now building more complicated electronic code-breaking equipment, culminating in the revolutionary Colossus completed by Tommy Flowers in 1944, the world’s first fully functional electronic digital computer.⁹ Electronic machines were now fully integrated into the daily lives of the Bletchley cryptographers, so talk naturally turned toward what should be done with the technology after the war. From his discussions with Good, Shannon, and Michie, Turing decided the only logical course was to construct a machine that could think for itself.

⁶ Ibid, 267–270.

⁷ Ibid, 312–316.

⁸ Ibid, 332–334.

***

The earliest electronic computers like Colossus were wholly unsuited to serve as the basis for a thinking machine, for they were built for highly specific tasks, and their function was entirely governed by their hardware, so they could only be reprogrammed for a new task by physically rewiring the machine.¹⁰ This bottleneck could be eliminated if computer programs dictating the operation of the computer could also be stored in memory alongside the numbers they were manipulating. In theory, the binary circuits envisioned by Shannon could represent these instructions via symbolic logic, but in practice the vacuum tubes found in early computers could only house around 200 characters in memory, which was fine for storing a few five- or ten-digit numbers for calculations, but not for instruction sets that required thousands of characters. In the late 1940s, engineers began developing more expansive memory options to create the first stored-program computers.

One of the first people to whom Turing gave a copy of his landmark 1936 paper was its principle inspiration, Max Newman. Upon reading it, Newman became interested in building a Universal Turing Machine himself. He tried to interest Tommy Flowers in the paper while he was building his Colossi for the Newmanry at Bletchley Park, but Flowers was an engineer, not a mathematician or logician, and by his own admission did not really understand Turing’s theories. As early as 1944, Newman began expressing enthusiasm for applying wartime electronic advances to a project to build a Universal Turing Machine at the war’s conclusion.¹¹

In September 1945, Newman took the Fielden Chair of Mathematics at Manchester University and soon after applied for a grant from the Royal Society to establish the Computing Machine Laboratory at the university. After the grant was approved in May 1946, Newman arranged for portions of the dismantled Colossi to be shipped to Manchester for reference and assembled a team to tackle a stored-program computer project. Perhaps the most important members of the team were electrical engineer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author
• Introduction
• Prologue: Genesis
• 1 Searching for Bobby Fischer
• 2 Shall We Play a (War) Game?
• 3 The Priesthood at Play
• 4 One, Two, Three, Four I Declare a Space War
• 5 The Stars Are Right
• 6 Pinball Wizards
• 7 Rising Sun
• 8 A Nutty Idea
• 9 1TL200: A Video Game Odyssey
• 10 Ping-Pong Diplomacy
• 11 The Day of the Jackal
• 12 These Violent Delights
• 13 Homeward Bound
• 14 Back to BASICs
• 15 These Are the Voyages
• 16 Micro Machines
• 17 Solid State of Mind
• 18 Breaking Out in Japan
• 19 Chasing the Silver Ball
• 20 Putting the F in Fun
• 21 Hey Stella
• 22 Meet Me at the Faire
• 23 Micronauts
• 24 Critical Role
• 25 Adventure Time
• 26 Power in the Palm of Your Hand
• 27 The King is Dead, Long Live the King!
• 28 Japanese Invaders
• 29 Deep Impact
• 30 Home Invasion
• 31 Intelligent Television
• 32 Active Television
• 33 Guardians of the Galaxy
• 34 Pac-Man Fever
• 35 Blue Skies
• Epilogue: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy
• List of Interviewees
• References and Bibliography
• Index