Death Race and the Beginning of Videogame Controversy

GTA. Saint's Row. Bully. Doom. We all know the types. For as long as there have been video games, there has been the attached controversy. But my question is, when did the public start treating video games like the coming of your preferred religion's dastardly bad guy?

The answer is Death Race.

The game has a simple enough premise. you have a steering wheel and you drive a car around hitting "zombies". when you hit one, a grave pops up.

(Download the game here if you believe you can stand it's corrupting influence)

Make sure to read the readme, it makes sense of the seemingly buggy port, but works fine.

Anyway. This completely realistic driving spree simulator (as I'm sure JT would have put it) was loosely based off the much more violent, much less controversial Death Race 3000 movie, and was released by a company called Exidy in 1976 to a hostile audience. the "zombies" looked like stick men and as such, were presumed by many to be humans. Some thought this awesome. Most however did not.


After selling horribly partially due to the controversy and partially due to it really not being a very good game, 500 of the cabinets were made, putting newcomer Exidy on a monetary back foot for much of the company's game development history.


Now. To the game. As already stated, the aim is to hit as many zombies as you can under 30 seconds, avoiding the graves which will slow you down. The game then gives you a rank based on your score, which goes like this:

• 1-3 points: skeleton chaser
• 4-10 points: bone cracker
• 11-20 points: gremlin hunter
• 21+ points: expert driver

The game also has a two player mode, allowing the cars to stop each other and generally get in each others way, with no way in either mode to actually die.

Honestly, the game got really grating the second time i played it. The controversy was there, but that hasn't stopped games like GTA. It was genuinely bad. Controls were annoying, the graphics were bad, even for it's time, the only upside being some of the coolest cabinet art seen during those times, but that can only help the game so much.

Well, that's it for another game. I'll be back next whenever to find yet another game that defined our culture, to love and cherish, or to mock and despise. But I still have a goal to play all the defining moments of our history, and the goal is as enticing and impossible as ever.

Dismeeir

As seen on TV

As far as history is concerned, no real developments were made between '62 and '72, but leading up to '72, we meet a man named Baer.

Ralph Baer was an American inventor who's most notable achievement was the patent and development of the "Brown Box" in 1968, which was essentially the first home entertainment system, or "console". The box and it's patent were sold in 1972 to the company Magnovox, who used the Brown Box, with a few aesthetic changes, to produce and sell the "Odyssey" home entertainment system (the patent, on the other hand, was used by Magnovox to sue the monetary pants off of anyone who made so much as a sidewards glance towards the idea of console production)

The Odyssey was a revolutionary idea, and was one of the first attempts to commercially make video games on a large scale, the first attempt at a light gun, and one of the first signs that a computer could be made for residential use and at a reasonable size. the system had 12 games on it, all black and white and all with completely discernible sprites. but one of these games became the addictive beginning of mainstream video gaming. It was the instantly recognisable (and most commonly thought first game) Pong.

Pong (link for java version here) was a basic tennis game, where one line tried to get a square behind the other line over a dotted line. Graphics were simplistic to a tee here, trying to make the game as easy as possible to process for the Odyssey, who had a low processing power, even in those days. the game was two player, the one player version coming out much later (come on, like you'd expect the first residential computing device to support AI.)

The game became a huge success and major selling point of the Odyssey, the other games not having the same lasting appeal and the light gun was literally that. It reacted to light, and the game involved putting a sheet that came with the console over the TV, which had holes where the screen would light up, and one could win just as easily by pointing at the nearest light bulb and blasting away like a maniac. By the same token, if you had so much as another light on in the room, no matter where you shot, you'd get a hit. apart from the blind who may have found this helpful, it made the games completely useless for just about anyone else.

Pong was also the first successful arcade game released by atari, becoming incredibly popular and overshadowing the pinball machines that traditionally dominated arcades. well really, at the time they were just about the only thing in arcades of any real interest. But now, the pinball machines were what you played whilst waiting for the pong machine to be free. As previously mentioned, Magnavox with it's monolithic evil sounding name put on the sue cap and tried to take off every penny that Atari made, but settled out of court the rights to the game for 700,000 dollars. Whilst of course setting Atari back a great deal, it turned out to be a very worthy investment, allowing them to make silly amounts of money thereon after. (a version of space wars was created for arcade but wasn't successful due to people having to read a manual for controls, even then many couldn't understand them. look, i know I'm an internet generation bigot that is used to games requiring the same amount of control training as your average 3 stage rocket, but come on. 4 BUTTONS. Have some perseverance, damn it)

I would have had my dad again play this one with me but he was quoted as saying "i lost too much money over that thing". I'm certain he meant cent pieces at the arcade, but i like to think it was epic 100 dollar drunken bets over who would win.

He so would have won though.

Dismeeir.

Start at the start

Well, lacking any real direction, and with my list of games nowhere near complete, I thought i'd throw myself into it, and take a look at the first video game ever made.

But this raises one hell of a question. Which one was the first?

Well, doing a bit of research online, everyone has their own opinions, some writing entire thesis's on the subject, some with just a couple of words to say, some saying pong was, some saying pacman, some (less informed than others) suggest mario on the NES. but it really just boils down to this, no one has a fucking clue. So I'm going on what I've learned, heard and believed.

So now I present to you the first videogame ever:

Space War.













Here is a java applet with the original coding for the game, it was a two player space shooter, where you had two ships ("needle" and "wedge") floating about a very simple looking star shooting at eachother, with both the ships being affected by the gravitational pull of the star in the middle (omigosh physics engine!) it's very simplistic (no kidding, first video game and all) with deaths not scoring points but simply starting the game again.

Now i'm sure plenty of gamers that know shit about their history will have this thought of space war being the first game for want of a better description light a fire under their arse but I assure you I put a lot of thought into the choice. There was tennis for two, but that wasnt a videogame in the sense i'm talking about because it didnt use code, didnt have any character models and didnt have a clear objective. They also put noughts and crosses on a screen even before that, but that hardly counts, primarily because it was first a board game and it didnt really have a screen for it to play with, rather flashing lights, and secondarily it was quite simply shit boring.










Produced in 1962, it was run on the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) which was one of the first processing computers and was the size of a family car (and the family, if including the monitor)

The game had plenty of features, the aformentioned gravity, optional star background, two player mode (well, no one player mode but hey its a feature) but most of all, it's really heartening to see that despite it's age, if you have a friend around, its still a bit of bloody good fun, like any game should be. Also, not having anyone about to enjoy this memory lane better with, I enlisted the gaming services of my dad, who had played the game and others like it back in the prehistoric days where midi keyboards ran free and each article of clothing was more multicoloured and offensive than the next, and he beat the crap out of me. That man eats D-Pad and shits gamer, I kid you not.


Well now that we've started this blast from the past shenanigan, I feel a bit better now. until next time, stop wasting time working and play a game.

Dismeeir.

PS: We now have an RSS feed for all those tech savvy lazy bastards who cant bother opening up a website to see if it's updated (so, me.)

So it begins.

After playing Bioshock recently, it had occurred to me that I should play it's spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2. What I found after the absolute technical horror that was getting it to run on Windows XP was that SS2 was in fact a better game that Bioshock was, and it surprised me how such a gem could have passed by me, when I believe myself to be an avid gamer. Now like most of my ideas develop, one thing links to another and i pretty much forget or confuse anything that passes my mind. However, I luckily told a friend of mine about it, and in a great show of logic and wisdom he said "why don't you blog it?"

So here I am. My mission is to play all the great games of all the generations, from the ones my dad used to play back when arcade machines had three colour screens, monotone sound effects and bad-ass soldiers with mullets, to the latest games that come out, when they come out. I don't know if I'll be able to stick with this, I have my work cut out for me with about 20 years of gaming to summarize and cover. I would love suggestions of games you would like for me to track down and play, through emulator, eBay or if I have it already, no matter how obscure it is.

Over the next few days I'll be putting together a beginning list of games to play (even with exams on, great time to start this, huh?), it will be very impermanent though, so feel free to give me suggestions at any time. So until next post, have a good one.

Dismeeir.