Since the turn of the twenty-first century, a lively topic in cultural studies and within the culture industries has been new media, a term that has never been simple to define.1 Rather than just whatever media happen to be new at a particular time, new media usually have something more specifically to do with computers as media of communication. New media are distinguished historically from print, film, broadcasting, and other mainstays of modern life, which are relegated to the status of old media. New media are seen as the opposite of the twentieth century’s mass media, since they are participatory rather than passive. Video games, as popular interactive technology of the digital age, are a key example.
Talk of new media often functions as hype within the world of business, where digital technologies have been seen as catalysts for disruptive innovation, but intellectuals are also susceptible to overheated excitement. Such rhetoric can err by seeing the present as an implausibly radical break from the past. This way of looking at changing technology tends to obscure as much as it reveals, promoting (or decrying) present events as fundamental departures rather than recognizing continuities with the past. At the same time, historically minded writers have recognized that new media studies could be taken up as a paradigm for doing media history, going against the grain of the sometimes frenzied optimism or pessimism of new media rhetoric.2 Whether digital or not, any medium was new once, and most tend to be renewed over time as material changes prompt fresh ways of using and thinking about a technology. New media begin in a period of mysterious uncertainty and potential, a period of becoming, but eventually they are integrated into markets, regulatory frameworks, and the patterns of everyday life. Over time, they come to seem familiar and unremarkable. A medium’s period of buzzy novelty can be particularly important for establishing its meaning and value. These often abide many decades or centuries after newness has passed. The long history of a medium is shaped (though not in all ways) by early understandings and uses.
This book is a new media history of video games, charting their emergence in the United States during their first decade of public, commercial availability, beginning around 1972. That year marked the release of the first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey, and Atari’s first hit coin-operated game, Pong. Video games had been in the works for some years by this time, but 1972 was the moment when they arrived as an experience of play wide open to American consumers. As a new media history, Atari Age assumes that during their emergence, video games were objects without fixed meanings, without a clear identity, without a commonly shared understanding of their cultural status. All of this had to be worked out. The emergence of video games was not just a matter of bringing new products to market for people to buy and use. It was not merely a succession of platforms, interfaces, and games. It was also a process of introducing ideas, including notions of who should play games, where and when, and for what purposes. It was not clear in 1972 whether games would be seen as a harmless amusement or as a danger to America’s children. It was not clear if their players would mainly be adults or kids, or of one or another gender. It was not clear if the medium would be seen in positive, productive terms, or rather as a moral or physical threat. Ideas like these are up for grabs when a medium is new.
A history of emerging media is one of uncertainties and misdirections, of struggles over uses and purposes, of unexpected and surprising outcomes. Inventors cannot dictate how the fruits of their labor will be understood and appreciated, who will use them and to what ends. Technologies pass through a period of interpretive flexibility, as different social groups adopt them for divergent purposes, before a process of closure establishes a clearer identity, making some uses dominant while others become more marginal or are cast aside.3 What makes early video games distinct from games in later periods in the history of the medium is precisely this lack of a stable identity.
When video games were new, people apprehended their novelty through associations with already familiar technologies and experiences. Just as automobiles were called horseless carriages, video games were familiarized by comparison with existing objects, next to which they were often regarded as improvements. New media, as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue, are remediations, adapting and repurposing the forms and techniques of earlier media.4 The older forms through which video games established an identity varied in reputation and cultural status. Pinball had a sketchy life as a public amusement sometimes banned for its associations with gambling and crime, but also adored by countercultural fans who admired the rebellious image of the pinball player. Television had been regarded as a promising medium for democratic civic life that became debased by commercialism and catering to the mass audience to the point where it was loathed for inculcating passivity and disengagement. Computers were seen alternately as instruments of dehumanization employed by massive institutions of corporate or state control, and as miraculous technologies that promised to solve myriad problems. Games played in the home, such as board or card games, were associated with the suburban family ideal and the ideology of domestic harmony so important to the postwar consensus society.
Popular imagination closely linked early video games with these very different technologies, media, and social practices, though it sometimes also distinguished them. In some ways, video games were caught between these technologies and practices. Each of these remediations was also centrally concerned with age, gender, and class identity politics, as each of the “old” media carried along social identities of its own coming from the spaces and users with which it was identified. As a new form of public amusement, video games picked up associations with the history of coin-operated games, but also contrasted against the earlier versions of coin-op machines. As a new thing to play in the home, video games were part of a history of domestic leisure, but also were seen as a more masculine amusement than the typical family-room game. As a device to plug into a television set, video games intervened in television history by giving broadcast audiences an alternative to watching TV shows. As a use for home computers, video games were an incentive to some early PC users to acquire a computer, but also provided a seemingly trivial reason to own one, wasting expensive cutting-edge technology. Public amusements, family leisure, television, and computers all pushed and pulled video games one way or another in the formulation of their cultural status as a medium.
As they emerged, video games became associated with players of certain identities, and the consequences of this are still with us. Decades after their emergence, gender inequality suffuses the world of video games. Despite the presence of huge numbers of girls and women as players, video games cater especially to boys and men in many ways, including the representations within them. The culture of video games often seems dominated not just by boys and men, in ways that exclude girls and women, but by strongly identified gamers who seem threatened by any form of critique of their fandom and pastime.5 Women are underrepresented in the games industry, an industry that can be inhospitable to them. When women speak out about unequal representation and other gender inequities in the world of video games, they are often harassed, threatened, and vilified. This book ends its story around 1983, but its ideas about how video games became associated with masculinity (along with youth and middle-class identity) provide a backstory to much more recent developments in the history of the medium. Many key ideas about games familiar to people in the 2010s were circulating already in the 1970s and 80s. This book is, among other things, a history of how video games became masculinized during their period of emergence.
It is also a history of how video games became identified with two other aspects of social identity: age and class. In their first decade, games came to be regarded as a somewhat respectable type of boy culture: as a medium for male, middle-class players in their preteen, teenage, and early adult years. This was a contrast against two conceptions of leisure that also shaped the history of electronic games, which informed their promotion and reception. The first was the ideal of the companionate family at play in the bourgeois suburban home with members of different ages and sexes. The second was the reputation of public coin-operated amusements long associated with gambling, crime, sex, drugs, and riffraff, a reputation shaped by lower-class identity and by a more mature masculinity.
The youthful, masculine, and middle-class status of the medium was a product of many dynamics and influences. Unlike many new media, video games emerged as multiple objects in different kinds of spaces. They were both a computer and a television technology. They were both a public and private amusement, played in taverns and living rooms. In some ways they were like pinball or pool, and in others they were like watching television or playing checkers. The status and identity that emerged for video games was a product of negotiations among many meanings and values. It developed along with changes in public amusement spaces, computers in everyday life, and the family. The identification of the medium with an identity of its user was not merely a product of who played most often, though this was part of it. It was also a matter of the place the medium occupied in popular imagination. It was a product of how people looked at and thought about video games.
This book is as much concerned with ideas and representations as with game consoles and cartridges, but never with one at the expense of the other. One basic assumption will be that these two sides of the history inform one another. They cannot be isolated from each other if we want to know the cultural significance of the emerging medium. Some of our understanding of early video games comes through looking at the games themselves, but just as often, context and surroundings tell the story. Spaces of play and identities of players are no less important than game companies and the products they sold. The pleasures of playing video games and their place in the everyday lives of their players are of no less interest than design innovations over this first decade. This is not a technical or aesthetic history or an economic analysis of an emerging industry as much as a social and cultural study of the medium in relation to its players. In this way, Atari Age is at once a work of game studies and media studies, looking at games as games, as play, as a medium of their own, but also as a form of media that has continuities and commonalities with other forms and is approachable using the same tools as other cultural studies of media. Its ambition is to uncover assumptions and expectations about video games that became established as a shared (even if contested) common sense in the period of their emergence, as cultural histories have done for cinema, radio, and TV, among other media.
This common sense did not emerge without struggle. At every point along the way of this story, we find not one clear idea of video games but competing positions in tension and contradiction with one another. There was no one common sense about video games to which everyone learned to subscribe. Rather, video games were perched between rival conceptions, and differences had to be worked out over time, bit by bit. The middle-class status of the new medium developed in tension with a less respectable and less legitimate reputation of public arcades and game rooms. The close linkage between video games and television required a distinction between the promising interactivity of the former and the reputation of the latter as a vast wasteland. The place of video games in the home was inflected by the idea of domestic space as feminine, and by the unified family ideal of private leisure. The use of computers to play games and the status of games as computerized playthings introduced tensions between productive and frivolous uses of advanced electronic technology. The craze for arcade games in public places stoked many adults’ fears of young people’s corruption, both moral and cognitive, by this new form of amusement even while many experts touted its benefits. This is a book about these tensions and contradictions, which were typically resolved by fashioning the new medium around some identities more than others. The admission of video games into the realm of mainstream popular culture required an accommodation of identities other than young and male in the world of electronic play even as boys were affirmed as the most central segment of the market.
While this is a book about the early history of video games, it does not share the ambition of some of the video game histories already published. Books such as Replay: The History of Video Games, The Golden Age of Video Games: The Birth of a Multi-Billion Dollar Industry, and The Ultimate History of Video Games offer a particular kind of representation in which the key elements are video game companies and the people (mostly men) who worked for and ran them; technologies and their commercial release as consumer products; and particular games and genres, along with their aesthetic and technical development.6 These journalistic histories contain much important and useful information, sometimes based on interviews with key figures in the industry, and they function as useful reference works. This book is different. It makes no attempt to cover every console or every commercially successful or aesthetically interesting arcade cabinet. It is mostly concerned with how people understood and thought about video games as a whole.7
Thus, Atari Age does not chronicle year-by-year the fortunes of the video game business or the release schedule of its products. Such information is easily accessible, but nevertheless a brief encyclopedia-style history, highlighting key moments and objects in the period under discussion, is offered here as an orientation for the reader.
The history of video games struggles to designate a “first” game. It might be William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two, or the MIT game Spacewar!, or Ralph Baer’s Brown Box, the prototype for the Odyssey.8 The first video game console you could buy to play at home was the Odyssey. The first coin-operated video game many people encountered in a public place was Pong, though the much less successful Computer Space (1971) preceded it. Computers were used to play games in the 1940s and ’50s, but these are rarely named as potential firsts. It actually matters little for a social or cultural history which of these games was the original, or if any game deserves to be so honored. For a small number of people who had access to computers in the workplace or at school, computer games using a graphical output were available for play before 1972, but by and large 1972 was when the general public gained the opportunity to access them.
Following Pong’s success, versions of the ball-and-paddle game were released for both the home and arcade.9 Arcades and other public game spaces (which had existed for decades) contained a variety of games in the early and mid-1970s, including pinball, kiddie rides, and electro-mechanical driving and shooting games, in addition to fully electronic video games. Many Pong copycats were sold as home TV games. Some could also be used to play hockey or soccer as ball-and-paddle contests, perhaps in color. It was a crowded field, and the appeal of these games was hard to sustain after the novelty wore off. The popular press covered these games as a new way of using a television set. In the mid-1970s, electronic games were, along with videocassette recorders, among the “new tricks your TV can do.”10
In the second half of the 1970s, changes in the business, technology, and experience of video games broadened their appeal and improved their commercial fortunes. Some of the earliest games, such as Pong and the Odyssey, were electronic but not computerized, and contained no microchips or software. They were made using television technology.11 The introduction of silicon chips into a host of consumer culture technologies from cash registers and calculators to home computers and toys like Merlin and Simon also transformed video games technologically. The big news in home games in the second half of the decade was programmable consoles like Atari’s Video Computer System (VCS, later the Atari 2600). A programmable console would accept cartridges with their own chips so that it could play many different games, which increased the utility of the device and expanded its owner’s interest in play. Although Atari’s VCS was by far the most commercially and culturally successful home leisure product of the video game industry, it had many rivals including Fairchild’s Channel F, which preceded it to market, and Magnavox’s Odyssey2. Its most serious competition was Mattel’s Intellivision, whose games sometimes had more sophisticated graphics, and whose controller was far more complicated than Atari’s simple four-direction joystick and fire button.
Late in the decade, Space Invaders was released first as an arcade cabinet and then as an Atari cartridge. Like Pong, the success of this game in public game rooms promoted the sale of the home version. By the time of Space Invaders’ success, Atari had been acquired by the media conglomerate Warner Communications, Inc. (WCI), and a few years later Atari was earning more for WCI than film, television, or any other division, and accounted for more than half of the company’s operating profits.12 Many consumers eager to play Space Invaders at home bought an Atari console for this very purpose, a dynamic repeated with Asteroids, Missile Command, and Pac-Man.
At the same time as Atari and Intellivision struggled for dominance in the home market and hit games like Space Invaders earned large sums in quarters dropped in the coin slot, microcomputers became available to consumers to purchase for the home. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, millions of Americans acquired a computer such as a TRS-80 from Radio Shack, a Commodore PET or VIC-20, an Atari 400 or 800, or an Apple II. While the uses of such machines were presented in marketing discourses as virtually limitless, the most common application of home computers was to play and sometimes to program games. Earlier computers had a variety of inputs and outputs, but what came to be known as a personal computer had a cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor and speakers as its output. Even if they saw other uses as more important, users of early home computers tended to try out playing games on these high-tech devices. Many game programs were sold for PCs, and these were among the most successful software products of the time.
At the end of the 1970s and in the first few years of the 1980s, video games exploded commercially and became a huge cultural sensation. The press now covered them not so much as a novelty to be introduced to an unfamiliar public, but as a newly popular form of leisure that was making some people quite rich, claiming more and more of young people’s time and money, and potentially causing harm or bringing benefits to players. Intellectuals weighed in more and more on the significance of this new medium that was suddenly out-earning movies and records, and a fan press sprouted up to feed the interests of newly devoted players of the video generation. New arcade games continued to lead the way forward, with home games lagging behind them in technological sophistication. The arcade was typically considered a more authentic site for playing video games, and home consoles were advertised as recreating the arcade experience. But arcades were also feared by many adults as a place where children might be led astray, and video games more generally were objects of grave concern for some parents and teachers who believed they would have negative effects on habitual players.
The years 1982 and 1983 marked the pinnacle of popularity for early arcade and home video games. Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man had become practically universally appealing, making video games a familiar part of many people’s leisure-time experiences. By this time video games were fairly clearly established in popular imagination and their cultural status was worked out. The flexibility of their meanings was being closed off, and the associations between the medium and the typical identity of its players had been set. What followed in the video games industry was a crash, as many products failed, companies went out of business, and the trade faced declining fortunes. What caused the crash was probably, to give the broadest explanation, a mismatch of supply and demand. A glut of products had been brought to market to satisfy a craze for video games, some of them wanting in quality. Many players at home were using computers rather than consoles. In late 1982, Atari’s report of lower than expected earnings caused a drop in video game company stock prices and rattled investor confidence.13 But from the players’ perspective, the video games crash was hardly remarkable. The same spaces of play continued to offer video games, and the consoles in the home continued to be played. This history stops in 1983 because the crash is a widely regarded historical milestone, and because an identity for video games as a medium had been established by the time it occurred. But Atari Age is a social and cultural history rather than a business or economic one; this will be the last word on the crash.
In each of the phases of video games’ first decade, particular problems need to be worked out, and particular questions need to be answered. Who would play games, and where and when? What games would be popular, and why? What value would different games have for different players? Would video games be welcomed or feared, or some combination of these? Would they be seen as productive or problematic, legitimate or a waste of time and money?
Just as early cinema is different from studio-system Hollywood and early television is different from the height of the three-network era, video games in the 1970s and early 1980s are different in many ways from later video games. This is true both of the games themselves and of the ways people thought about them. It’s tempting to look at these games as the first chapter in a longer narrative of video game history, which in some ways they are. But there is a tendency in telling the story of an art form or cultural practice to project backward and see early stirrings as anticipatory of later developments. We could, for instance, see the people who stuffed the Pong machine full of quarters at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, as the first gamers. We could look at Battlezone as an origin point for the first-person shooter, or at the intermissions in Ms. Pac-Man as proto-cutscenes. But we ought to be wary of anachronistic thinking. The history of video games does not necessarily lead anywhere, and the period of early video games should be seen on its own terms rather than as the prelude to a later understanding of what the medium is or could be. No one knew what a gamer, a shooter, or a cutscene was in the 1970s and early 1980s because these things didn’t exist. The challenge of this kind of history is to project ourselves back into an earlier mindset, to understand the medium from the perspective of its users at the time, and to appreciate the period for what it was.
To see video games, having debuted in 1972 (or before), as part of a continuous history to the present day and beyond, is to risk sidelining much of importance about video games in the period of their emergence. They were not initially regarded as their own independent medium with a clear and distinct identity. They were likely seen as another public or home amusement or another use for a television set or computer. In some instances, they were familiarized as a marriage of television and computer.14 Video game history, television history, computer history, and the histories of arcades and rec rooms are not neatly distinct from one another. In particular, the early history of a medium will overlap significantly with earlier media—so radio is essential for understanding the emergence of television, traditions of live theater and performance are essential for understanding the emergence of cinema, and telegraphy and telephony are essential for understanding the emergence of radio. Games are no different.
In addition to taking on the identity of neighboring media or overlapping with their functions and pleasures, early periods in the history of a medium tend to excite or frighten a public uncertain about its status. New media are conceptualized in some strikingly consistent ways in disparate historical periods, conjuring up similar notions of technology auguring society’s redemption or ruin. The same dreams of democratic participation and the same worries about private life being eradicated and public life being trivialized have attended emerging new media across the generations.15
Early video games, like other emerging media, were an occasion for hopes and fears not only about the medium but perhaps more importantly about the society into which it was emerging. New media predictably excite the public about their potential, sometimes in positive and even utopian terms, and other times provoking dystopian reactions that express widely felt anxieties.16 The desire for video games to overcome television’s deficiencies or to teach young people computing was not only an expression of hope for the new medium but also an opportunity to work out society’s issues with mass media’s effects on social life, childhood development in a changing world, and economic transformations linked to technological change. The fears of video games corrupting youth or ruining their minds likewise had as much to do with uncertainties around raising children in a culture perceived to be threatening to them and the tensions that always exist between generations. New media, early media, predictably inspire these divergent reactions. Many of the same fantasies that the Internet conjured up in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were also once inspired by the telegraph, telephone, cinema, radio, television, and video games.
These are all examples of media of communication and representation, some of the key information technologies of modernity. By referring to each of these as a medium, I mean to include both their material and conceptual qualities. As in my book Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium, I take a cultural view of the concept of medium. A medium is made up of both things and ideas, and both of these influence each other and change over time. Video games comprise circuitry and its connections and containers, input interfaces, displays and speakers, packaging, art and design, but also commonly shared notions of what they are and what and whom they are for. A medium is defined not just by the parts and the ways they work, the things they can or cannot do, but also by a social identity, a cultural status, a degree of legitimacy and respectability. For instance, cinema and television have an identity related to but also distinct from film cameras, projectors, and the transmission and reception of pictures across electromagnetic waves, with each having its own cultural status relational to the other. These more social or cultural dimensions of a medium are products not only of technology as such but, crucially, of lived social relations of power that place the medium in popular imagination by identifying it with some users and not others, some purposes and not others, some ideals and not others.17
The identity of the emerging medium of video games that this book is concerned with is not innocent of power relations, but is rather shot through with their implications. Video games became youthful, masculine, and middle class not by accident but through the negotiation of their identity in relation to those earlier media against or alongside which they were understood. The place of computers, television, coin-op machines, rec room games, and other pertinent media within these social relations, and each one’s cultural status, is central to video games’ emerging meanings and values. Video games were defined through these comparative discourses, where their meanings were constructed.
These meanings may not have been shared universally, and the idea of a “popular imagination” may emphasize common meanings at the expense of peculiar or minority visions. But like words and their definitions, cultural concepts often have broad purchase among members of a society. Even if there are doubters and dissenters among the public, or people who just don’t get the message, there are also dominant, commonsense assumptions that inform popular imagination, and the task of this historical work is to apprehend them.
How do we access the meanings a medium or technology had in the past? How can historical research give us an understanding of what people thought about video games when they were new, and what place they might have had in the experiences of their players? How can we know now what their meanings were, what value they had, and for whom?
Looking at the games themselves helps, but it doesn’t tell us everything we might want to know. The meanings and ideas around a medium are discursive: they circulate in many places as forms of knowledge that are widely shared. Knowledge about video games comes from games as material objects, but also from a diverse array of discourses in which games are discussed, debated, promoted, perhaps denigrated or celebrated, and more generally represented as objects and experiences with particular affordances, for particular users. The sources of knowledge about video games that this book has drawn from include materials produced by the business itself, such as packaging and catalogs, and advertising and promotional texts such as television commercials. It also draws on similar marketing discourses such as Sears Christmas Wish Books.
The sources of this history also include several overlapping categories of the press: popular newspapers and magazines for general or intellectual readers, periodicals for those interested in business in particular, the trade presses of the electronics, retail, and amusement industries, and publications aimed at video game fans. Depending on their readership, these print sources position video games in certain ways, making sense of them for readers. Sometimes these sources are introducing a new media technology to the public, and sometimes they are aimed at workers in the amusements trade seeking to maximize their profits. Sometimes they are covering video games as a trade or as a form of entertainment. By the early 1980s, many publications had started up to cash in on the craze for video games by selling magazines and books to mostly young male video game enthusiasts.
Contemporaneous social science research is another source of knowledge about video games, which is both evidence of who played and in what ways, but also of how the medium was understood at the time by the researchers themselves. Some of this writing is based on quantitative or qualitative survey research, and some of it is ethnographic. The fields range across the social sciences: sociologists, psychologists, and education researchers were particularly interested in games. Several books by intellectuals in these fields published in the early 1980s shed light on how some elite thinkers conceived of the medium, including David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld, Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self, and Loftus and Loftus’s Mind at Play.18
Representations of games in media, as in films or television programs such as What’s My Line? (the Odyssey appears as a mystery guest), Airplane! (air traffic controllers play an Atari game on the radar display), and WarGames (a teenage boy instigates a nuclear crisis by playing what he believes to be an online game), also shed light on popular conceptions of the medium. Games appear in a variety of media texts of the 1970s and ’80s as a novelty or new social force. They can be both positive and negative influences on the typically young players who take interest in them. The ideas expressed in these representations are evidence of widely circulating conceptions of the medium.
None of these sources speaks for itself. All are produced to advance particular interests, and all represent a point of view and perhaps an agenda of positioning the medium in a certain way. But they are all traces left behind that show the ways of understanding and imagining video games available at the time, from which ordinary people would have drawn their own interpretations and understandings. This kind of research assumes that ideas about popular culture, although not universal or compulsory, tend to be broadly shared discourses that are both produced and reflected by popular media. These sources, when synthesized and situated in historical context, establish a horizon of expectations against which people at the time made sense of the social world.19 Such sources, as Lynn Spigel argues, “do not reflect society directly” and offer no straightforward evidence of “what people do, think, or feel.” But they can be read “for evidence of what they read, watch, and say,” and by showing us these things, popular media help us tap into a history of ordinary people’s fantasies and pleasures.20 The emerging identity of games can be understood by reading these sources and putting them into conversation with one another. The identity of video games was a product of many forces and developments in these years. It becomes visible through the interpretation of games, representations of games, and ideas circulating about players and play with electronic amusements.
In the historiography of fairly recent popular culture, what counts as sources, and where are the archives that house them? Video game history is blessed to have both legions of living fans and an open Internet on which those fans share an amazing array of documents, images, and videos. Many games themselves are emulated online for anyone to play. YouTube alone is an archive of video game history with an impressive enough collection of materials to sustain many research projects. The Internet Archive contains full scans of issues of Electronic Games and Byte among its numerous magazine offerings. Of course not everything is accessible online, and this book’s research also finds sources in conventional archives including the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Libraries also function as archives, and periodicals on microfilm or in bound volumes on the stacks, as well as scans provided by interlibrary loan, are essential documentary evidence for this study. Some materials were also acquired in ways that might seem unconventional, like shopping on eBay and accepting Atari and Intellivision cartridge donations from the collections of friends and family, but there is no logical reason to observe any old-fashioned distinction between more and less official or legitimate sources of historical knowledge. The history of popular media and everyday life cannot be written without materials that may be archived casually or unintentionally, and we must access them however we can, remaining critical of their status as sources while also deriving meaning from them. We all have archives of popular media and everyday life in our possession and sources of historical knowledge can be constituted as such by regarding these treasures or ephemera as sources, as evidence of the past. This is a matter of how to look at objects rather than some quality inherent in them or in their consecration in official archival institutions. Each historical researcher working on popular media amasses his or her own archive, a combination of official historical documents such as legal decisions and newspaper stories and other sources some traditional historians might consider odd or out-of-bounds. Any source that speaks of the history of video games in everyday life is welcome in my archive.
The chapters that follow explore the emergence of video games in both public places like arcades and private spaces of the home, beginning with the origins of the video arcade and ending with Pac-Man Fever. Each chapter is centered on a cultural tension or contradiction through which the emerging identity of the new medium was worked out.
Chapter 1, “Good Clean Fun: The Origins of the Video Arcade,” charts the course of public coin-operated games and other amusements in the twentieth century leading up to the shift from pinball to video games as the most profitable and popular form of public play, drawing from the trade press of the coin-op amusements business, particularly RePlay. During the 1970s, many suburban game rooms were fashioned as “family fun centers,” assuring them of middle-class respectability. This occurred before the rise to dominance of video games, when pinball was still the most important source of income for the coin-op trade. By riding pinball’s wave of newfound respectability in these more upscale and culturally legitimate spaces, video games found a welcome spot in which to appeal to middle-class young people. But video games, which did not carry along pinball’s associations with gambling and crime, also improved the reputation of arcades by being technologically sophisticated, and by being deemed acceptable for home play within more affluent American neighborhoods.
Chapter 2, “‘Don’t Watch TV Tonight. Play It!’ Early Video Games and Television,” reveals the common threads of the histories of video games and television. Early games were typically framed as a form of television or a use for a television set. News items and promotional discourses used the language of broadcasting, for instance, telling audiences unfamiliar with electronic play that you tune in the game like any other channel. Names like Intellivision and Channel F reference TV and related concepts. But video games were presented as improvements on TV, ways of solving the older medium’s putative problems of passivity and low cultural value, according to the terms of the midcentury mass society critique. By presenting video games as participatory, champions of the new medium showed their potential to redeem television from its status as a plug-in drug. This discourse of rehabilitation of TV has an undercurrent of gender and class politics, as a feminized mass medium, long associated with passivity, was transformed by a more active and masculinized technological marvel.
Chapter 3, “Space Invaders: Masculine Play in the Media Room,” explores the significance of video games as domestic amusements, placing the new medium in the space of the idealized suburban home. The new games were often presented in marketing and advertising materials as a way to bring the family together during times of domestic leisure. Commercials, game brochures, store catalogs, and photos in magazines pictured players of mixed ages and both genders enjoying each other’s company through electronic play. This effort to sell the new medium to families emphasized an inclusive gender and class appeal. But the forms and genres of the games themselves, and many advertisements, present a rather contradictory appeal to young boys in particular, emphasizing youth and masculinity. Games were seen not only as a way of unifying families, but also as a means of escape for boys from a feminized space, continuing a long tradition of boy culture but moving it indoors.
Chapter 4, “Video Games as Computers, Computers as Toys,” locates the emergence of video games alongside the development of home computers in the later 1970s, showing these two histories to be mutually entwined. Computers had been used to program games for decades before Pong and the Odyssey, and before Apple and Atari. Games could demonstrate the abilities of computers and impressed ordinary observers of computing. They were also often used to familiarize novices with computers, most typically middle-class boys and men. When home computers became a consumer good, games were among their most frequent uses, though this was often seen as a wasteful use of the technology. For children in particular, games could teach computing, but playing with computers itself was a central appeal of the home computer revolution. Drawing on advertisements, trade press discourses, and publications aimed at home computer users, this chapter argues that early video games and home computers share a history, that play was crucial to the development of PC culture, and that computers gave cultural legitimacy to the emerging medium of video games.
Chapter 5, “Video Kids Endangered and Improved,” pairs two related developments that occupied many Americans’ attention in the early 1980s. On the one hand was a panic about video games and young people, particularly young boys spending quarters playing arcade games, which was a frequent topic of news stories when municipalities took steps to regulate and in some instances ban coin-operated video games. On the other hand was an effort to counter this hysteria, particularly among social scientists and other experts, who saw in video games a great potential benefit to young people. In addition to teaching eye-hand coordination, video games were seen as training in technology that would be essential to professional knowledge work in the postindustrial society. This chapter argues that these fearful and optimistic ideas about video games were two sides of the same coin, which expressed a certainty that the incredible popularity of this new medium would have profound and lasting effects on its users, particularly those who were young, male, and middle class.
Finally, chapter 6, “Pac-Man Fever,” takes up the most popular early video game and the period around 1982–1983 when games became a huge pop culture sensation. Pac-Man was an unlikely game to become so phenomenally popular as, unlike Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, and many other hits, it had no spaceships and no shooting. Pac-Man was cute and cartoonish, and its difference (along with its appeal as a challenging and fun game) helped it attract a wider market of players than other games, particularly girls and women, for whom it had been designed. This chapter concludes the book by considering the importance of this blockbuster game as an exception to the medium’s close identification with boy culture. It argues that Pac-Man and its sequel Ms. Pac-Man broadened the medium’s appeal and acceptability but also, by being so exceptional, reinforced the identification of video games with masculinity.
Throughout the decade of video games’ emergence, we find clashing values and meanings, divergent ideals of the new medium’s purpose and function. The pages that follow reveal the negotiation of an identity for video games between competing conceptions of players and their experiences.