Prologue: Genesis
On August 31, 1966, an electrical engineer serving as a division head for a large New Hampshire defense contractor called Sanders Associates sat on a cement step outside a New York City bus terminal waiting for a colleague to arrive so they could meet a client together. A television engineer in earlier days, he considered this appliance – now present in over 90% of American homes – almost completely useless. Sure, the typical family loved its TV set, gathering around it in the evening to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the news or catch the latest happenings in Mayberry on the Andy Griffith Show, but with only three networks on the air, programming lacked variety, and the engineer considered these meager offerings to be a passive and dull form of entertainment. His own television sat unused in his living room much of the time, and he figured he was not alone. Certainly, he thought, the television must be able to offer something more.
In 1951, the engineer had almost done something about it. Tasked with building the “best television set ever” by his employer, the Loral Corporation, the engineer would sometimes fool around with test equipment that placed lines and color bars on the screen and allowed the user to move them around to adjust the set. Before long, he came to believe that moving objects around on a television might just be a fun way for a person to pass a few spare moments. Inspired, the engineer suggested incorporating some type of game into his new ultimate television, but the project was already behind schedule, and his boss would not hear of it.
Now, on this warm summer’s day in 1966 the concept came to the engineer again, rising unbidden out of his subconscious mind as he idly watched traffic passing by. Pulling out his notebook, he began scribbling furiously. Upon returning to his office the next day, the engineer turned this disorganized jumble into a four-page disclosure document for a “TV Gaming Display” in which a “low cost data entry device” could generate a video signal conveyed directly to the television through its antenna terminals. Conflicted at proposing such a frivolous project to a defense contractor, the engineer couched the opening sentences of his document in generic technical language before finally gaining confidence and christening the channel on which the device would broadcast “Channel LP,” which stood for “Let’s Play.”2
The engineer in our story was not the first person to dream of controlling an object rendered on a screen in order to play a game. Indeed, college students across the United States had already been hunting each other in the cold vacuum of computer-generated space for nearly half a decade when Ralph Henry Baer signed his name at the top of each page of his proposal on that fateful Thursday in September, while an eminent physicist with the Dickensian name Willy Higinbotham had wowed visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York with a primitive tennis game displayed on an oscilloscope even earlier than that. But Baer was the first person to suggest creating an interactive entertainment experience by conveying game data to a display through the use of a video signal, so even though he never used the term in any of his subsequent documentation or patents, he is nevertheless the progenitor of what we now call the video game.
Narrowly speaking, there is no video game without that video signal, the key conceptual breakthrough that Baer introduced in his pioneering Brown Box. Practically speaking, the term “video game” now encompasses so much more. Virtually any program run by hardware containing electronic logic circuits in which the user directly manipulates objects rendered on a display for entertainment purposes now falls under the definition of the term, which long ago shed its purely technical roots. Under this broader definition, video games have been deployed on practically any device with a screen, from televisions and computers to phones, calculators, and watches. One enterprising hacker even modified the LCD on a Canon printer to run the classic first-person shooter DOOM. As smart media devices continue to pervade all corners of our culture in the Information Age, the definition of the video game will no doubt continue to evolve to cover an ever-expanding array of entertainment platforms.
Just as the term has widened in common usage, so too has the player base. Once merely considered a simple past time for children, the video game has evolved into a visual feast as exciting as any summer blockbuster, a story-telling device as sophisticated as the novel, and a competition of skill to rival any professional sport. And in a landmark decision in 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that a video game could be a work of art communicating “ideas – and even social messages – through many familiar literary devices ... and through features distinctive to the medium.”3
Over 1 billion people around the world now play video games, indulging in products ranging from simple match three puzzle games to sophisticated first-person shooters and story-driven role-playing games. In the United States, until recently the largest market for video games, the average player age is now 34, and the percentages are almost evenly split between children, adults aged 18–35, and older adults.4 Once almost exclusively the province of the young male, new genres and platforms have opened gaming to women in larger numbers, and they now make up 45% of the U.S. gaming population.5 Many would argue that the video game industry still has a long way to go to become fully inclusive, but the player base is still more diverse than it has ever been.
Despite ever-increasing popularity and mainstream acceptance, however, the video game is still in its infancy. The commercial industry is just shy of 50 years old. By comparison, the motion picture industry had only been producing talkies for about a decade at that point in its own history and had yet to truly separate itself from Vaudeville and the theater in its conventions and techniques. Indeed, while the video game has become ubiquitous in the developed world, it has not come close to realizing its full potential. The industry arguably still awaits its Citizen Kane moment, in which an auteur with a singular vision breaks from the conventions of previous media in daring ways to tell a story or evoke an emotional response by taking advantage of the unique characteristics of the medium to challenge and transform our ideas on the power of interactive entertainment. The video game may theoretically be capable of telling a story as sophisticated as any great work of literature, but individual games rarely approach those heights. In 1983, Electronic Arts asked in a famous ad whether a computer can make you cry. So far, the answer has largely been no.
Of course, the question remains as to whether a video game should even try to reach the same heights as Shakespeare or Hollywood. If a game, whether played with cards, balls, boards, or controllers, is primarily a test of skill or a battle of wits against other human beings, does storytelling interfere with the pure gaming experience? And even if narrative holds value in a game world, should the story be dictated by the designer through a canned plot, or should the player merely be placed inside a virtual world with a coherent set of rules but little to no structure to discover his or her own narrative through interactions with the people around them? These are just some of the challenges that the video game industry faces as it approaches its 50th birthday.
These questions were of little consequence to Ralph Baer in 1966–1967 as he and a small group of technicians struggled just to display two or three dots on a television screen at the same time. That in such a brief span of time the medium has progressed from barely recognizable representations of simple objects to photo-realistic landscapes encompassing hundreds of square miles of virtual real estate is a testament to both the brilliant technical and creative minds that have birthed so many enthralling virtual worlds and the shrewd businessmen who have disseminated these visions to the masses. Here then are their stories and the story of what stands to become the most important entertainment medium of the twenty-first century: the video game.