188宝金博页面版

Video games 1 are neither a new nor even a recent development. Th ey spluttered into existence in the late 1950s as the result of more or less idle experiments on North American university campuses. 2 William Higinbotham is generally credited with inventing the fi rst ‘true’ video game in 1958: Tennis for Two consisted of an analogue computer that was programmed to calculate ballistic trajectories of a simulated ‘tennis ball’. 3 A connected oscilloscope of f ered a visual interface and the game was played by means of a makeshif t controller – the very fi rst gamepad – which was used to propel the ‘tennis balls’ over the ‘net’. Th e graphics were rudimentary (to say the least) and there were no sound ef f ects, but the close relationship to the later hit arcade video game Pong is obvious. Pong , released by the then newly founded company Atari Inc. in November of 1972, was a signif i cant hit and launched the video game era, with the so- called ‘Golden Age’ of mostly arcade video games, that saw cultural classics such as Space Invaders (1978), Asteroids (1979) and Pac-Man (1980), lasting from roughly the end of the 1970s until the crash of the video game industry in 1983. 4 Th at crash of 1983 saw an almost total collapse of what in the late 1970s and early 1980s had already been a multibillion- dollar industry: Atari, the company that largely dominated the arcade market with a market share of around 80 per cent, had seen a rise in sales from $75 million in 1977 to $2.2 billion in 1980. 5 Th e total US video game market in 1982 was worth approximately $8.9 billion (or roughly $23 billion in 2018 terms, adjusted for inf l ation), according to industry fi gures. 6 By contrast, in 1984, sales had dropped by almost 30 per cent to $6.4 billion, market leader Atari had incurred total losses of $536 million ($1.36 billion in 2018 currency) and was forced to drop more than a third of its employees. 7 Th is is not the place to analyse the reasons for the market collapse, so suf f i ce it to say that they included a general market saturation with huge numbers of largely indistinguishable arcade and home video systems (including the classic Atari VCS 2600) and the general economic situation of late 1970s and early 1980s. Tellingly, however, the crash also more or less coincided with the introduction of the Personal Computer (PC) by IBM in 1981 and the subsequent availability of Prologue Playing with the Ancient World An Introduction to Classical Antiquity in Video Games Christian Rollinger 1