The year 2023 is almost upon us and you know what that means.
It's time for us to look back 10, 20, 30, 50 years into the history of video games and talk about the things that happened all those decades ago.
Yes, it's another Years in Review review.
Of course, we do things backward. We start this episode talking about the games of 1973 and then move along to 1983 and get partway through that.
You can look forward to future episodes where we finish up 83 and move on to 1993 before or Bob wraps things up by looking at 2003 and the game's industry's attempt to recover from the terrible hangover of 2002.
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And now we look to the future by talking about the past. As New Year's arrives, it's time for us to look back at years in history that came 10, 20, 30, even 40, no wait, 50 years earlier.
Actually, I don't think we're going to do 10.
I think we're going to start with 20 because 10 doesn't seem that long ago now that we're old.
But 50, that was actually before I was born.
I can actually say that.
I'm so proud. So yes, we're going to start this episode talking about 1973.
We're also going to talk about 1983.
And in a future episode, we'll talk about 1993.
But as with the past couple of year -in -review reviews that I've done, instead of trying to address every single thing that happened in these years, which is just going to lead to digressions and delays, and this podcast will take hours to complete, Instead, I have put together a list and asked everyone to talk about a few things each year that they find of particular interest. So we're just going to touch on the highlights of 1973 and 1983 as we prepare for 2023, just to give some context for what was happening in video gaming at these particular junctures in history.
And in 1973, there wasn't much of video gaming to be found, which is why I've called in three heavy hitters for this episode.
I might have overdone it.
This might be too many heavy hitters for one episode.
We're going to be hitting each other.
What's that? We're going to be hitting each other.
No, please don't. Just hit on interesting topics of video game history, and that'll be good.
By heavy hitters, you just mean old people?
Is that relevant? No, I mean people who know a lot about these particular topics, because I'm older than you.
And yet I do not know as much about the year 1973 in video gaming because I've kind of drawn a line for myself and said, you know, once the Famicom launched, that's where I'm going to start looking at video game history.
And everything before that, I'm aware of it, but I don't know it with the depth that you do, because I didn't have access to many video games outside of arcades back then and haven't really found much motivation, internal motivation, to dredge up old computers and pre -NES video game systems to spend time exploring them.
And hey, maybe that's a failing in myself, but I cop to it.
And so to compensate for my failings, I brought in people who can talk about cool and interesting things in 1973.
So we're going to start in the arcade space.
And let's see, someone here is in purple.
I think that's Kevin.
You're going to tell us about Space Race.
Kevin, why is Space Race the first thing we're going to talk talk about in 1973 what was so significant and important about space race that it should be the lead -off for this episode uh so space race uh it's a game where you're it's a two -player game we've got a rocket ship on each side and you're just trying to make it to the top of the screen and avoiding you know little asteroids that are just little specks of light on the screen uh you can think of activision's freeway uh but with much worse graphics and that's actually a pretty relevant comparison because David Crane, who wrote Freeway for the Atari 2600,
has directly said that he played Space Race, thought it was a cool idea, and revisited that gameplay concept for his game.
This was particularly interesting because this was actually a game that Ted Dabney and and Nolan Bushnell started working on before Computer Space, which, you know, came out in 71 and was the first arcade video game.
They never really got too far with it.
Ultimately, when they started up Atari, Bushnell worked on it a little bit and then set it aside again.
And then after Al Alcorn finished up Pong, he dropped the project off on him and told him to finish it up.
Unlike Pong, which was sort of targeting that adult demographic of people who hang out in bars and bowling alleys.
This target audience for this was children, which they felt would be a different market segment, so it wouldn't be Atari competing with itself.
It wasn't a huge hit.
I mean, it sold 1 ,500 units, which was moderately successful for the time.
But the real legacy here is that Freeway is a much more successful game for the 2600, and it probably would not have existed were it not for Space Race.
