Pleasure Before Business
Man is a game-playing animal, and a computer is another way to play games.
–Scott Adams, computer-game software pioneer
Long before high-level languages and operating systems simplified programming, computer enthusiasts created games. They drew their inspiration mostly from the arcade games that were then becoming popular. The early microcomputer games were often just simpler versions of Missile Command, Asteroid, and others.
Early PC Games
Games provided the early hobbyists justification for having a computer. When friends questioned the utility of having such a machine, these hobbyists could show off a clever game, perhaps Steve Dompier’s Target or Peter Jennings’s Microchess, and listen to the oohs and aahs.
Dompier was among the most creative when it came to programming games on the Altair. With no I/O except the front-panel switches, it was a challenge to make the Altair do anything. A number of people, Dompier included, wrote variations on the popular Simon electronic game, in which the player chased the 16 blinking lights up and down the front panel, attempting to press the corresponding buttons to make the lights flash on and off “real pretty.”
Creating games also provided a way to learn how to program. As soon as they got their hands on Gates and Allen’s BASIC, they had the essential tool needed to create simple games. Several books were soon available that listed the programs for loads of different games. An Altair, KIM-1, IMSAI, or Sol owner could type in the program and start playing the game in no time. The first such book was David Ahl’s 101 BASIC Computer Games, compiled while Ahl was still at DEC and originally intended for use on minicomputers. Often displaying nothing more graphically sophisticated than patterns of asterisks printed out on a Teletype machine, the early games were primitive compared to today’s interactive, multimedia extravaganzas.
Many of the first games jumped over to microcomputers from minicomputers and mainframes. (It can be argued that the earliest ancestor of modern computer games, with all their flashy graphics, was a simple tennis-like game played on an oscilloscope.) Games were nothing new to the early hobbyists who had played them on the big computer systems at their jobs, sometimes even loading games into memory on large time-sharing systems. Of course, if they were caught playing, they faced trouble, but the temptation was too much to resist.
One of the most popular games for large machines was Star Trek, which allowed the player to pretend to be Captain Kirk and command the Enterprise through a series of missions against Klingon warships. Star Trek was an underground phenomenon, hidden in the recesses of a company or university’s computer, to be played surreptitiously when the boss wasn’t looking. No one paid for copies of the game, and no royalties were ever paid to the writers or creators of the Star Trek television show. Scott Adams, an RCA employee working on satellite-recognition programs at Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, recalls playing Star Trek on the satellite radar screens—an act that did not endear him to government officials.
Figure 36. Scott Adams Adams created some of the first games for personal computers.
(Courtesy of Scott Adams)
Because it was everywhere on larger machines, it was only natural that Star Trek would become one of the first microcomputer games. Many different versions of it already existed, and many more were soon written for microcomputers, including Dompier’s Trek for the Sol. When advanced technology made graphics possible on a microcomputer, Star Trek programs added visual simulations of “the final frontier.”
By late 1976, having graphics capability in a microcomputer was growing increasingly important. Cromemco, with its Dazzler board, and Processor Technology, with its VDM (Video Display Module), gave the Altair its first graphics. The VDM, released in 1976, also operated on the IMSAI, Sol, and PolyMorphic computers, and any other machine with an S-100 bus structure.
Frequently, graphics software was designed primarily to test or demonstrate the capabilities of a machine. The kaleidoscopic images and changing patterns of John Horton Conway’s game of Life were popular for that reason. Steve Wozniak’s Breakout and Steve Dompier’s Target were two real games that showcased the computers well. A clever programmer such as Dompier could easily make games to display a computer’s hidden talents. Target, described by its author as a “shoot-down-the-airplane-type game,” became a phenomenon. Employees at Processor Technology regularly played it during lunch, and soon it gained wider exposure.
One evening, Dompier was at home playing Target while occasionally glancing at a color television across the room. Suddenly the television screen lit up with video graphics, and there was his game, blazing away in full color on the set. He jerked his hands off the keyboard in amazement. No physical connection existed between the TV and the computer. Was the computer somehow able to broadcast the game to the TV? Stranger still was that the television screen showed a different stage of the game than what was currently on his terminal, but both screens were certainly displaying Target. Suddenly, the game on the TV screen dissolved into Tom Snyder’s face, and Dompier realized that the talk show host had been playing Target on air, demonstrating the Sol’s capabilities from coast to coast.
Another kind of game was generating a lot of publicity at around that time. It also depended on microelectronics, but it wasn’t played on a computer. A brilliant engineer and entrepreneur named Nolan Bushnell created an electronic game machine that proved to be the successor to pinball machines. He sold it through his start-up company, Atari. That machine, Pong, made Bushnell rich and famous, and eventually spawned millions of arcade and home-video game models. Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1976 when Atari was doing $39 million in annual sales. Although the game machines that were Atari’s specialty were not general-purpose computers, the programmers who wrote games for personal computers took much of their inspiration from the Atari devices. (Atari would later make its own personal computers.)
Programs like Dompier’s Target were receiving mass attention and the game machines were enjoying great popularity, but microcomputer programmers in 1976 generally didn’t consider computer software a business, certainly not in the way that computer hardware was a business. At that time, very few programmers sold software to anyone other than a computer company, and in a market that narrow, the software sold cheaply.
Chess
A Toronto chess enthusiast named Peter Jennings (no relation to the TV news anchor) foresaw, earlier than most people involved with microcomputers, that microcomputer owners would gladly buy software from independent companies. Jennings had often toyed with the idea of designing a chess-playing machine. In fact, while still in high school he built a computer that could make the opening moves in a chess match.
After being introduced to microcomputers, Jennings figured he could program a machine to play the ancient board game. Jennings bought a KIM-1 microcomputer with less than 2K of memory at the PC 76 computer show in Atlantic City, brought it home, and boldly declared to his wife, “That’s a computer and I’m going to teach it to play chess.”
Writing a chess program compact enough to take up no more than a few hundred bytes of memory is the sort of challenge most people would just as soon avoid. As intricate as the game of chess is, the task could use up a huge chunk of a mainframe’s memory. Jennings was undeterred: he welcomed the challenge. Within a month he had written most of the code, after a few more months he had perfected it, and before long he was selling his chess program through the mail.
For $10, Jennings sent a stapled 15-page manual that included the source code for Microchess. His notice for it in the KIM-1 User Notes newsletter was one of the first advertisements for microcomputer application software. When Chuck Peddle, president of MOS Technology (manufacturer of the KIM-1), offered Jennings $1,000 dollars for all rights to the program, Jennings declined, saying, “I’m going to make a lot more money selling it by myself.”
One day while Jennings waited for the money to roll in, his phone rang and the caller identified himself as Bobby Fischer. The reclusive chess grand master wanted to play a match against Microchess. Jennings knew what the outcome would be, but gladly agreed. Later, after Fischer had trounced the program, he graciously told Jennings that the match had been fun.
The experience was fun for Jennings, too, and lucrative. The orders poured in. Jennings found that people who couldn’t play chess, and who weren’t even interested in learning chess, nevertheless bought the program. With Microchess, computer owners could show their friends that this thing they possessed was powerful and real. It could play chess. In a sense, Microchess legitimized the microcomputer.
One of the first buyers of Microchess was Dan Fylstra, who ordered the program while an associate editor at Byte magazine. Later on, after Fylstra started a company called Personal Software, he called on Jennings and the two struck up a partnership. Soon they were investing money from sales of Microchess into the marketing of a business program called VisiCalc, written by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. The pairing of Fylstra and Jennings created one of the most important software companies in the industry. Bricklin and Frankston’s VisiCalc was Personal Software’s biggest hit.
Figure 37. Personal Software In the Personal Software booth at the first West Coast Computer Faire are Peter Jennings (left), creator of Microchess, and Dan Fylstra, who published Microchess and VisiCalc.
(Courtesy of David H. Ahl)
The transition from games to business software has occurred a number of times in the microcomputer industry. Several early game companies went on to add business-software departments. The games led to profits, and the profits led to business applications.
Adventure
Adventure was another star of the computer-game underground. Originally written by Will Crowther and Don Woods on a mainframe computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Adventure involved a simple form of role-play: the user explored mazes, fought dragons, and ultimately discovered treasure. The game had no graphics whatsoever. Players would type in terse verb-object commands such as “GET GOLD” or “OPEN DOOR,” and the program would respond by describing whatever was nearby in the imaginary maze.
By storing dictionaries of verbs and nouns and tying them to certain commands, the programmer was able to create the impression that the Adventure program could understand those simple two-word sentences. No one but the programmer knew the program’s vocabulary, and figuring out how to communicate with the program was the best part of the game. Adventure achieved cult status, and San Francisco Bay Area programmer Greg Yob wrote a limited Adventure-type game for microcomputers called Hunt the Wumpus, which was played in a maze of tetrahedral rooms.
By 1978, Scott Adams decided that he could launch a company and sell computer games full time. Well-meaning friends warned him that programming Adventure on a microcomputer was impossible because storing the data for the maze structure and the library of its commands would require an excessive amount of memory. Nevertheless, Adams did the programming in two weeks and started a company, Adventure International. The company became a microcomputer-game empire, and its product attracted huge crowds at computer shows.
Adams became convinced that games like his Adventure Land and Pirate Adventure were serving to introduce computers to the average person. Other software companies also began selling adventure games. Even Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Microsoft, who until then had shown no professional interest in game software, released a version of Adventure. In addition to Star Trek and Adventure, games such as Lunar Lander made the transition from large to small computers.
When customers walked into computer stores in 1979, they saw racks, wall displays, and glass display cases filled with software, and most of it consisted of games. Games with outer-space themes were especially popular—among them Space, Space II, and Star Trek. To this day, games still represent a significant percentage of the software titles released each year.
Many more games were being released, including Programma’s emulation of the video game Space Invaders. Software companies such as Muse, Sirius, Brøderbund, and On-Line Systems reaped great profits from games. Programma amassed a huge and diverse supply of software—not a wise policy, as it turned out. Programma sold plenty of programs, mostly games, but not all of them were good, and its reputation suffered. When serious competition arrived, Programma did not survive its reputation for second-rate wares. Nevertheless, many personal-computer programmers got their professional start writing programs for Programma.
Few of those early software companies had the business savvy of the Personal Software people, and fewer still achieved the wide acceptance that Digital Research had earned for its operating system.