all right well welcome to what is kind of the second topic in the series on history we covered um all the way from board game history all the way from 5000 bc up to the present and today we're going to talk about video game history which should be a little bit shorter because video games haven't been around this long so hopefully we can get get through this but uh they have been around for a little while and a lot has happened in the last you know what is that 70 60 odd years or so like or so so part of the difficulty is that it's hard to definitively name as i say here a very first video game but mit space 4 can certainly make a claim make a claim to that title in 1962 and so that's kind of when things started but most of these were pretty inaccessible to your your average your average individual however the introduction of the home console changed a lot of that so in 1968 magnavox introduced what's called at the time was called the odyssey it's something that would allow you to play kind of play some of these video games at home basically um but then what they found was that we got with the age of the golden age of kind of arcades so now by 1972 uh you've got these standalone video games that can be played in these large consoles in uh you know one particular area so pong being the very classic example this uh made by atari where it's kind of like the tennis match where you you control a a little a little line and you bounce a ball back and forth and you try and get the ball past the other person essentially on this little tiny screen like this one here so these things were giant they stood up like this but on top of that in addition to that 1977 atari introduced a home system the atari 2600 and so what was really unique about this was that it had a joystick and it came with interchangeable cartridges which is a concept that is essentially carried with us to the to the present day well not so much anymore because now we're all digital but it carried with us for the next 40 or 50 years this idea of you have the same box and depending on what game you want to play you put in you know a different cartridge for a different game basically and so atari was massive it was huge i remember playing with an old atari system my grandparents house tons and tons of frogger uh menu but the arcades were really king because they were so cheap and accessible so just for a few quarters you could play any of these games in an arcade so space invaders is another classic classic video game that came out in 1978 that was a big deal in um arcades where there was this this ever descending kind of line of space aliens and you were this little gun ship along the bottom so you can see it here is the little the little gun ship this gun ship running around running around along the bottom uh trying to shoot the space aliens as they they fall towards you basically uh pac-man was another classic game that came out in 1980 many of you are probably familiar with that it's enough of a cultural phenomenon that you probably know what it is at the very least um and so you have this age of arcades where you could you can and there are still places like um on the beach front or waterfronts or things like that where they've got these these big arcades with these kind of quarter machines and these old these old games that are these standalone kinds of kind of things and they still exist and they still still define in terms of making money a lot of really good games however what happened was the technology advanced to the point and a lot of these games were doing so well that the idea was essentially well we can get anything to sell and so in 1983 there was this massive crash of the video game industry basically because people were rushing to to sell a really many um sub quality or un poor workmanship video games that were very poor quality even even considering you know the the graphics of the time poor gameplay poor story and so people just kind of stopped buying these things it was hard to distinguish yourself or set aside any of these things just the american market kind of took a nosedive so i say the american market because it was right about that time uh that nintendo came along uh from from asia and so in 1990 1985 the release of the original nintendo entertainment system which has just set so many standards so many things that have been so long running so this is what this is what this looks like again with the interchangeable cartridges now with these the a little button controller uh the joystick you know the kind of the joystick kind of thing is gone but the original some of the original kind of games that have gone through the nintendo system and the system that people are familiar with right super mario brothers legend of zelda metroid final fantasy some of the ones i miss that i mentioned here have had iteration in iteration duration through many many different systems made massive amounts of money this is where they started and of course um you see here the little orange gun for duck hunt just the classic a really classic game for this particular system and so that really brought the game that came to market that that made a huge difference and kind of took things over with that um then in 1989 you've got the release of the original game boy which is now it's no longer you don't need a tv screen you don't need to sit down you can put this in your pocket and again the interchangeable cartridges that go in the back so many of these were packaged with tetris and pokemon became a huge thing through the game boy system basically as a result of this and handheld gaming as a part of video gaming uh this is kind of what was born i would say you can make a really strong argument for that and nintendo has played up the handheld gaming a lot so i didn't mention the original handheld version of game watch from 1980 but 1989 is the really significant one of the launch of the game boy and then you've got game boy color and um 1998 and then there's a whole string of uh nintendo kind of systems that have been launched through the years for four people uh and this will bring us ultimately towards uh towards mobile gaming which um i'll talk about in the next lecture but i don't want to spoil all the fun just yet so there's a huge huge range of these kinds of things that are out there so while all of this is happening uh so while nintendo is doing all this stuff with handheld gaming the consoles have come a long way so the um the nintendo entertainment system was replaced by the super nintendo entertainment system or the snes which finally had some significant competition in the form of sega genesis and so you begin to see companies kind of trying to compete with each other for dominance in this home console market where you have this you have this box that will play these games for you and throw them up on your screen and so all the work is being done in this little box system and it's just going to kind of going up on a screen and so the snes did much better than the sega genesis in this case we can declare it the winner in this instance but soon others got into the market and so you see in the mid 90s now the introduction of nintendo's third home console in the n64 as well as the sega's advanced more advanced system the saturn see that there in the upper right but sony got into the mix too now with the introduction of the playstation and so you see some very classic titles coming out uh here goldeneye double s7 is considered to be one of the best first person shooters super mario 64. in terms of its its 3d capabilities and open world play kind of uh abilities and a lot of this is enabled not just by these new systems but by improvements in computer technology essentially you have processors so basically the engines on these things are able to run faster and so they're able to handle more detailed uh images and movement and those kinds of things resident evil which created a huge a line of things as well and it was here that the playstation actually began to kind of um take dominance in terms of its the number of sales actually and out compete uh nintendo at least in the home console realm so the next version of this we go to the playstation 2. so sony's playstation 2 sega's dreamcast nintendo launched their gamecube and microsoft enters the fray now with the xbox and so it's at this point that sega kind of falls off the map the dreamcast was actually a system that was you could almost say it was ahead of it today in terms of the idea was to have to begin to have internet capabilities so you you could connect your games to the internet and do things but the internet wasn't good enough basically for what sega had hoped it would be able to do essentially and so the dreamcast did not didn't really sell well unfortunately so sega kind of steps out of the market after this um you've got the the playstation 2 again kind of wins out here and one of the reasons for that was what's called backwards compatibility and so in backwards compatibility that means that you can play the playstation 2 can play games that you still have for the playstation you can take your little disc that you played on on the playstation you can put it right into your ps2 and you can play it out of your ps2 can't do that with the gamecube gamecube no longer works that way and so that i think created problems so the ps2 outsold all the rest of these although the xbox uh i had i mentioned here the xbox introduced us to uh some really really good uh or well-known games in gaming series particularly with respect to halo in the call of duty series so there were major standouts for the xbox and multiplayer capabilities um so that was 2000 2005. so only five years later now we're getting the next renditions of these kinds of things ps3 i guess the playstation you got a theme you stick with it ps ps2 ps3 so sony's playstation 3. the xbox is now not just the xbox it's the xbox 360. and nintendo introduced something called the wii which was kind of the first of its kind uh which involved uh motion capture technology and the ability to move things around and so we sports in particular that kind of was a pre-packaged game with we became a household family-friendly really big household thing uh and yet it was the ps3 that that still sold the most units but we started you started to see both microsoft and sony move try and move into this motion capture stuff as well with uh i think microsoft had connect and sony used something called move it might be misremembering that um but so you can begin to see some of that here uh so from there uh so the wii the oh so we did actually i think create waves and some of the newness was that was there and particularly the family friendly nature and the communal ability to play these games together uh with these these motion things really helped it take precedence in this case so it may have outsold the ps3 in this case i don't actually apologize they don't actually remember that um but that particular one next generation though we've got um xbox one playstation 4 and the wii u and we this is the first time nintendo really kind of dropped the ball we you would did not get nearly the reviews that xbox one and playstation 4 did and place the playstation 4 um dominated or at least won this particular battle here so it's 2013 so there's a fairly long gap between 2005 and 2013 and we are just now entering the next generation of things um with the ps5 and what's called the xbox series x and nintendo has introduced their switch uh switch system and so that he has yet to be seen kind of which of these is going to be kind of winning out um in this particular thing but this is this has been a battle that has stretched in some ways from the 90s until now in terms of these groups battling back and forth who's got better video processing who's got higher quality games who's got this or that or what's the unique thing that's going to draw in new consumers and new customers so this is this is kind of a background in terms of what's going on on the console side of things meanwhile people can play video games on their computers and so all these consoles are getting better the computers as well are getting better and some of the capabilities of what they're able to do and what they're able to handle and so i'm highlighting here that there's much that could be said i'm highlighting in particular the path of blizzard entertainment which is owned by activision so blizzard entertainment's path starting with a real-time strategy game called warcraft which was released in the early 90s and so the idea it's called real-time strategy because there's a there's a clock that's ticking basically and you have to move fast and so the game is built around um not only are you you coordinating all these different bits properly but are you doing it fast enough and so um you build towns you create units that you defend your towns you build defenses and so this is a really early version screen of what that looks like so you you send out in this case you'll send out little peons to go and harvest wood and so that you can build new buildings so you can make better uh soldiers to help defend your town and so on and so forth uh so yeah so warcraft was recent 94 it quickly released warcraft 2 a sequel to that 95 and then as things got more and more advanced so here you're seeing a screen grab from warcraft 3 which was released in 2002 so you can see the significant difference in terms of graphics capabilities between you know 94 and 2002 more complicated buildings more complicated structures more complicated you know pretty much everything so massively successful real-time strategy game and so from there they developed what's called the diablo series so the diablo series again diablo 1 diablo 2 in diablo 3 1996 2000 and 2012 as a kind of an action rpg so the rpg genre which we talked about when we talked about board games right this idea of playing out as a particular character and so you pick in this case so the diabolo 3 selection screen that i've got here in front of you you pick a particular class of character and that class then is going to affect the kinds of things that you're able to do in the game and the kinds of uh ways that which you're going to grow and uh the abilities are the things that the kinds of knowledge that you're going to learn as you get better as you advance some characters are going to get stronger because of their physical build some of them will get more intelligent because they're more of an intelligence kind of build and so you have some kind of control over that and diablo is particularly a very kind of a point-and-click kind of game so it's again it's live it's action a lot of it is based on how fast you're doing particular clicking and combinations and those kinds of things so again graphics capabilities advancing as we move from the 90s to the to 2012 so we've got real-time strategy we've got role-playing games and then they're they're probably to date the most most popular real-time strategy game would be starcraft so the original starcraft was released in 98 and then starcraft 2 in 2010 and there are still international competitions with significant prize money based around the play of starcraft 2. and so right here you're looking at this is a screen grab from a particular starcraft 2 game there are multiple different races or different so not just humans in these games that they can this is a science fiction based once there's other types of species so this is a protoss base and so again it's about you know harvesting a set of resources uh minerals or vesping gas and then using those resources to build new buildings to create more powerful units so you can defeat your enemies and so on and so forth and this all has to happen quickly because as you're trying to do this quickly your enemy is also trying to do this quickly so how do you allocate resources appropriately to give you the best advantage essentially so we've got starcraft and then the introduction of world of warcraft in 2004 so world of warcraft is by far the single most popular mmorpg so massive multiplayer role playing mass multiplayer online role playing game um so where basically you again you inhabit a single player so rpg but you're playing at the same time as other people and it's massive so it's large uh that's very open world so we mean what we mean by that is that you have choice on a map of where you go you can tell your character to go to a lot of different places it's multiplayer so other people in the game with you and it's online so it's happening live so i i think um some of the current numbers it has about 115 million subscribers with more than five and a half million people per day active um on the game so that's around the globe that's a huge number of people five and a half million people per day um watch uh playing this so pretty pretty significant so i want to it's not technically blizzard for some of you know a few things about this but i do want to talk about the role of league of legends which was introduced in 2009 at this point um by a company called riot so league of legends is uh the most popular video game in the world uh to to date uh and it's what's called a moba or a the multiplayer online battle arena so it's a small group of people teams of people who are competing against each other it's one of the reasons and this is also coincides with the loss of what's called twitch so one of the ways that you you understand how to do better or to learn from these things is from people who who are better than you and so twitch is a streaming platform where people who are really good at games basically record themselves and they'll stream their themselves live playing playing games and then sometimes they'll give commentary on what they're doing or they'll give hints or tips or those kinds of things and you can subscribe to their channels and so twitch was basically specifically designed for this to happen so it has really helped accelerate kind of the growth of some of these kinds of things so to give you a sense particularly with league of legends um so it's a it's based around a shared map the map doesn't change from game to game this is what the map looks like probably talk about league of legends in a bit more detail and give you a better sense of it later on in this course simply because it's so culturally relevant and because of its popularity but ultimately it's a group of five people who start down here and another group of five people who start down here and you've got this map and the goal is to uh to destroy this little that's called the nexus but it's essentially the base of your opponent opposing team before they destroy yours uh and so it's a massively complicated and skill based and strategical game strategical is that a word strategic there's a lot of strategy involved so before you think it's it's too simplistic but that's the essence of the way the the game is supposed to be played and there's a lot of other complicated details which not not worth getting into just yet but just to give you a sense when i say it's the most popular video game in the world just so you understand what i'm talking about uh so league of legends uh finals so there is their their competitions as prize money for these things uh had 98 million viewers in 2018 um and the super bowl in america had 96 million viewers in 2021 uh so i know the super bowl is a kind of mostly a us-based thing although it is watched across the globe but there are more people in the world who watch league of legends and watched the super bowl so just to give you a sense for you know there's stuff that happens that is popular outside of just just the united states um so it's a pretty it's a pretty big deal uh so now back to talking about blizzard so the reason i interjected that thing there on league of legends is because uh blizzard has since then so you'll notice the dates right 2009 is when uh riot launched league of legends but blizzard has since then introduced other kinds of games a collectible card game kind of uh in hearthstone another kind of a moba similar to league of legends but different called overwatch it's like a first person shooter based moba in 2016 as well as something called heroes of the storm in 2015. and so they've kind of been very consistently kind of releasing games that are become very significant games within their genre and so overwatch is another game that is played is played quite a bit all right so that's kind of what's happening with blizzard but i want to talk briefly on just kind of other pc mac major significant developments so we've got a couple of other games so simcity the generation of this this sim so sim standing for simulation so in simcity the original sim city you're you're supposed to design a city and to help it run and succeed and grow so that means you need all this infrastructure you need things like roads and rails and water and energy and those kinds of things and so you need uh residential areas and commercial areas and industrial areas as you can see the simplest version of here of that here uh you know you put down a commercial area and then there's parks you can put in and then you've got industrial areas you got police departments so it's gotten a bit more complicated since then uh so you can get things now where that are super futuristic and you're building all these very very high tech kinds of things so um again as time has progressed graphical capabilities video processing have also moved along with it similarly another significant genre within um gaming is the 4x genre by particularly sid meier's civilization where you are supposed to not just kind of simulate a city where it's just kind of a simulation but here you are helping a civilization to grow and not just grow but out compete surrounding civilizations and so you can see here very basic right you've got rome down here and byzantium here so it's based on usually based on real real historical things uh and so from there we go from civilization to now this is uh a scene from six so we're up to the sixth iteration of civilization which is again massive levels of complication and uh strategy i just can't figure out what word i'm using for that strategical strategy anyway uh so and and graphical improvement as well uh so a couple of other genres as well so the sims was introduced which isn't just which is not just about simulating a city but it's about simulating a life like a or a household or something like that a person grand theft auto series um which was which has been highly controversial for a number of reasons because it you basically win the game by stealing lots of cars or that's part of it as well as the development of various first-person shooter games for the first time so this is a screen grab from wolfenstein 3d which is arguably one of the first really successful first person shooters but so an fps gamer first person shooter what that means is that you view the video game as if you are the eye in the eyes of the person you're seeing through the eyes of the uh the individual doing the shooting um and so in this case here uh this is the you're playing this guy this character here and this is what the character sees and you can see he's holding he's holding a gun here which he's pointing at this nazi wolfenstein 3d is mostly about killing nazis um and so it's generated this whole field of first-person shooters which have again been controversial right because the whole the entire game is uh predicated on you acting like uh and viewing things as if you're killing and shooting other people so no small amount of controversy since their inception over these kinds of things so after wolfenstein a couple other major series in this like doom and quake uh as well that were also first person shooters um doom was mostly about killing shooting demons and so [Music] yeah mostly so you got this first person shooters um in contrast to that you've got some much more perhaps sedate but also really compelling and thrilling games like mist so mist was this really beautiful puzzle solving game that had this very rich history and lore not very time based but again a huge number of sequels um but really really well done minecraft is a relatively recent game but again it shows you how simple things can be really compelling so it's again it's very open world uh it's kind of it's what would sometimes fall under the category of a sandbox game where you can kind of create whatever you want we'll perhaps talk about minecraft a little bit more um later but essentially it's this idea of kind of building things putting things together to to survive there's not a lot of there's not really player competition or anything like that so another major significant thing in the development of video games would be what i would argue would be in 2003 the release uh or the launch of something called steam by a company called valve and so up until this point if you remember i talked about consoles you would go and you would go to a store and you would buy a game a physical game you would take that game and you would pull another game out of your playstation or your xbox and you would put your new game in you do that on the console and when it came to pc or mac games um you would go to the store and you would buy a cd in a box and you don't take that cd and you would put it in your computer and you would you would go from there so steam really kind of the introduction of steam and these kinds of clients the epic game store as well would be another significant one revolutionize things so where what you did is when you buy a game you buy a digital copy of it basically there's no hardware anymore and so by hardware i mean a physical disk or a cartridge or whatever and so it makes buying games much much easier you don't have to worry about losing disks you don't have to worry about losing your authorization code your special authorization code or anything like that there's a digital memory of this purchase basically so that if your computer crashes for example you have to get a new one you just log into steam and steam your your account and your account says you own all these games and so you can just download them um right again even if even if your computer is crashed there's this digital memory essentially that you you've stored and bought this game and so has made gaming and buying games much much easier for people so i think i think my plan is to have you play one or two games off of the steam the steam thing later later this this in the semester so you'll get you'll get to see what that's all about but it allowed for expansion for several other significant what i would say significant computer-based video game series i didn't i should should have mentioned assassin's creed as well but well i'm sure there's things i'm forgetting there's no way a list like this could be comprehensive but things like elder scrolls and bioshock and fallout and of course most recent massive success would be fortnite which came out which made 2.4 billion dollars in 2018 which is is huge that's that's a ridiculous amount of money um so yeah there's a lot going on there um in terms of the future of what's gonna be happening with video games it's it's hard to know um graphics will probably continue to get better that's probably a pretty safe bet but we're beginning to fiddle with uh virtual reality uh particularly the oculus rift is the first the first thing to really kind of explore this uh where you put on a headset like this that this individual is wearing and where you actually move and turn changes kind of the way the game is and so it's your actions your physical actions are actually impacting the way the game is so it's not just kind of you know i i hit my d button here and it makes my character attack now you actually have to take a swing with your physical arm in order to make your character attack or something like that so we'll see um i imagine that this technology will only continue to get better as well so so again i'm not going to have you play a ton of video games part of the reason for that is again i'm trying to keep costs low for you for this and not everybody i imagine has the same kind of graphical capabilities on their computers so i can't have you play you know some really intensely heavy uh graphics thing if some of you have some some older laptops or things like that so trying to keep things relatively simple but there are plenty of things out there and i'm happy to give you recommendations or chat with you about any of these kinds of things certainly shoot me an email or something if you think i've missed something significant i've tried to give a pretty brief rundown of video games here but i i'm i'm not an expert on this uh played a few of these and understand them but some of you have probably played more of them or know a bit more so i'd be really curious as uh as to your take on these things or what you think i might be missing uh so all right that's it for this and this was a bit longer in which i apologize but i didn't really see any easy way to break this up and so that'll be it for this one thanks