Hello, everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit, we've got the history of gaming on the show. Gaming is a thing. Game is a thing. Now, for those of you who are here for Henry the eighth and the defeat of the Roman legions and the Nuremberg Forest Gaming Gaming's got as much of an illustrious history as anything else on this podcast. Gaming is a global phenomenon. Gaming is what we're all going to be doing in the future. It's what all our kids and grandkids are going to be doing, probably more than any other form of entertainment that we know of today.

And Tristan Donovan is the man to guide us through this. We need to understand what gaming is, where it came from. He is an author and journalist. He's written a couple of books on the history of video games. It was a bit of a bit of a nostalgic trip for me. This because I remember I'm not a gamer anymore, but I kind of realized that I was I was an early adopter. I was a five, six, seven year old playing the earliest video games.

And I should have kept going. I could have made something in my life. I had a head start. And so I kind of dropped out around the year 2000 and I became addicted to civilization and almost died of starvation and dehydrated, surrounded by my own uneaten food waste and unanswered letters. So that was a wake up call and I stopped gaming. But I'm regretting it now because it's a fascinating conversation.

If you want some digital entertainment, it's going to blow your mind. And over the history dot TV, it's a digital history channel. It's like Netflix, but the history available in all territories in the world. I just received a tweet from someone on an island in the Indian Ocean, they're watching history at TV, no problem at all. Smoothen anything, no buffering. So there you go.

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Tristan, thank you so much. Come on the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. How old is gaming days? All the way back to the 40s. The very earliest things you could call video games start in late 40s when people first inventing computers and people like Alan Turing inventing chess games to play on them for artificial intelligence research. Wow.

So before the personal computer, there were games. Yeah, yeah. Games existed long before personal computers. So the first one they could really call a video game in the sense we know it now came in 1962 on emeriti. They built this game called Spaceward Little kind of shoot them up kind of game, and that was built on a huge kind of one of these giant computers that filled up an entire room at a university, really.

And so the first game was a shoot space war. I mean, how does that tells you a lot about where the direction the industry would go in, doesn't it? Isn't that amazing?

Yeah, I it had everything you could think of. They would find sort of games in the early 80s when they came along as to sort of rocket ships flying around the galaxy, shooting each other. And it's a template that's lasted.

Exactly. Okay, so you've got kind of artificial intelligence demonstrations, cheering, playing all that kind of stuff. But they've got space war in the early 60s. What about an industry? When is it a consumer led marketable proposition, would you say? Right.

So this starts with two people, Ralph Bayer and Nolan Bushnell. So we'll start with Nolan Bushnell. So he was into starting a business around arcade machines and he played baseball at Stanford University. And before if I could get that in an arcade, that would be fantastic. But of course, computers were enormous and you couldn't really fit them into an arcade and they cost a fortune.

So he basically worked out how to build a kind of replica of a computer game out of just old circuit, set aside resistors and transistors and basically electronics that you could buy in those days at somewhere like Tandi or Maslin's, and basically built a machine that made the game a little bit like Spaceward and put it in an arcade. He was a sort of first person to bring video games to the wider world. Then at the same time, a guy called Ralph Baer was working for a military research company in New England.

And he came up with the idea of we should make a game machine so people can do something with their TVs other than watch TV. So he built this little kind of machine that you plug into your TV set and it played a little kind of bat and ball game where you kind of knocked the ball from one end of the screen to the other. So it took years for him to get someone to make this game.

A TV set manufacturer called Magnavox released it, but it wasn't very popular back then, and neither was Nolan Bushnell's game compared to space.

But then Nolan Bushnell noticed Ralph console for that kind of basic bat and ball game would make kind of an OK, OK, let's give that a try. And that became Pong. And that's when video games suddenly went massive, suddenly spread all across the world. Everyone wanted to play Pong. So it is that little game of kind of two bazza even the screen bouncing things back and forth.

But Pong was made by Atari, right? Yeah. So Nolan had founded Atari at that point.

Okay. Because Atari and so the theory becomes well I always thought was the first name in gaming.

Yeah. No. And the second. Well third really. So you had nothing. Associates which published Nolan Bushnell's first game compared to space and brought that into the arcades. And then Magnavox, which was an American TV manufacturer, bought out the first game console, Magnavox Odyssey. And then Nolan left the found Atari and pretty much started in Shantaram, did pretty much defined the industry from that point on for a good ten years.

Wow. And so the dream of gaming was established that point pong. Everyone in the world was playing Pong.

Yeah, I know it seems ridiculous because it was literally like six years of people played pong or things that were variations upon for a good six years. That's all there was. You know, it's like more arcade machines. Maybe it's four player game upon, maybe it's pong, but it's vertical. Oh, it's Pong for your home, is Pong for your home in color. And this went on for years and there wasn't really that much else happening in games of people love playing.

This was 1972. Pong came out in the arcades and you were still getting pong machines by 1980. So they were still a viable business dance. And I mean, this was going on for pretty much the whole seventies.

When do we see the next generation after Pong? Well, that really begins when people start getting microprocessors. So before then, games are made just basic hardware, suddenly you get cheap microprocessors and games become like computers.

So is it fair to say Pong is in some ways not a computer game? Pong is not a computer game at all. There's no computer in it.

So it's a place where things are kind of computer games didn't really exist until the late 70s when the first home computers came along.

The tech is key here. The microprocessor comes in the late 70s. Yeah.

So what that change meant is in the Pong era, you had to basically soda and wire together a game. That's how you made a game. You made it out of electronic circuits and you had to build that. Microprocessors meant you didn't have to do that. You wrote it in computer code. And that's suddenly sort of opened up the opportunity to do all kinds of things. These circuits were getting really complicated. You know, it's really hard to do much beyond Pong.

So you get microprocessors and then you start getting things like Space Invaders and Pacman and all those kind of early 80s games that really kind of take games from being the simple pong kind of pastime thing to something much more exciting. So, you know, Space Invaders, suddenly they're kind of armies of aliens coming down the screen shooting at you and it's Pacman. You've got these kind of cute characters for the first time and it's really kind of explodes off the back of that.

I remember both of those so well and just the Space Invaders as he as he went on, they just got more scary and sort of bigger and more jagged shapes. It was so exciting.

Yeah. And sound. I mean, there wasn't much sound in the early pong days. I mean, there's just one tone. But Spaceways that had that kind of death march of dum dum dum dum dum and it would speed up as the game carried on, it was almost like Jaws.

And am I right in thinking that I had a tape on our young listeners might have an audio tape with a ribbon on it.

Younger listeners will have to go and watch an 80s film to understand what that is. But it's not how I loaded up my games.

Yeah, that was how it was. So in late 70s, early 80s and for Europe, most of the 80s games came in on cassette tapes and you would load in the cassette and it would spend five minutes kind of transferring what is now just in the same memory as an email. And sometimes it would just crash at the end. I mean, it was pretty wonky, the technology then.

Oh, yeah.

I remember the I remember that getting caught up shouting my mum and dad from the attic and they'd have to come up and kind of they are presented with this tape that all the ribbon had just got deeply entrenched into the little Turner bits, and they'd have to sort of tear the whole thing out with me complaining all the time.

Oh, gaming in the 80s, kids, it was wild. It was wild. In fact, it was so well, it kind of put me off weirdly, because I was quite gameau when I was a kid. Now, I'm not a gamer now. I think I think of my career as the wandering around. But then everything changes because I remember that from that year on, there was a different kind of home computer, like the kind of the hockey stick phase had begun at that point, right?

Yeah. So it's essentially become established. And you have consoles on one hand, which were kind of easy plug and play, you know, appearance time and get a cartridge, put it in and you get Pacman at home or whatever. But then you had computers at your site and essentially both of these became fixtures of people's homes. So there was a kind of market that just kept on growing. And the thing about computers was anyone could program on them, you know, a games console you can't make a game for unless you're a professional.

But home computers, anyone could. So this is where you get things like in Britain and France, you just had these kind of amateur programmers, often teenagers, just going up. Well, I've got computer. I'm going to write a game and I'm going to sell it mail order or I'm going to find a game publisher and going to sell it. And that's where the industry really sort of starts to come through and kind of grow into what it is today.

What a big moments. Then on this march from the from the eighties to the present, the first big thing is Seefried.

Atari pretty much goes bust. So the early eighties had this huge boom, particularly in North America, of video game sales. And that time it was treated like the toy industry. And basically everyone just flooded into the market. Too many games, some fairly rubbish, and suddenly the sales stopped and everyone went bust. So it seemed like consoles were dead. But then Nintendo in Japan decides, well, kids still like games. We're going to bring out games, console.

Everyone thought they were completely insane. But what Nintendo did that was different is they had this iron grip of control over what games would be published on their system, the NHS, and that redefined kind of what console gaming was. It kind of meant they controlled quality. So you didn't. Have kind of everyone just going, oh, well, I've kind of worked out how to do it. Make this awful kind of game and shove it out there and I'll make a quick buck.

So Nintendo came along with that and Super Mario Bros.

And basically revived the entire game industry off the back of that.

So this kind of transfer everything towards everyone's looking at Japan as the leader of the industry and also consoles the kind of where the big stuff happens.

You listen to the history podcast, we're talking the history of gaming with Tristan Donovan. More coming up after this. When did people take. Gaming seriously, as a kind of cultural phenomenon at that time, it is definitely still kind of boys toys kind of thing, and I think that really changes when Sony come into the market with the PlayStation and games going 3D. So what Sony did is going to market this not as a kid's toy, but as a consumer product, a bit like a hyphy or a video player.

We're going to market it, young adults. We're going to accept that being more mature themes. So you get games like Grand Theft Auto, which would have been unthinkable in the heyday of Nintendo in the 80s, whereas decided this is for kids. You wouldn't put out a game like Grand Theft Auto where people going around robbing each other. You also start getting things like Tomb Raider, which, you know, 25 years later doesn't look as revolutionary and it kind of looks a bit sexist.

But at the time, just having a female lead character was a bold move for a game. And so game sort of finally went out this kind of darkened kid's bedroom kind of culture into the mainstream of society with things like FIFA and Grand Theft Auto and Tomb Raider. It became cool almost to play video games.

Do we see Hollywood waking up to the idea? There might be there might be money in games. I'm trying to think what was the first big time? Would it be Sonic or something? Or Tomb Raider? What your what was it?

Hollywood always been paying attention, but the games industry had this kind of little brother kind of syndrome. So from the 90s to pretty much the end of the 2000s, it was always looking at Hollywood.

So, oh, well, one day we're going to make games as big as Hollywood makes and we're like our games to be cinematic. And where have these great stories and where show Hollywood how it's done.

And kind of Hollywood was like, wow, you know, you're kind of geeks programming games, you know, what do you know?

So there was always this kind of weird tension of kind of Hollywood's to kind of destination that games were trying to get to for a good 20 years. And I think that's changed now. I think games industry kind of got over its inferiority complex and decided actually we're making more money than film.

Why are we trying to be like Hollywood? We're bigger than Hollywood. We don't need to do that. We don't need to try and make games that are movies. We can just make games.

They're doing well enough that anyway, as a Brit, we've raced past the story of Sinclair. So I feel that I feel the rest of the world needs to know about early 80s.

There's no pissers. Every computer format is different, and pretty much every country was getting their own kind of version of a PC. And in the UK, we had Clive Sinclair, kind of inventor of, you know, kind of cutting edge, kind of wonky technology, but also very cheap technology. So he came out with Residex EIGHTY-ONE and the Zedek spectrum computers, and these were the cheapest computers in the world for anyone to buy. I mean, at home, computers were kind of several hundred pounds.

This was kind of a ninety nine pound computer. So obviously it sold really, really well.

And that kind of created a world where British game industry could grow up and and start making games like Jetset, Willy and Nightlong and things like that, which really big in the 80s and ponded reason that worked because not many other countries were playing the Zadak spectrum. It was big in Spain and some other parts of Europe, but largely it was a British thing.

And so, you know, American companies weren't making games for it. You won't have to worry about competition from Japan. So the British industry kind of had a bit of protection by being part of this kind of, hey, we're the people using that spectrums and no one else is.

I remember there's a spectrum and yeah, I'm not so much to be proud of that. Yeah.

I think in terms of the cost, you know, it was a radical breakthrough. It's the keyboard was awful.

If you had to use the same colours together. I mean it looked terrible. But, you know, the programmers squeeze some great games out of it and, you know, it fostered the entire British game industry. And British game industry is a major player worldwide even today. And it wouldn't have happened without that expansion.

What happened to our mighty the mighty spectrum and the Sinclair Empire? Yes. Well, Clive Sinclair wanted he was never very into games and he wanted to go on and build a new kind of transport vehicle. The Sinclair C5, which is kind of like a go cart for driving on motorways, was kind of the vision of it. And he also wanted to make flat screen TVs. And basically he did these things and they were expensive and they failed. I mean, he became a laughing stock with the Sinclair C5.

And Sinclair really kind of just ran out of money, the computer wasn't making that much money to save it. So Alan Sugar's Amstrad came in and bought Sinclair and basically continued it for a few years. But then Amstrad decided it was going to make PCs and abandon the computer market. So that is kind of a sad end to the Clay Sinclair story.

Who starts making the waves in that decade, you know, 20 years ago.

South Korea is a country I'd point to. So South Korea is an interesting one. It kind of late 90s. It's got no history in video games whatsoever. It's barely got game industry. No one really pays any attention. South Korea, the South Koreans kind of slightly unique because it's got a very bitter history with Japan. It's been invaded by Japan. Japanese imperial empire were awful when they run it. And so after the Second World War, South Korea bans Japanese cultural imports.

And that means no Japanese games consoles are going into Korea. So Korea becomes a nation of PC gamers. Then after the East Asia kind of financial crisis of the late 90s, the Korean game, as we've got to find a way to kind of kick start the economy, we're going to put in the world's fastest broadband connections. So it starts this massive program with super fast broadband, fast broadband in the world.

And this kind of creates this culture of we're going to play online video games, multiplayer sort of World of Warcraft type games. But these games require subscriptions and subscriptions online, require credit cards. No one in South Korea has got credit cards. So they come up with this idea that they're selling little items in games. So it might be a hat for your character and you'll pay a small amount of money on your phone for it.

And so this creates a kind of new way of doing the games business. The games are free to play. You don't have to spend anything to play them, but you can buy little extras, whether it's a sword that makes you more powerful or kind of a faster go kart or whatever it is. And that's where the game maker will make money. So this kind of new way of doing games kind of turns up in South Korea. And since then it's spread worldwide, is spread first to China and now it's spread pretty much all over the world.

You know, a lot of games now they're free to play. And you just play for little you pay money for little extras.

We mentioned Hollywood now. Now it seems that the game's gaming is almost a big brother to Hollywood. Is it I mean, in terms of in terms of what people spend their time doing and money yet.

So if I can remember the figures. Right, I think the film industry is worth about 100 billion. The game industry is about 160 billion. So this kind of video games are noticeably bigger than film.

And I think it was always an odd sort of bedfellows. You know, sort of the interesting thing about video games is that they're sort of left and right brain together. You know, they're partly the kind of tech world of Silicon Valley. They're also kind of the entertainment world of Los Angeles. So they've always been in that kind of strange middle place. But essentially, I don't think the video game industry looks to Hollywood anymore. I think it's more now Hollywood might be looking to video games for games.

It could turn into films. I think they kind of balance of power shifted. I have a feeling V.R. may be having a false dawn again. Really? Yeah, so I think it's here to stay, but it's kind of slightly trapped yet to really break through into the mainstream.

So if you think of the PlayStation four that had something like a hundred and ten million consoles were sold and it's got VR headset, which is the best selling VR headset, and that's only sold five million, five million out of 110 million.

Isn't that great a performance? So there's not a huge incentive to make many games just for VR. And so and there's also problems with people feeling nauseous when using VR that, you know, they're starting to overcome. But it remains a problem that for many people, their first taste of VR was I played this for five minutes and then I felt ill.

So it VR hasn't quite got its legs yet. I don't think it's going to disappear like it did at the end of the 90s, but I don't think it's going to take over as it might have seemed it would four years ago.

What is it about in the character of modern gaming that shows that the unique journey that it's been on?

I think it's in the way that it's brought people together and changed their relationship with media. So you have to think before video games. The experience of media was very passive. You would be the consumer. You were never kind of a participant in what you consumed. You could watch TV, you could watch a movie, you could go watch a play, you could listen to the radio, but you can't control that is kind of being that you video games kind of changed that relationship.

Now, it's a case of, well, actually, this game doesn't do anything unless I'm playing it. And it's changed how we think about media. We expect more control over it. So I think you can see that little bit in how say something like Netflix works, certainly how kind of social media works. You know, there are ideas from games that have kind of seeped into that and kind of how how we interact with things because we expect to do something can get that feedback.

And the video game industry really kind of pioneered that. They were the first ones to go. You've got a TV, but actually we're going to give you proper control over what's happening on the screen. And that didn't exist before games. So I think that's kind of the role they've played in sort of changing society and and how it sort of wrapped up in that.

Is the golden era still to come in gaming, do you think? I always kind of get worried about golden era. You know, everyone's got a golden era. It's usually that kind of their childhood. So, you know, there are people talk about the golden era of the early 80s games. There was a golden era around 2010 when digital distribution of games began and it suddenly made it cheaper for sort of three or four person studios start putting out games without needing a big publisher and a million dollars.

I think there will be many golden ages to come. I think kind of golden age is kind of always very subjective and games are endlessly inventive. There are so many different experiences that they offer. I mean, this is a kind of world that has everything from Grand Theft Auto to farming simulator events. And, you know, there couldn't be two more different games, but you know that that's still under the same hat.

Thank you so much for coming on this podcast. You've written that you're like historian of the gaming world. So tell me what's what's your latest book?

Latest book is It's All a Game, A Short History of board games that obviously I've also written about video games with Replay the history of video games, which first came out in 2010.

Very cool. Thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Praying for him. I hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go, a bit of a favor to ask. Totally understand. If you want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash, money makes sense. But if you could just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or get your podcast. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, perjure yourself, give it a glowing review.

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