100 years of selected moments from Game Cultures — jonCates (2019)

i chart the following, nearly 100 years of selected moments from Game Cultures, in order to illustrate a few perspectives…

imagine:

● in the 1920’s we locate an origin point in the bright constellation of Computing as well as the innovations and developments that lead to Television, a now nearly obsolete term which once meant many situations simultaneously (1. the architectural hardware receiving the 2. signal of the 3. broadcast technology, as well as the 4. content [programming] flowing across the 5. infrastructure into peoples homes and public / privatized social spaces).

● as this universe expands, in the 1930s, Computing Cultures continue to develop alongside television, both deeply interwoven into imperialist political desires, Fascism, Capitalism, and the encryption / decryption of secret messages. meanwhile, pinball became a popular mechanical game to play, eventually in dedicated social spaces, arcades. these pinball games, housed in wooden cabinets, were at first entirely mechanical and then later in the decade became electrified. in Chicago, Raymond T. Moloney founded the Bally Manufacturing Corporation, and Harry Williams founded Williams Manufacturing Company. both rival pinball companies manufactured and designed pinball games in the 1930s and would continue to contribute to Game Cultures as they transitioned into Video Games during the later part of the 20th Century.

● the international conflict known as World War II, which began in the 1930s increases in violent scope until its conclusion in the mid-1940s. humanity creates and confronts holocausts in the decade of the 1940s, industrializing genocide in concentration camps, and weaponizing nuclear energy against civilian populations. in the nation-state now known as the United States of America, during the end of World War II, an intense deeply interdependent relationship is codified between Military and Industrial concerns. the then five-star United States Army General former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower (who would become the 34th President of the United States) witnesses the development of these complex set of interdependencies from inside the system itself. by 1961 in his Presidential Farewell Address to the people, he would warn against the threat to Democracy posed by the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex. more accurately, as it began in the 1940’s, it was already the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex and would quickly become the Military-Industrial-Academic-Entertainment Complex. advances in computing are required and facilitated by all of the above, from census taking to trajectory plotting. as a result, the first digital computer is developed for and during the Drittes Reich (The Third Reich) of Nazi Germany and followed by massive commitments to further developments in the United Kingdom and United States.

● computing technologies flourish inside the heavily secured and protected Military-Industrial-Academic Complex in the United States of the 1950s.

● within this tightly controlled system, in the decade of the 1960s: computer programmers create games, such as Spacewar! at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); the ARPANET begins to physically connect the network that would become the Internet backbone; and in arcades Sega Games and 株式会社タイト (Taito Corporation), both Japanese corporations, develop and market increasingly complex electro-mechanical arcade games that resemble features of contemporary digital Video Games.

● both small companies and larger corporations begin to develop, design and bring to market home computers and games systems in the 1970s. television sets have become more common in the home and home computers and games systems / consoles attach to these. Game Cultures begin to move from the pseudo-public commercial spaces of arcades into the homes of those who can afford to purchase these platforms (middle, upper-middle, and upper class consumers). individuals such as Allan Alcorn (Pong), Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (Dungeons & Dragons), and Will Crowther (Colossal Cave Adventure), design and develop games that will become archetypal, forming the basis of entire game genres from simulation to sports, from role-playing fantasy to text adventure, and interactive / branching narratives.

● the personal computer, a previously nonexistent type of device / system only beginning to be introduced in the years before, becomes widely available and popularized in the 1980s. home video game console development continues. games continue to be developed that innovate on and establish genre conventions for decades to come.

● by the 1990s these systems have become more powerful, popular, affordable, and ever-present in peoples lives. the World Wide Web (WWW) experienced through web browsers, connects people internationally and encourages participation, i.e. via “View Source” options. communities of gamers, i.e. those who create modifications, now share experiences and data across international borders. the Games Industry responds to this particular form of participation (modification) more positively than previous old media businesses, further facilitating creative engagements by gamers, game developers, artists, musicians, computer engineers, and computer programmers. in the home, web browsers and games are run on personal computers and consoles while the video game consoles themselves become fully functional computers.

● by the 2000s and TwentyTeens, games have become the major form of entertainment media, are recognized as an art form, and are created (designed, developed, financed, and distributed) by both major consolidated corporate forces (i.e. Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, etc), as well as small scale individuals / studios (i.e. New Media Artists, Indie Games developers, political organizations, etc).

the above summaries are meant to contextualize the following timeline, which itself, is meant to illustrate a specific set of points, transitions, and movements within Game Cultures / Digital Culture from the Late Analog Era, through the Digital Revolution, to the current moments. as such, all of these entries are meant for reflection rather than as definitive statements that can define decades. this list is intentionally partial, never exhaustive, always ongoing:

1920s
Enigma — Scherbius & Ritter (1923)
John Logie Baird develops the first electro-mechanical television broadcast system (1925)
Philo Farnsworth develops the first fully-electronic television technology, including television video camera tube (1927)

1930s
Fernsehsender “Paul Nipkow,” the first television station, begins public broadcasts in Berlin, during the Drittes Reich (The Third Reich) of Nazi Germany, primarily consisting of live transmissions (1934)
Z1 — Konrad Zuse (1935)
DuMont Laboratories manufactures, markets, and sells commercial television sets (1938)
The British Bletchley Park Bombe — Alan Turing (designer) for the government of the United Kingdom (1939)

1940s
Z2 — Konrad Zuse (1935)
Z3, the first digital computer, developed for and during the Drittes Reich (The Third Reich) of Nazi Germany — Konrad Zuse (1941)
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) — The United States Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (1943)
PROJECT: WHIRLWIND — The United States Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (1945)
Project 414A: Project Nike line-of-sight anti-aircraft missile systems — The United States Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (1945)
The RAND Corporation — The United States Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (1945)

1950s
The Nimrod — Ferranti, John Makepeace Bennett (designer), and Raymond Stuart-Williams (engineer) (1951)
IBM 701 Computer AKA Defense Calculator — The United States Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (1952)
TX-0 — Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory (1958)
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) — The United States Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (1956)
Weapon System 133-A: “Minuteman” ICBM Nuclear Missile program — The United States Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (1958)
Semiautomatic Ground Environment Air Defense System (SAGE) — The United States Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (1958)
TX-2 — Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory (1958)
Tennis for Two — William A. Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Labs (BNL) (1958)
PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) — Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) (1959)

1960s
Spacewar! — Stephen Russell, Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert A Saunders at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) using PDP-1 assembly language (1962)
GRAIL — The RAND Corporation (1964)
IBM 360 M42 Mainframe Digital Computer with 2250 Graphic Display — International Business Machines (IBM) (1964)
ARPANET — Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), The RAND Corporation, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California Santa Barbabra (UCSB), the University of Utah, and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) at Stanford University (1969)
Vector General (VG) graphics terminals — Vector General (1969)
The Brown Box — Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison (1969)

1970s
Computer Space — Syzygy Engineering (Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney) (1971)
Magnavox Odyssey — Ralph H. Baer, Sanders Associates, and Magnavox (1972)
Pong — Allan Alcorn / Atari (1972)
Dungeons & Dragons — Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (1974)
TV Tennis Electrotennis — Epoch Co. (1975)
Home Pong — Atari and Sears Tele-Games (1975)
Colossal Cave Adventure — William Crowther (1976)
Binatone TV Master — Binatone (1976)
Telstar series — Coleco (1976)
Zork — Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson (1977)
Color TV-Game series — Nintendo (1977)
Atari 2600 — Atari (1977)
The Bally Astrocade — Bally (1977)
BASIC ZGRASS: A Sophisticated Graphics Language for the Bally Home Library Computer — Jamie Fenton, Tom DeFanti, and Nola Donato (1978)
Magnavox Odyssey² — Magnavox (1978)
Intellivision — Mattel Electronics (1979)

1980s
Castle Wolfenstein — Silas Warner / Muse Software (1981)
ColecoVision — Coleco (1982)
Commodore 64 — Commodore Computers (1982)
ファミリーコンピュータ（Family Computer [Famicon]）- Nintendo (1983)
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) — Nintendo (1983)
Apple Macintosh — Apple Computers (1984)

1990s
スーパーファミコン（SUPER Famicom / Super Nintendo Entertainment System [SNES]）- Nintendo (1990)
The Bard’s Tale Construction Set — Interplay Productions (1991)
Wolfenstein 3D — id Software (1992)
Mosaic, the first Web Browser, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) (1992)
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) distributes the World Wide Web (WWW) Project in the public domain, releasing the following version with an open license (1993)
Mosaic software is publicly released; its public release marks the beginning of our experiences of the World Wide Web (WWW) as known today (1993)
DOOM — id Software (1993)
Sega Saturn — Sega (1994)
PlayStation — Sony (1994)
Duke Nukem 3D — Apogee (1996)
Quake — id Software (1996)
ニンテンドウ64 (Nintendo 64) — Nintendo (1996)
Dreamcast — Sega (1998)
Half-Life — Valve (1998)

2000s
PlayStation 2 — Sony (2000)
GameCube — Nintendo (2001)
Xbox — Microsoft (2001)
Half-Life 2 — Valve (2004)
Garry’s Mod — Garry Newman (2004)
Xbox 360 — Microsoft (2005)
PlayStation 3 — Sony (2006)
Wii — Nintendo (2006)

2010s
Wii U — Nintendo (2012)
PlayStation 4 — Sony (2013)
Xbox One — Microsoft (2013)
Nintendo Switch — Nintendo (2017)

jonCates, Chicago, 2019