A Brief History of Gaming

 Tic-Tac-Toe ’52 – first CRT

 Tennis-for-two ’58 – pong on o-scope
 Space War ’61 – 1st widely dist.
 Atari’s Pong ’72 – 1st popular arcade
 Wump , Adventure ’72 – 1st text adventures
 Death Race ’76 – 1st controversial
 Atari 2600 ’77 – 1st cartridge console
 Zork ’77 – 1st commercially successful text adventure
 Space Wars ’78 – 1st vector arcade
 Space Invaders ‘78 – 1st high score
 MUD ’79 – 1st multi-user adventure
 Pac-Man ’80 – most popular arcade
A Brief History of Gaming
 CRASH of ’83!
 Nintendo ’85 – revived industry
 Game Boy ‘89 – 1st popular handheld
 Doom ’93, DKC ’94 – 1st popular 3D FPS
 Playstation, Nintento 64, Sega – battle of format
 EverQuest, Lineage – successful MMORPG
 PlayStation 2 ‘00– 1st DVD, dynamic 3D
 Nokia N-Gage ‘03 – 1st multi-function handheld
 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ‘06 – today’s State of the Art
Nintendo Timeline
 1889 – Playing cards
 1960s – Light gun arcades
 1970s – Oddysey distributor
– Color TV Game 6
 1981 – Donkey Kong arcade
 1983 – Famicom (Family Computer)
– 1985 American release of NES
 1991 – SNES
 1996 - Nintendo 64 – 1st 3D
 2001 - Nintendo Gamecube
 2006 – Nintendo Revolution
Nintendo Milestones
 Longest running console manufacturer
 The NES introduced three very important
concepts to the video game system industry:
– Using a pad controller instead of a joystick
– Creating authentic reproductions of arcade video games
for the home system
– Using the hardware as a loss leader by aggressively
pricing it, then making a profit on the games themselves
 Console lockout “Seal of Quality”
 Cartridge in N64
 1994 Donkey Kong Country - scanned 3D model
sprites
Sega Timeline
 1940 – Standard Games formed in Hawaii
 1951 – Moves to Tokyo, becomes SErvice Games
(SEGA) – coin op games
 1965 – Merges with Rosen Enterprises
– Rosen leads sale to Gulf & Western
 1984 – Sega Enterprises Ltd. formed in Japan.
 1990 – Sega Genesis (16bit)
 1994 – Sega Channel
 1994 – Sega Saturn
 1999 – Sega Dreamcast (128bit)
 2001 – Multi-platform development
Sega Milestones
 Sonic the Hedgehog (1991)
 Virtua Fighter (non-violence policy)
 ChuChu Rocket (2000) – 1st online console
Sony Timeline
 1946 – Tokyo Tsuchin Kogyo formed
– Repairing electrical equipment
 1954 – licenses transistor, makes radio,
– Changes name to Sony (sonus)
 1975 – Betamax VCR
 1979 – Walkman
 1982 – CD player
 1988 – 1992 Nintendo CD-ROM drives
 1995 – Playstation ($300M investment)
 2000 – Playstation 2
 2006 – Playstation 3
Microsoft Timeline
 1975 - Paul Allen and Bill Gates develop a BASIC
Interpreter for Altair 8800.
 1976 – Microsoft formed
 1981 – IBM PC released w/ Microsoft DOS
 1985 – Microsoft Windows
 1990s- Collaborates w/Sega on Dreamcast WinCE
 1990s – Home and Entertainment Group formed
– Age of Empires series, Combat Flight Simulator,
Crimson Skies, Metal Gear Solid, etc.
 1999 – Xbox planned
 2001 – Xbox US release
 2002 – Xbox Live
 $1.2 billion in losses through 2/2005
 2005 – Xbox 360
Trivia Part 1
 The Sega Dreamcast was the first console to implement online play over a phone line,
calling the system Sega Net.
 The Microsoft Xbox is the first system to completely support HDTV.
 The Magnavox Odyssey (1972) contained 40 transistors and no microprocessor. The
Pentium 4 microprocessor contains 42M transistors
 The PlayStation 2 is the first system to have graphics capability better than that of the
leading-edge PC at the time of its release.
 The Nintendo N64 was first time that computer graphics workstation manufacturer
Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) developed game hardware.
 While the original Atari Football game was first created in 1973, it wasn't released until
1978. It was delayed because the game couldn't scroll the screen -- players couldn't
move beyond the area shown on the monitor. When the game was finally released, it
became the first game to utilize scrolling.
 The Atari Pong console was the No. 1 selling item for the 1975 holiday season.
 The first console to have games available in the form of add-on cartridges was the
Fairchild Channel F console (1976).
Trivia Part 2
 The PlayStation 2 is the first video game system to use DVDs.
 The Nintendo GameCube's 1.5G disc holds 190X more than N64.
 On the market 1991 till 2004, the SNK NeoGeo AES has tied the Atari 2600 (1977-1990) as the
longest supported gaming console in history.
 The Sega Genesis featured a version of the same Motorola processor that powered the original
Apple Macintosh computer.
 Mattel's Intellivison system, introduced in 1980, featured an add-on called "PlayCable," which
delivered games by cable TV.
 Nintendo's Game Boy is the most successful game system ever, with more than 100 million units
sold worldwide.
 In the 1980s, a service called Gameline allowed users to download games to the Atari 2600 over
regular phone lines. It was not a success, but did form part of the foundation for AOL.
 The first color portable video game system was the Atari Lynx, introduced in 1989 and priced at
$149.
 Introduced in 1993, the 3DO was the first video game system to be based entirely on CD technology.
 The Sony PlayStation was originally intended as a CD add-on to the Super Nintendo. When licensing
problems and other issues arose, Sony decided to develop the PlayStation as a machine of its own.
6 Generation Consoles
th
Sony PlayStation 2 Nintendo GameCube Microsoft Xbox
Processor 128-bit "Emotion Processor: "Gekko" IBM Power Processor: Modified Intel
Engine" 300 MHz PC 485 MHz Pentium III 733 MHz
3.2 GB per second bus 2.6 GB per second bus 6.4 GB per second bus
"Graphics Synthesizer" "Flipper" ATI graphics chip Custom nVidia 3-D graphics
–150 MHz, 4 MB VRAM –162 MHz, 1 MB embedded –250 MHz
–75 million polys per second texture cache 3 MB SRAM
–125 million polys per sec
–12 million polys per second

Custom 3-D audio processor

Audio: SPU2 (+CPU), 48 Audio: Special 16-bit digital
channels, 2 MB memory signal processor, 64 channels RAM: 64 MB UMA

RAM: 32 MB RDRAM RAM: 40 MB Proprietary 4.7-GB DVD

Proprietary 4.7-GB DVD and Proprietary 1.5-GB optical disc 10/100-Mbps Ethernet, 56K
original PlayStation CDs modem (optional)
Drive bay (for hard disk or
network inteface)
Controller:Four controller ports, Controller: Four game controller
Controller: Two controller ports, Wavebird wireless controller ports
"Dual Shock 2" analog controller Handle for carrying 8-GB built-in hard drive

Other features: Two slots for 4-MB Digicard 5X DVD drive with movie

Two 8MB memory card slots Flash memory cards or a 64-MB playback
Optical digital output SD-Digicard adapter 8-MB removable memory card
High-speed parallel port Expansion port
Two USB ports, 1 Firewire
Two high-speed serial ports
Support for audio CDs and
DVD-Video Analog and digital audio-video
outputs
7 Generation Consoles
th
Sony PlayStation 3 Nintendo Revolution Microsoft Xbox 360
Processor: 3.2 GHz PPC w/ 7 Processor: Codenamed Processor: 3.2 GHz PPC Tri-
SPEs codenamed "Cell“ 218 “Broadway” (IBM) Core codenamed "Xenon"
GFLOPS, 18 billion dot products Memory: 1T-SRAM by MoSys 115 GFLOPS
per second GPU: Codenamed “Hollywood” 9.6 billion dot products per second
Memory: 256MB XDR @ (ATI) Memory: 512MB GDDR3 @
3.2GHz, 256MB GDDR3 @ 700 Audio: unknown 700MHz shared between CPU &
MHz GPU, 10MB Embedded eDRAM
Controllers: Four wireless,
GPU: RSX 550 MHz NVIDIA GPU: 500 MHz ATI, 1.0, 48 billion
devices over Bluetooth, Two USB
(based on G70 architecture), 1.8 2.0 ports, Four GameCube shader operations per second, 24
TFLOPS (theoretical), 74.8 billion Controller ports, Two GameCube billion dot products per second,
shader operations per second, 33 Memory card ports 240GFLOPs 32bit programmable
billion dot products per second, shaders, Unified Shaders, SM3.0+
Media: Propreitary CAV 12 cm
255GFLOPs 32bit programmable 10MB eDRAM (internal bandwidth
shaders, Distinct Pixel & Vertex Revolution optical disk, 8 cm of 256GB/s)
Shaders, SM3.0 GameCube optical disk, DVD, CD-
Audio: 5.1 Digital
ROM, SD/MMC card
Audio: 5.1 Digital Controllers: Four Wireless
Storage: 512MB built in Flash
Controllers: Seven wireless devices over 2.4 GHz RF, 3 USB
Memory
devices over Bluetooth 2.0, Six 2.0 Ports, 1 Ethernet Port
Online Service: Nintendo Wi-Fi
USB 2.0 ports, Three Ethernet Media: 12x (8.2–16.5 MB/s or
ports Connection, includes Virtual
Console 65.6–132 Mbit/s) DVD
Media: At least 2x (9 MB/s or 72 CD-ROM
Mbit/s) Blu-ray Disc DVD, CD-ROM Storage: Optional Detachable
Detachable HDD, Memory Stick HDD, USB Mass Storage Devices
standard/Duo, SD standard/mini Online Service: Xbox Live
CompactFlash (Type I, II)
Storage: Detachable 2.5” 60 GB
hard drive with Linux
Online Service: PlayStation
Network Platform