CS490 Supervised Undergraduate Research Projects
Computer Game Design
Cornell University - Rama C. Hoetzlein, Prof. David Schwartz

The History of Arcade & Adventure Games:
Consider as a Culture-Creative Process
Copyright R. C. Hoetzlein (c) 2003

This lecture examines the history of Arcade and Adventure games from a creative rather than market perspective. Most books available on the topic of the history of video games (which is not that many), with some exceptions, are based on the financial success stories of the industry, such as the rise and fall of Atari, Nintendo, Midway, and Namco. This lecture looks at the history of video arcade games from the point-of-view of the creative developers of these games, the processes they applied, and inspirations which guided them. As the rise of arcade games was so rapid, there are only a few reliable sources of information on the creative motivations and decisions of early game developers. These resouces include Steven Levy's book "Hackers", David Sceff's book "Game Over", and Scott Cohen's book "Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari", among others. This lecture is an attempt to piece together and gain insight into the early processes of game design by examining the few resources available, and looking at the culture setting in which early games were developed. The goal of this lecture is to examine the creative, technical and artistic decisions made by early game developers and to compare those decisions to modern game design processes.



The early history of arcade and computer games can be viewed in terms of the teenage culture of the late 60s and early 70s. This culture was not only an influence in the development of computer games, it was in many ways directly responsible for it as young programmers began creating the first computer games. As programming, and new visual computer displays, presented a technical barrier at the time, early arcade games such as Pong may have been an attempt to reproduce the pinball machine entertainment of the period in a rudimentary way but with unlimited new potential. The first computer games were essential prototypes of a new idea, testing wether or not a computer was capable of being entertaining.

This potential would be realized in the development of Spacewar by Steve Russell and the hackers at MIT, the inspiration for which was rooted in popular Science-Fiction magazines, glowing pinball machines, and model cars and trains (ie. the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT). The process of computer game design was just beginning, with the motivation provided by imagination and the power of a new tool from science-fiction suddenly made real - the computer.

Spacewar (1951) was developed on the PDP-1 by Steve Russell and friends at MIT. To quote from Steven Levy's book "Hackers", based on interviews with these early game makers: "Steve (Slug) Russell knew that his war-in-outer-space game would do something. In its own kitschy, sci-fi terms, it would be absorbing the way no previous hack had ever been. The thing that got Slug into computers in the first place was the feeling of power you got from running the damn things. You can tell the computer what to do, and it fights with you, but it finally does what you tell it to. Eventually, after tortures and tribulations, it will do exactly what you want. The feeling you get then is unlike any other feeling in the world. It can make you a junkie. It was the feeling that did it, and Slug Russell guessed the feeling was power... Slug got sort of a similar, though less intense, feeling from Doc Smith's novels. He let his imagination construct the thrill of roaring across space in a white rocket ship.. and wondered if the same excitement could be captured while setting behind the console of the PDP-1. That would be the Spacewar he dreamed about. Once again he vowed to do it." - Steven Levy, "Hackers", p. 47

As a process, computer game development was in its infancy, struggling primarily with technical challenges but filled with imagination. The visual elements were extremely simple, consisting of triangles and circles traced out in meticulous detail by an electron gun and moved according to computer instructions programmed by hand at the lowest level possible. In many ways, the tool may have been equally responsible for the development of these games as the hackers themselves. The possibilities of this new machine, not yet realized but considered in the imagination of a young programmer, may have inspired an overwhelming sense of power and opportunity to make the dream of science-ficition a reality.



Following the tradition of Spacewar would come an entire industry of video arcades, thus gradually transforming the pinball arcade into the video arcade. Many of the early hackers would leave MIT, along with this early vision, to found the first companies of the game industry. Games like Asteroids (1979 Atari), would be improved yet nearly identical versions of the original Spacewar idea developed at MIT. The video game industry was rooted in the idea of science-fiction, and so there came a proliferation of computer games with this as their central theme.



These games, such as Centipede (1983 Atari by Donna Bailey), the first video game made by a woman, required the developers to overcome the challenge of creating simple artifical life. As the process of translating the imagination of science-fiction into artificial life became an industry standard, the techniques would gradually become more sophisticated. One essential creative motivation of these early games was to learn how to make something move in an interesting and lifelike way without any prerecording (as in film) and with minimal visual complexity (using simple shapes due to the limitations of the display technology). The ability to make an object move of its own accord, and in response to the player, was perhaps the essential quality of the video arcade as a new creative medium. Through a process of scientific experimentation and the continuous intuitive tuning of the games parameters, game objects and creatures would eventually move in a seemingly natural and captivating way.

As this form of arcade game matured, games such as Galaxian and Galaga (above) would come to represent the most sophisticated form of the science-fiction style based on artificial life. A whole series of games based on the Galaxian concept would follow from this idea.. In Galaga, a popular remake of this game, insect-ships move along complex curved paths in a ballet of coordinated motion. Relative to Spacewar, Galaga represents the continued technical growth and increasingly more expressive instantiation of the science-fiction imagination.. However, the fundamental inspirations, which are rooted just as much in the development and science of artifical-life as in science-fiction, have not changed. The process has been transformed somewhat by the media, and the technical ability of the games' creators, but the central idea has been carried forward up to this point.

This would all change with a new game from the Japanese company Namco. Pac-man (1980 Midway), originally called Puckman (1980 Namco) from the Japanese word pukupaku meaning to flap one's mouth open and closed rapidly, was developed by Namco programmer and designer Toru Iwatani.. Here is a brief recounting of Toru Iwatani's inspiration: "Over dinner with friends, programmer Toru Iwatani saw a pizza with one slice missing, and the face that launched a thousand arcades was born. Pac-Man was the most successful arcade game in history, but more than that, the little yellow orb with the enormous mouth became the official image of the entire video game industry. Space Invaders made video games into family entertainment, but Pac-Man gave them personality."

"Iwatani's game was based on a classic Japanese tale about a creature that protected children from scary monsters by eating them. In Iwatani's version, the creature was more interested in eating little power pellets, dots of energy that lined the corridors of a bright blue maze. Four pastel-colored ghosts chased our hero through the maze, stopping the feeding frenzy with a single touch. But with one chomp of an energizer pellet, and the hunter became the hunted as the ghosts turned temporarily blue and fled from their prey."

Pac-Man differs from previous sci-fi style arcade games in that it was the first game to give an arcade game character personality. The idea of creating artifical life with unexpected motion in response to the player remains, but the inspiration now comes from life itself (ie. the form of a pizza with a missing slice), and children's folk tales, rather than cosmic adventures in outer space. The technical process of game development would continue to follow the now industry standard method of applying complex motion to simple graphics sprites, while the inspiration would gradually shift away from science-fiction toward other themes.



One new theme, although not new in inspiration, was the idea of opening the video game market up to young girls and well as boys. Science-fiction, pinball and video arcades were of interest almost exclusively to boys. This would change with Pac-Girl, the first female character in a video game. Noticing that Pac-Man, and the abstract shapes of the characters, were gender-neutral Midway realized that there was a potentially huge market advantage in repackaging Pac-Man as a woman and opening the video game arcade up to girls as well as boys. It worked. Although visually the only difference between Pac-Man and Pac-Girl was the pink tint to the maze and the red ribbon on the main character (as well as fruit bonuses that hopped), Pac-Girl would be nearly as successful with girls and Pac-Man was with boys. However, the popularity of Pac-Girl died out much more quickly as girls, and game players in general, realized that it was essentially just a repackaging of original Pac-Man idea. Interestingly, these new spinoffs of Pac-Man, including Pac-Girl and Super Pac-Man would make the original inspirational idea even more valuable. The process of developing spinoffs or remakes of original ideas would become a standard, inexpensive method in the game industry to fill potentially valuable marketing niches.



In 1980, Shigeru Miyamoto, born in Kyoto in 1953, was working for a Japanese company called Nintendo. Miyamoto studied at the Kyoto Art Institute, and just before working for Nintendo, was developing new cloths hangars for children made of soft wood with animal engravings which wouldn't damage clothing. At the time, "the company [Nintendo] asked him to work on a game called Radarscope, yet another knock-off of Galaxian.. He was much more into another idea he had for an arcade game, the inpetus of which is the American film King Kong.". Miyamoto was fed up with the business practice of copying classic American-style video games. He wanted to move away from the now obvious theme of science-ficition into entirely new realms of the imagination.

"Many of Miyamotos ideas were rejected: Miyamoto's characters had to do simpler things than he wanted them to. He ended up having the carpenter and player, Mario, maneuvering up the unfinished foundation of a building in order to reach the gorilla, who had climbed to the top with the girl. To get there, the little man ran up ramps, climbed ladders, rode conveyor belts, and jumped on elevators while trying to avoid the objects the gorilla hurled at him - cement tubs, barrels, and beams."

Miyamoto perosonally implemented every aspect of his game using the hardware of the defunt Radarscope. This included creating each character dot-by-dot, and developing the music and sound himself, both artistically and technically. The character, and the game's name, Donkey Kong was derived from the American film King Kong. Miyamoto wanted something not quite so frightening as King Kong himself. Something that children might still find appealing. The word Donkey comes from a similar Japaense word meaning 'bonkers' or 'goofy'. The result was Donkey Kong.

"American sales managers looked at Donkey Kong in disbelief. Games that were selling, with the exception of Pac-Man, had titles with words like mutilation, destroy, assassinate, annihilate. When they played 'Donkey Kong', they were even more horrified. Salesman were used to battle games with space invaders."

Despite the radical change in theme from science-ficition, or perhaps because of it, Donkey Kong would become the biggest selling arcade game of 1981 with over 65,000 units, outselling even Pac-Man himself.



With Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, the video arcade was no longer limited to science-ficition for inspiration. But with Donkey Kong, Shigeru Miyamoto was just getting started. Miyamoto used the Mario character from Donkey Kong as the starting point for his new game: Mario Brothers. While working on Mario Bros.. "Someone mentioned that Mario looked more like a plumber than a carpenter, so he became one. Since plumbers spend their time working on pipes, large, radiant-green sewer pipes became obstacles and doorways to secret world in his next game."

The process of developing Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. (above) was much more interesting because there were always new worlds to conquer, each one more magnificent than the last. The technology now made it possible to have scrolling landscape which permitted the explorable world to be unlimited in size. The space of the video game has suddenly expanded. Although there were many improvements in technology, which Shigeru Miyamoto took advantage of, it was his game design process that ultimately made these games so captivating to both children and adults.

"Adults enjoy Mario too, because it is a trigger to again become primitive, primal, as a way of thinking and remembering.. An adult is a child who has more ethics and morals.. That's all.. When I am a child, creating, I am not creating a game. I am in the game. The game is not for children, it is for me. It is for the adult that still has the character of a child." - Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyamoto's process included borrowing freely from folklore, literature nad pop culture - mushrooms from Alice in Wonderland (which actually make Mario grow and shrink), Warp Zones from Star Trek.. "There are walking plants, fish that Dr. Seuss might have created, dragons, serpents, flying turtles, fire-spitting daisies, and angel wings upon which Mario and Luigi could hitch a ride.".. Dragon-turtles trowing hammers, jellyfish, and clouds with faces would not only express an imagination as Spacewar did, or provide a personality, as Pac-Man did, but they would extend the imagination beyond contemporary arcade game trends into the areas of children's literature, classical literature, and popular culture.

"The spirit, the state of mind of a kid when he enters a cave alone must be realized in the game. Going in, he must feel the cold air around him. He must discover a branch off to one side and decide weather or not to explore it or not. Not just the experiences but the feelings connected to those events were essential to make the game meaningful." - Shigeru Miyamoto.

Shigeru Miyamoto would merge ideas from many different disciplines and traditions in his games. This process would occur not only at the level of inspirational ideas for his games, but also at the level of development, as Miyamoto was responsible for both the technical and artistic aspects of his games.

"Between 60 and 70 million copies of Mario Bros. were sold. Westerners would make trips to Kyoto just to meet him, including Paul McCartney, who during a Japanese tour, said he wanted to see Miyamoto instead of Mount Fiji."



As with Galaxian, following Super Mario Bros. came a series of technically superior games which were nearly identical in concept. Sonic the Hedgehog (1991 Sega), coming many years after Super Mario Bros. was particularly notable in this respect due to an incredibly accurate representation of physical motion. Although the elements of the game's world are very similar to Super Marios Bros, including sun-flowers, coins, trees, etc., the technical achievement of Sonic the Hedgehog was to make the playing experience even more immediate with a realistic sense of physical motion.

In Sonic the Hedgehog, which moves incredibly fast, physical simulation is perfected as Sonic rolls though hoops and bounces realistically through various worlds. Along with accurate physical motion, the game represented a revisitation to the pinball era, except that this time the physical motion of the ball is entirely simulated by the main character himself.. From a creative perspective, Sonic the Hedgehog is very complex, as it not only retains the inspiration provided from infinitely scrolling worlds and a child-like landscape, but enhances it with physically realistic motion and a subtle reference to pinball machines of an earlier culture period.



At the same time that Super Mario Bros. was being released, the technology which allowed an infintely explorable world would have other impacts as well. Rising out of the folk literature of J.R.R. Tolien and the Dungeons & Dragons series of multi-player home games, game makers realized that the ability to have an infinitely (or at least very large) explorable world meant that the goals of adventure and exploration in a large space were now possible in video and arcade games. Gauntlet (1985 Atari), shown above, allowed four players to work together to advanced from level to level. Based on the ideas of exploration and adventure, it consisted of over 260 levels each slightly different which, when completed, recycled back to the first level with the difficulty level slightly increased. This provided for nearly endless game play, and also gave the sense of a vast (although very repetitive) universe which had to be conquered.

It is important to keep in mind that although the technology, which now permitted explorable worlds, was providing conscious motivation for these games, the game makers ideas and inspirations were now free to borrow from any source of the imagimation. The evolution of game design had transformed from "What ideas can I express with the technology?" into the question "How can I make the technology express my ideas?".