Computer games - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 179

The success of Space Invaders was followed by similar games such as
Asteroids from Atari and Galaxian from Namco Limited. Color was introduced
into arcade games at the end of the 1970s. In 1980, Namco succeeded in creating
a new genre of video game in addition to shoot 'em up and sports games. The
game was Pac-Man ( Fig. 9.6 ), a maze game in which the player controls a char-
acter, Pac-Man, through the twists and turns of a maze, eating various objects
on the way. When all the objects have been eaten, the player proceeds to a new
stage after an intermission in which Pac-Man is chased by four different ene-
mies. The game's designer, Toru Iwatani ( B.9.7 ), said that he had designed the
enemies with distinct personalities and behavior to keep the game from being
boring but also to ensure that it was not impossibly difficult to play. The game
generated a new audience for video games because it appealed to female play-
ers as well as the traditionally male gaming community. The game sold more
than 350,000 units and had an estimated thirty million active players in 1982.
A perfect Pac-Man game occurs when a player eats all available objects and van-
quishes every enemy on all of 255 levels. The first person to achieve this was
Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida, in 1999, who finished the game in about
six hours. Arcade games continued to be popular throughout the 1980s but
began to decline in popularity as home game consoles and personal computers
became more popular in the 1990s.

B.9.6. Tomohiro Nishikado is one of
the most well-known Japanese video
game developers. His first games
were the early team sports games,
Soccer and Davis Cup , both released
in 1973. Nishikado claims that Soccer
was Japan's first video game and that
his 1974 driving race game, Speed
Race , was “possibly the first Japanese
game in America.” His most success-
ful game, Space Invaders , was released
in 1978 and began “the golden age of
video arcade games.” B1

Console wars

In 1951, the U.S. inventor Ralph Baer was developing television technolo-
gies for an electronics company based in New York. Instead of just using pat-
terns on a television screen to calibrate the equipment, he realized that it was
possible to give the viewer the ability to manipulate what was displayed on the

Fig. 9.6. Pac-Man is one of the most
influential video games of all time. It
was the first game to introduce a char-
acter as a gaming icon, and it estab-
lished a new genre of games featuring
mazes. It was the first game to include
“power-ups” - in which the characters
get extra powers or abilities for a short
time. It also introduced the idea of “cut
scenes” - brief animations or videos that
give more detail about the character
and the game. Pac-Man is credited with
opening up video gaming to female
audiences.