This is Not a Software Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 4

games not as software and instead as creative collaborative works that are
infused with culture and broad cultural implications.
HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS
The game industry is of course inextricably tied to code and the emergence
of the software industry. Software industry luminaries like Steve Jobs and
Steve Wozniak made their early marks working for video game companies
like Atari. Computer scientists in labs at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) created games for early supercomputers as part of extra-
curricular communities at the university.
Perhaps throughout the lifetime of the Atari 2600 and its later iterations,
prior to the game industry “crash” of 1984, the majority of game developers
had their roots in computer science and software engineering. Indeed, every
one of Atari's “designers” was also the programmer for the game's car-
tridge. When a single person was responsible for the conceptualization and
implementation of a video game in assembly language for the Atari VCS, it
made sense for this vagary. Prior to this time, any graphics presented to the
user were often quite simplistic; e.g. lines, triangles, rectangles, circles and
other basic shapes or assemblages of basic shapes were the primary artistic
elements found in games. The early pixel art for games was often limited to
a collection of 8x8 sprites. It wasn't until the development of more complex
systems, like those of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), that more
complex artwork was even possible.
The NES was introduced in the U.S. in the winter of 1985. The NES
carried with it a host of new technologies that have had a lasting signifi cant
impact on the video game industry. The NES carried a precursor to the now
ubiquitous Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The PPU, or pixel-processing
unit, of the NES simplifi ed the way graphics were stored and delivered to
the screen. This innovation also allowed the NES's central processing unit
(CPU) to spend more time performing game-related operations and less
time performing graphical operations.
Piracy, copy protection and product licensing were also introduced in
the NES. I have written extensively on the specifi cs of how concepts like
digital rights management, region encoding and copy protection were fi rst
introduced in the NES (O'Donnell 2009). The ef ects of these changes have
been long-lasting, with signifi cant impacts for how game developers work
on a day-to-day basis and their ability to collaborate across companies,
teams and generations (O'Donnell 2011b).
Thus, it was from the time of the introduction of the NES forward that
the simple depiction of a game developer as engineer began to rapidly break
down. As the complexity of games began to grow, so did the need for areas
of specialization. Although early NES games had relatively small devel-
opment teams, new disciplines began to emerge. It quickly became more