History of the Games of 1981

<v Speaker 1>All right, everybody, welcome back to the Surely You Can't
<v Speaker 1>Be Serious Podcast. Today we're going to start our series
<v Speaker 1>on games of nineteen eighty one.
<v Speaker 2>Oh man, I don't know. I don't know if I
<v Speaker 2>can do it today. Man, I feel like I'm coming
<v Speaker 2>down with pac Man fever.
<v Speaker 1>Nice.
<v Speaker 2>This is my dad joke of the day, Fever. You
<v Speaker 2>don't even have to put.
<v Speaker 1>A quarter in to get this kind of content today.
<v Speaker 1>This is Podcasts are free unless you want to be
<v Speaker 1>a Patreon. Go to our Patreon page help support the show.
<v Speaker 2>We would love to have you as a Patreon for
<v Speaker 2>less than a week's worth of nineteen eighty three money
<v Speaker 2>going to the arcade. You can be an executive producer
<v Speaker 2>of one of our episodes.
<v Speaker 1>That would be fantastic.
<v Speaker 2>Did you when you were a kid, did your mom
<v Speaker 2>like give you a dollar and you went to the
<v Speaker 2>video arcade and just hang out there.
<v Speaker 1>I begged for money all the time.
<v Speaker 2>Like it was. It became kind of a routine that
<v Speaker 2>I would come home. I'd be like, are we going
<v Speaker 2>to them all to day? Yes, We're going to the
<v Speaker 2>all to day? Kind of have a dollar for this
<v Speaker 2>arcade and I could spend She would go shopping and
<v Speaker 2>I could spend two hours on a dollar, not that
<v Speaker 2>I was playing that long, but I would just you know,
<v Speaker 2>you watch other people play. It was fantastic. Absolutely, video
<v Speaker 2>game arcades is one of my deep loving memories from
<v Speaker 2>the early eighties.
<v Speaker 1>We're going to get into it. But there are video
<v Speaker 1>arcades that I have fond memories of. Okay, there are
<v Speaker 1>restaurants that had arcade games that I can remember growing
<v Speaker 1>up eating at and like gas stations. There's a convenience
<v Speaker 1>store by my house that had a couple of games
<v Speaker 1>I played at. My church had three video games in
<v Speaker 1>the pool room next to the family life center of
<v Speaker 1>the gym.
<v Speaker 2>Nice I did not have that, but Central in Arkansas
<v Speaker 2>we had fun City was the name of the arcade.
<v Speaker 2>Fun City. It eventually moved over by the hospital. But
<v Speaker 2>in the other mall, Phoenix Village Mall, we had Aladdin's Castle,
<v Speaker 2>which I think had to be in every town in
<v Speaker 2>the world. Yes, in the early eighties, Yes, and that
<v Speaker 2>those were my early eighties video game places. And then
<v Speaker 2>later on I was like you, I was going to
<v Speaker 2>I would drive eight miles on my bicycle to a
<v Speaker 2>convenience store that had Super Mario brothers to play that
<v Speaker 2>game in the mid eighties. Nice and then in the
<v Speaker 2>nineties I would play the player against player fighter games.
<v Speaker 2>I played the Capcom Street Fighter versus Marvel. I would
<v Speaker 2>play that at the Putt Putt Place in Fort.
<v Speaker 1>Smouth Showbiz Pizza in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it was the most.
<v Speaker 1>Amazing place in the world because they had pizza, ski ball, pinball,
<v Speaker 1>and video games along with those creepy stand up robotmatronics.
<v Speaker 2>It was scared out of you.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, but every it was like a labyrinth. You would
<v Speaker 1>go into another room and you'd find more games, like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>my gosh, I didn't know they had this game back here.
<v Speaker 2>So we're here at the beginning of a series on
<v Speaker 2>video games. But these are video games that all came
<v Speaker 2>out the same year, nineteen eighty one. Yes, it is
<v Speaker 2>the year that we've already described as potentially having the
<v Speaker 2>best two week period for movies of any two week
<v Speaker 2>period in history. But it also had all of these
<v Speaker 2>amazing arcade games released the same year. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>People refer to this as the golden age of video games.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and this if there's a pinnacle year of the
<v Speaker 2>Golden age of video games, it's nineteen eighty one. I
<v Speaker 2>think so, I think so, yeah, So how did we
<v Speaker 2>get there?
<v Speaker 1>It is an interesting story of how we got to
<v Speaker 1>stand up cabinet arcade games.
<v Speaker 2>So our story begins with the development of the atomic bomb. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>so with the development of the atomic bomb. They have
<v Speaker 2>this thing called thesilloscope, which I tried to learn about
<v Speaker 2>before we had this podcast, and all I can say is,
<v Speaker 2>it is too hard for me to understand what an
<v Speaker 2>asilloscope is. It's got lots of uses, and one of
<v Speaker 2>those uses happened to be in the creation of the
<v Speaker 2>atomic bomb. And one of the guys who was a
<v Speaker 2>nuclear physicist who worked on the first atomic bomb, invented
<v Speaker 2>the first video game on the ascilloscope in nineteen fifty eight. Wow.
<v Speaker 2>So it was called Tennis for two and it looked
<v Speaker 2>we know what pong is, right, everybody knows what pong is,
<v Speaker 2>but this was much more like you're looking from the
<v Speaker 2>perspective of a spectator at a tennis match, where you
<v Speaker 2>see the ball going over the net and back over
<v Speaker 2>the net, and all of this took place on this acilloscope.
<v Speaker 2>So that was nineteen fifty eight. The year before that,
<v Speaker 2>the Soviets had sent the first man into space. Right
<v Speaker 2>the year after that, JFK says we're going to have
<v Speaker 2>a man on the Moon within the next decade. So
<v Speaker 2>everything at that point was all about space. So the
<v Speaker 2>second video that came along was a space game that
<v Speaker 2>was invented by a guy named Steve Russell called Space War.
<v Speaker 2>And I said space War because it was like all
<v Speaker 2>one word. I had an exclamation point at the end.
<v Speaker 2>It's almost it's almost like Star Wars put together, this
<v Speaker 2>really bad, like holiday musical kind of thing. Thankfully that
<v Speaker 2>never really happed. Yeah, right, So anyway, this video game
<v Speaker 2>is called Space Wars and it's got space ships flying
<v Speaker 2>around shooting at each other. It was really an eighties
<v Speaker 2>looking thing. But this was much earlier on and the
<v Speaker 2>program became what we call the day like open source,
<v Speaker 2>where it was, you know, you could just share the
<v Speaker 2>programming with someone else and they could easily recreate it,
<v Speaker 2>and so there were all kinds of improvements being done.
<v Speaker 2>And it was the first game that somebody said, you
<v Speaker 2>know what, we need a better control and so they
<v Speaker 2>made a joystick out of spare telephone parts. Really, yes,
<v Speaker 2>the first joystick, the first joystick. Nice that was the
<v Speaker 2>first screen video game. Then a little later on comes
<v Speaker 2>this guy named Ralph Bayer. Okay, he was a German
<v Speaker 2>guy who had moved to the US before World War Two,
<v Speaker 2>had gotten involved with World War two, was a very
<v Speaker 2>military guy. But he saw while he was working with
<v Speaker 2>these computers, he saw the potential of combining computers and
<v Speaker 2>television games because back then nobody had a computer, but
<v Speaker 2>there were forty million people who had TVs, and so
<v Speaker 2>he thought, I can set up these games on a
<v Speaker 2>television set at the house. So this was the first
<v Speaker 2>time that somebody said, let's make TV an active, participating sport.
<v Speaker 2>That's pioneering. Thought, yeah. So he develops this thing for
<v Speaker 2>Magnavox called the Odyssey, and it's the first gaming console,
<v Speaker 2>had like seven games with it, and one of them
<v Speaker 2>was essentially a pong game.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so the first Odyssey Magnavox was released in September
<v Speaker 1>of nineteen seventy two.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, so at this point, there are a couple of guys,
<v Speaker 2>Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell working at this electronics place
<v Speaker 2>called Apex. Okay, they find a common love for this
<v Speaker 2>game called Go, which is not an electronic game. It's
<v Speaker 2>a game from like twenty five hundred years ago. It's
<v Speaker 2>the oldest game that's still being played. But this interest
<v Speaker 2>in gaming and in electronics leads them to form the
<v Speaker 2>company Atari The Atari The Atari. So Atari was kind
<v Speaker 2>of this answer to the fact that all of the
<v Speaker 2>games up to this point had come from military guys.
<v Speaker 2>You know, you get nuclear physicists making bombs and other
<v Speaker 2>ralph behers, military guy making these war games. They are
<v Speaker 2>kind of the hippie response where Bushnell basically says, if
<v Speaker 2>you want to come in in your T shirt and
<v Speaker 2>your flip flops and you want to smoke dope and
<v Speaker 2>you want to do whatever, I don't care project done.
<v Speaker 2>I don't care what you do with restaurant. So Atari
<v Speaker 2>became like this very kednistic sex, drugs and rock and
<v Speaker 2>roll place to work. And so Nolan Bushnell gets one
<v Speaker 2>of these guys, gets an engineer from Apex that he
<v Speaker 2>and Dabney had worked with, and said, hey, I want
<v Speaker 2>to I want to do a game. I've got this
<v Speaker 2>contract with GE. He didn't have a contract with GE. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>he goes, it's just kind of a training thing to
<v Speaker 2>see if you know you're going to be up to
<v Speaker 2>working with us. He totally knew the guy was the
<v Speaker 2>best thing that they could get, but it was just
<v Speaker 2>this challenge for him. Right. So this guy he's hitting up,
<v Speaker 2>his named al Alcorn, Right, okay, and he says, what
<v Speaker 2>I want is the game that's kind of like ping Pong. Well,
<v Speaker 2>I mean they'd already seen the Magnavox Odyssey. They he
<v Speaker 2>knew exactly what he wanted here. But al Alkorn programmed
<v Speaker 2>the first Pong game. When he brought it to Bushnell,
<v Speaker 2>Bushnell's like, it's okay, that's pretty good. Can you put
<v Speaker 2>any sound with it? He's like, man, I got other
<v Speaker 2>things going on. I can't you know, figure that part
<v Speaker 2>of it. He says, like, in less than a day
<v Speaker 2>he figured out how to make sounds with the chips
<v Speaker 2>already involved in it. Said, it took him no time
<v Speaker 2>at all. So he invented the complete game of Pong
<v Speaker 2>within just like three or four days. Wow, they take
<v Speaker 2>that and make a stand up video game out of it,
<v Speaker 2>and that is the birth of the stand up video
<v Speaker 2>game Pong. That's the first one. Yes, just a little
<v Speaker 2>side note.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, in the early nineties, I'd say this is ninety three.
<v Speaker 1>I went to Saint Louis with a friend of mine
<v Speaker 1>Craig Parrish, friend of the show, friend of mine. And
<v Speaker 1>in Saint Louis by the Arch, within walking distance of
<v Speaker 1>the Arch, they have the video game Hall of Fame
<v Speaker 1>and you could play Pong along with everything else under
<v Speaker 1>the sun.
<v Speaker 2>Uh huh.
<v Speaker 1>And you talk about having fun, I mean we were.
<v Speaker 1>Our eyeballs fell out when we walked in that place.
<v Speaker 2>Oh my gosh, it was fantastic. It was fantastic. Do
<v Speaker 2>you remember playing Pong as a kid? I can't say
<v Speaker 2>I remember playing Pong. Yeah, we had a gaming we
<v Speaker 2>had a gaming console. We actually had a bally. I'm
<v Speaker 2>not even sure what the game was we had, but
<v Speaker 2>it had the twist knob kind of controls like the
<v Speaker 2>original Pong had. It was awesome. I wish we'd find
<v Speaker 2>something that had those twist knobs again.
<v Speaker 1>I mean I spent a lot of time at arcades,
<v Speaker 1>that's for sure.
<v Speaker 2>Well, needless to say, al Alcorn got the job at Atari, okay, right,
<v Speaker 2>and he becomes kind of one of the higher ups there.
<v Speaker 2>And at some point this guy comes in and says,
<v Speaker 2>I read your ad that says I want to have
<v Speaker 2>fun and make money, so I'd like to come work,
<v Speaker 2>and the girl at the reception desk is like, okay,
<v Speaker 2>well you know I need you to come out. He's like, no,
<v Speaker 2>I'm not leaving until you give me a job. And
<v Speaker 2>she's like okay. And so she calls Al Alcorn on
<v Speaker 2>the phone and says, I've got this guy up here.
<v Speaker 2>He's like in a T shirt and flip flops. It
<v Speaker 2>looks really like a hippie. He said, he's not going
<v Speaker 2>to leave till we give him a job. What do
<v Speaker 2>you want to do? And al Corn says, send him
<v Speaker 2>on back, let me talk to him. So the guy
<v Speaker 2>comes in disheveled hair, Al alcrn ask him. He's like,
<v Speaker 2>where'd you go to school? He goes, I want to read.
<v Speaker 2>He's like, is that a electronic school. He's like no,
<v Speaker 2>it's a literary school. He says okay, well what was
<v Speaker 2>your degree? And he goes, oh, I didn't graduate. And
<v Speaker 2>he's like all right. He goes, but I really love technology.
<v Speaker 2>I really have a passion for it. And Al says, listen, kid,
<v Speaker 2>you look like you got potential. I may give you
<v Speaker 2>a job. What's your name? And the kid goes Steve Jobs,
<v Speaker 2>Steve Jobs, Wow, Wow, and Al hired him, and so
<v Speaker 2>that was Steve jobs first job as Atari employee. That
<v Speaker 2>is freaking amazing. Yeah. I love the crap that you
<v Speaker 2>find as you go through this stuff, isn't it amazing?
<v Speaker 1>I'm glad he figured out that this guy had something.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean you talk about he had a passion,
<v Speaker 2>he had a fire. He also had bo.
<v Speaker 1>That makes sense.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the people at Atari had a hard time working
<v Speaker 2>with Steve Jobs because he had kind of this attitude
<v Speaker 2>and attitude problem, and he also smelled terrible. He believed
<v Speaker 2>he believed at the time that if you ate only
<v Speaker 2>fruit that you wouldn't have body odor. It turns out
<v Speaker 2>that's not true.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder if he ate, like, you know, cherry, then strawberry,
<v Speaker 1>than orange, than pretzel, than apple, then pair of them banana.
<v Speaker 2>I think he was really just fond of the apple. Oh,
<v Speaker 2>but ching damn thanks zoom. Okay. So, one of the
<v Speaker 2>games that Atari develops that is very similar to Pong,
<v Speaker 2>but one that you can play yourself and with that
<v Speaker 2>dial knob thing is a game where you have the paddle,
<v Speaker 2>you send the ball up and it breaks the blocks.
<v Speaker 2>You know what I'm talking about is this game called Breakout. Yes,
<v Speaker 2>it is. It is called Breakout okay Now. The game
<v Speaker 2>Breakout inspired a Japanese he's engineer to create his own
<v Speaker 2>game okay Now. Japan, after World War two, had seen
<v Speaker 2>the potential of electronic technology and it used it as
<v Speaker 2>the focus in rebuilding the country. But remember that bit
<v Speaker 2>from Back to the Future three now on this circle
<v Speaker 2>fail says made in Japan. What do you mean that
<v Speaker 2>all the best stuff is made in Japan? That encompasses
<v Speaker 2>the difference between nineteen fifty five and nineteen eighty five. Right,
<v Speaker 2>they went from being someone that was not respected to
<v Speaker 2>the pinnacle best you can get stuff. So one of
<v Speaker 2>the engineers in Japan who is fascinated by this game
<v Speaker 2>Breakout as a guy named Tommy Hero Nishikato, and he
<v Speaker 2>comes up with this idea of instead of throwing a
<v Speaker 2>ball up, we're going to shoot up. And he's like, okay, now,
<v Speaker 2>I just have to come up with stuff to shoot.
<v Speaker 2>He thinks, tanks now on the good planes looks too hard?
<v Speaker 2>How about people? People looks good? That's awesome, yes, but
<v Speaker 2>let's shoot people. But the company he was working for
<v Speaker 2>was like, no, we're not going to have a game
<v Speaker 2>where you're killing people. And he was like, well, what
<v Speaker 2>about what about droids? What if they were droids? Because
<v Speaker 2>in nineteen seventy eight, the biggest thing in the world
<v Speaker 2>is Star Wars. Yes, Star Wars, and they said no,
<v Speaker 2>but we are willing to consider spaceships, okay, and so
<v Speaker 2>he starts thinking about spaceships. He loved War of the
<v Speaker 2>World when he was a kid, and so his idea
<v Speaker 2>of a spaceship is something that looks kind of like
<v Speaker 2>a spider or crab or something like that. And so
<v Speaker 2>he creates this game where you have a spaceship firing
<v Speaker 2>on invading spaceships that look like crabs and spiders, and
<v Speaker 2>he names the game Space Invaders. Got it. I believe
<v Speaker 2>we're up to nineteen seventy eight, nineteen seventy eight, nineteen
<v Speaker 2>seventy eight, So we've two landmarks so far. We've got
<v Speaker 2>Palm Yes landmark, which leads to Space Invaders landmark Yes.
<v Speaker 2>And Space Invaders becomes so popular that markets in Japan
<v Speaker 2>start they stop buying food and they start buying arcade
<v Speaker 2>games because they realize they can make more money with
<v Speaker 2>arcade games than they can selling food. Wow, Japan has
<v Speaker 2>like only second time in its history has to start
<v Speaker 2>producing one hundred gen coins again, because that's what they
<v Speaker 2>use instead of quarters over there, because so many of
<v Speaker 2>them are being fed into the belly of Space Invaders.
<v Speaker 2>As a matter of fact, all of the gaming arcade
<v Speaker 2>they call like Invader Houses or something like that. Wow.
<v Speaker 1>I remember playing Space Invaders at the time and loving it,
<v Speaker 1>but yet being frustrated because you can only shoot one
<v Speaker 1>missile at a time, like one shot at a time,
<v Speaker 1>and you if you.
<v Speaker 2>Miss, you're waiting to reload. Yeah, which was a pain.
<v Speaker 2>I am. I am young enough that I probably played
<v Speaker 2>Galaga as soon as I played Space Invaders or Galaxian
<v Speaker 2>or anything like that. And I can remember for the
<v Speaker 2>non Gallica games going what the heck? What what? I
<v Speaker 2>can fire one shot at a time, But since nobody
<v Speaker 2>knew what they were missing at that point, this one
<v Speaker 2>shot at a time was gangbusters, both in Japan and
<v Speaker 2>in the US without a doubt. It's the T shirt
<v Speaker 2>that James It's a T shirt that James Halliday wore.
<v Speaker 1>Right, that's right, Ready player one boom, So just.
<v Speaker 2>Real quick on Space Invaders. Yes, again, it's they're using
<v Speaker 2>the electronics to make the sounds, but he deliberately has
<v Speaker 2>it sounded like a heartbeat. I remember the sound of
<v Speaker 2>spaces It's four It's like four notes, four notes. Absolutely,
<v Speaker 2>But just like Jaws, it got fast. As it got
<v Speaker 2>more intense, the heartbeat sped up and it would stretch
<v Speaker 2>you out. Yep.
<v Speaker 1>Space Invaders was one of the three arcade games we
<v Speaker 1>had in my church.
<v Speaker 2>Nice. Okay, so we've hit landmark number one. Pong, we
<v Speaker 2>hit landmark number two, Space Invaders landmark number three. A
<v Speaker 2>guy named Touro Awatani notices that in all of these
<v Speaker 2>arcades in Japan there's dudes and more dudes, and smelly dudes.
<v Speaker 2>Is like dark and stinky in all of these arcades. Fortunately,
<v Speaker 2>they love Space Eva Invaders enough to keep on going
<v Speaker 2>despite this dark, stinky place. But the women are like no,
<v Speaker 2>thank you. Right, So he thinks, how do I develop
<v Speaker 2>a game for women? And as it turns out, women
<v Speaker 2>actually probably have better small muscle control than men do. Yes,
<v Speaker 2>but they weren't interested in the shoot him up games.
<v Speaker 2>He's like, okay, what appeals to women? And in Japan,
<v Speaker 2>apparently all women no matter what, get dessert after the meal.
<v Speaker 2>That's just a thing, I guess. Okay, at least it
<v Speaker 2>was back in the seventies. I have no further knowledge
<v Speaker 2>on Japanese culture beyond that, are you trying to tell
<v Speaker 2>me that women like to eat? Women like to eat?
<v Speaker 2>And so that became his keyword, eat, eat, eat, And
<v Speaker 2>so he's thinking about a game, he's thinking about eat.
<v Speaker 2>He's like, I'm hungry, Let's go get some pizza. They
<v Speaker 2>go to the pizzaia there in Japan. They're sitting down
<v Speaker 2>talking about eating, talking about the game. Somebody takes a
<v Speaker 2>slice out of the pizza as is delivered. He looks
<v Speaker 2>down and sees the pizza with one slice missing and says,
<v Speaker 2>I've got it. We'll have a character that looks like
<v Speaker 2>this that runs around eat it.
<v Speaker 1>That sounds like a lot of fun to play.
<v Speaker 2>It does just run around and eat. And that idea,
<v Speaker 2>just at that moment, was the first time that the
<v Speaker 2>idea of having a hero in a video game had
<v Speaker 2>ever come about. Okay, and so he develops the character
<v Speaker 2>that he would go on to call puck Man. What
<v Speaker 2>does puck man mean? Well, he looks like a puck okay,
<v Speaker 2>and so we'll call him puck Man. Right, Okay, We've
<v Speaker 2>got the ghost chasing him around. Never need to worry
<v Speaker 2>about that we're gonna call him puck Man, except that
<v Speaker 2>he's familiar enough with English to realize, wait a minute,
<v Speaker 2>when this goes over to North America, a P is
<v Speaker 2>really easy to change into an F. Good for him,
<v Speaker 2>and so he's like, wait a minute, maybe I can
<v Speaker 2>head this off at the pass. Let's instead of calling
<v Speaker 2>it Puckman, call it pac Man. Pac Man nineteen eighty yep.
<v Speaker 2>And so we've reached landmark game number three, pac Man.
<v Speaker 2>So the games that we're about to talk about were
<v Speaker 2>all in some way inspired by these landfard games.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, the best selling arcade games of all time number ten,
<v Speaker 1>out Run it's a card.
<v Speaker 2>Game, okay, number nine, Oh yeah, our Run I remember Run?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah, number nine, Galaxian number eight, Centipede number seven,
<v Speaker 1>Defender number six, Asteroids number five, misspac Man number four,
<v Speaker 1>Donkey Kong number three, Street Fighter two number two, Space
<v Speaker 1>Invaders number one, pac Man.
<v Speaker 2>So it's fascinating. All of those games were three nineteen
<v Speaker 2>eighty two, except Outrun and Street street Fighter, and Street
<v Speaker 2>Fighter most would say is responsible for the resurgence of
<v Speaker 2>the video game in the late eighties early nineties. There
<v Speaker 2>you go, all right, that will do it for the
<v Speaker 2>history leading up to the Games of nineteen eighty one.
<v Speaker 2>Join us next week for our next episode.
<v Speaker 1>It's gonna be so much fun. We are going to
<v Speaker 1>have a great time. Get your quarters ready. We got
<v Speaker 1>unlimited credits.
<v Speaker 2>Come back next week. You might just get an extra
<v Speaker 2>life