Trigger Happy
by planting grain and assessing tax rates each year—a direct ancestor of Civilization. And later, the advent of ADVENT (1972): short for Adventure, this was the first of a lost genre of game that was hugely popular on personal computers right up until the late 1980s. It was the first computerized version of “interactive narrative”: the computer described a location and the user typed in commands—“north,” “look,” “kill snake,” “use torch”—to move around the virtual world, use objects and solve fiendish puzzles. But the world at large remained ignorant of the myriad charms of these proto-videogames. It was a closed community, a priesthood without a parish.
Most people assume that coin-operated arcade games preceded home videogame technology. In fact, in terms of conception rather than commercial distribution, the reverse is the case, for by 1967 Ralph Baer, the consumer-products manager of a military electronics company, Sanders Associates, had invented
aTV-based home-tennis game and more complex “hockey” simulations. Unfortunately it took him several years to persuade other manufacturers of the commercial possibilities. At last, at the turn of the decade, Intel got their act together and invented the
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