Talk:Early history of video games

Nintendo
Would the addition of the founding of Nintendo be relevant? It was founded in 1889 as a card-game producer and only became a video game company much later. ThutmosisV (talk) 10:10, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Definition
"definition would preclude …, any game rendered on a vector-scan monitor, …" Asteroids was vector-scan. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.220.97.105 (talk) 02:16, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes? That's why the section immediately goes on to say that most modern definitions don't restrict the display type, because it excludes a lot of games that are generally considered "video games". -- Pres N  17:54, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Merge Proposal

 * No - I don't think a merge is a good idea. The first video game article concisely addresses a very specific topic, while this article is part of a series of timeline articles. I think we need to have both of this things; rewriting first video game as a timeline would decrease its utility and not having a timeline formatted entry at the start of a long series of timeline articles seems inelegant. -- Akb4 (talk) 06:43, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
 * What if a section was simply added to the start of this timeline to address the controversy addressed by First video game? — Preceding unsigned comment added by MyNameWasTaken (talk • contribs) 18:24, 14 August 2011 (UTC)


 * mixed - I agree with Akb4, just noticed the tag in fact. However, the material added here needs to be maintained in a way that its cohesive with the first video game article content.  If its just a ragtag list of dates, much of which duplicates material already on the first video game page, I don't see a purpose.  Likewise the title would need to be reworked, because it denotes an actual prose article on early game history (which also would conflict with the purpose of the first video game article), when what's actually here is a listing of important events related to the evolution of computer games and later actual video games. Maybe the article should be changed to "listing of early video game history" --Marty Goldberg (talk) 19:58, 23 May 2009 (UTC)


 * No but - these articles are different but complement each other. Someone interested in Early history of video games would for sure also look for First video game if he knew about. I suggest adding a See also link to it - I would have never found the First video game article if there was no 'merge proposal' tag. GL1zdA (talk) 19:10, 24 April 2011 (UTC)


 * YES - I think the biggest problem for me is that these articles are using different definition of what qualifies to be listed. Early history of video games includes proto-games from before those listed on First video game. I take this as meaning that one page is using a flawed definition of video game. To me, there is absolutely no reason why First video game can't be fully merged, and then a section added to address the controversy of which is technically the first. I think this organization would allow for the conversation about "Who was first?" without the unnecessary First video game article. MyNameWasTaken (talk) 18:22, 14 August 2011 (UTC)


 * No - While the proposal is a good one I think that this page is mostly about protogames that are not yet considered video games while the 1st generation is mostly about some of the first consoles.

WWII training games?
I always thought the first video games were developed for use by troops during WWII. There was one called Identico where various ships would come across the screen and you identified them as friend or foe, and shot the enemy ones. If these are not strictly speaking video games, what are they? --Bluejay Young (talk) 02:22, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Do you have a link or book name that talks about this? It's... basically impossible for such a thing to be a video or "computer" game. While technically primitive analog computers existed at the time, and technically oscilloscopes existed, there was nothing that could generate shapes to display on a screen, nor a screen that could display shapes- computers did math equations at best and cost absurd amounts of money, and oscilloscopes could just barely move a dot (the end of the cathode-ray beam) fast enough to show the waveforms of an input electric signal. The game you describe could have been done with a motor turning a paper scroll with ships printed on it, possibly with a projector involved, which seems much more likely given that it would have cost several orders of magnitude less. And without a "computer" driving it, much less a monitor of some sort, it wouldn't really be a "video game". -- Pres N  02:43, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
 * To answer your last question, though, if it wasn't a video game because it didn't involve a computer or video monitor (under any definition of such) then it would at best be an electronic game, though that article is pretty awful, which covers all games involving electronic components. -- Pres N  02:46, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

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Non-video computer games.
AFAIK there were plenty of computer games before first (which ever it is) video (no matter the exact definition) game. I think people reading the article might have a bad impression that there were no computer games before video games, but there were plenty. And it would be nice to reference these facts somewhere. 81.6.34.246 (talk) 22:41, 4 October 2019 (UTC)


 * The best option would be a Precursors or Antecedents section, before the current Initial games. The scope of the article is rightfully dedicated to computer games with a video component, but this needs to be put in the larger context of games created with mechanical or electronic computational components that didn't include a video screen. Diego (talk) 15:15, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what games the IP is referring to, but while it would be nice to have more coverage of electro-mechanical games in general, they were by no means "computer games", with or without video output. You have to draw the line somewhere, and I don't think having a section for "games that used electricity and/or moving parts" really fits in with an "early history of video games", any more than a discussion of board games would. The article already contains discussion of the very first electronic games and the very first computer (without video output of any sort) games, which together are the step before "video games". -- Pres N  22:49, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
 * There are electromechanic games with computational components that were described in the article and have since been removed. The idea should be to describe the early context of games implemented on devices that take automated decisions, pointing the reader to other articles where they can expand their knowledge; the article now is not telling the whole story. Diego (talk) 05:20, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is constrained in its coverage by reliable sources. In this case, the pertinent reliable sources to consider for the scope of a video game history article are the dictionaries and encyclopedias that define the term "video game." Every definition I can find in these sources (OED, Merriam Webster, Britannica, Cambridge, etc.) includes either "electronics" or a "screen" as a key element (interestingly, few include both, but all include one or the other).  Both of those elements are absent from early electro-mechanical games with computational components such as the Spanish Chess Player.  The one EM game that was an influence on an early video game, the Nimatron, is only discussed within the context of the Nimrod computer and not as a video game in its own right. That situation notwithstanding, EM games are simply outside the scope of this article, especially since there is no direct link between any of these games (or indeed most of the games in this very article) and the development of the video game and the video game industry in the 1960s and 1970s.   Basically, anything done before 1962 was an outlier and a curiosity only, and this article properly includes only those products that fit the common definition of the term "video game" in reliable sources. Indrian (talk) 06:38, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Agree with everything Indrian said. That said, if you or anyone else wanted to make a "history of electromechanical games" or "early electromechanical games" article, I would absolutely be interested in helping out, and would definitely agree with linking to it from here. -- Pres N  16:51, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Fad? Dubious
There is a mention under Reception about "others felt it to be confusing and part of a passing video game fad.". A "fad"? How can there have been a fad as this came was arguably the first such example aimed at arcade, this seems dubious. MrNeutronSF (talk) 05:59, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I think you meant to post this at the Computer Space article, but we can also discuss it here. I reworked the language a little bit to make it clear that what people actually thought was that video games would amount to no more than a fad as opposed to Computer Space itself initiating a fad, but the overall point is valid: the coin-operated amusement industry has a long history of products that were very briefly popular and then faded away. When video first hit, most distributors and operators believed it would be another one of these passing fads and did not take it seriously.  Even Pong, a wildly successful product, was considered a one-off success rather than the beginning of a new form of entertainment. Indrian (talk) 15:23, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Specific claims need citations
If the opening of the article is going to make specific claims, like "Video games transitioned into a new era in the early 1970s with the launch of the commercial video game industry in 1971 with the display of the coin-operated arcade game Galaxy Game and the release of the first arcade video game Computer Space", then those assertions need a citation. It does not matter if the claim is made in the introduction or the body. Once something specific is asserted, then it needs a citation.

Jeffrey Walton (talk) 06:24, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
 * To echo what Indrian said at the Computer Space talk page: no, that's not how leads work. Everything in the lead is summarizing something in the body, it's not making it's own contentious statement. I don't know why you think "specific claims" in the lead need their own specific citations. -- Pres N  15:49, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

A valuable source

 * This 1983 Video Review timeline of video games was written while video games were still in their infancy]. Super fascinating stuff!--Coin945 (talk) 02:13, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
 * It is, though don't take it at face value! It's not citing its sources, and for good reason- there's a big whopper on the second page, that Bushnell saw Spacewar in 1965 and even modified the game to make it go faster. Bushnell didn't see the game until 1969 (in 1965 he would have been a senior in high school/freshman in college), and he certainly wasn't modifying the game to make it faster, seeing as he didn't know programming at all and was never associated with Stanford (where he actually saw it) to even have the computer time to attempt such a thing. It is, however, one of the many increasingly-over-time self-aggrandizing stories he told about himself in order to make it look like he was a bigger deal than Ralph Baer. See for a more detailed look at how his story changed over the years.
 * This post is actually interesting from a historicity perspective- the poster's and your's conception that this account is "closer" to the time period and therefore has value for that. Because it does, but it's also written 6 to 10 years after the sources that I know they're citing- Baer's book, the relatively-widely reported lawsuits by and against Magnavox that disseminated the history of Tennis for Two and also Bushnell's account of his timeline. It wasn't actually contemporary, it just feels like it since it's almost 40 years old now. None of this was deep reporting. It's more interesting to me that this seems "novel" as it contradicts a lot of the narrative both then (as the magazine article mentions) and as recently as the late 2000s, and the reason for that is that games "journalism" is/was anything but actual journalism, so a lot of poorly researched nonsense has been floating around for decades. None of this information was hidden or lost, and yet tons of people have read terrible chronologies by poor games writers of less value than this 1983 article.
 * Still though, all that aside, it is an interesting view on what was known or not known by the gaming press in the early 80s. Thanks for posting it! -- Pres N  04:37, 10 May 2021 (UTC)