The Oregon Trail is a computer game originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding his or her party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley on the Oregon Trail via a covered wagon in 1848.
Computer Space is a video arcade game released in 1971 by Nutting Associates. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who would both later found Atari, Inc., it is generally accepted that it was the world's first commercially sold coin-operated video game of any kind, predating the Magnavox Odyssey's release by six months, and Atari's Pong by one year. It was first location tested at The Dutch Goose in August 1971, then debuted at the MOA show on October 15, 1971, and then officially released in November 1971. Though not commercially sold, the coin operated minicomputer-driven Galaxy Game appeared around the same time, located solely at Stanford University.
Galaxy Game is one of the earliest known coin-operated computer/video games. It was installed at the Tresidder Union at Stanford University in September, 1971, two months before the official release of Computer Space, the first mass-produced video game. Only one unit was built initially, although the game later included several consoles allowing users to play against each other.
Star Trek is a text-based strategy video game based on the Star Trek television series (1966–69) and originally released in 1971.
In the game, the player commands the USS Enterprise on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of Klingon warships. The player travels through the 64 quadrants of the galaxy to attack enemy ships with phasers and photon torpedoes in turn-based battles and refuel at starbases. The goal is to eliminate all enemies within a random time limit.
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.
Highnoon is a BASIC game developed by Christopher Gaylo from Syosset High School, New York in early 1970 on a timeshared mainframe computer. The game is single-player and set in the Wild West in 1889.
The objective of the game is a showdown between the player and Black Bart. The status of the game, actions available and results of each action are written to the system console as textual descriptions. Turns are taken to either move closer, run, or shoot. Both the player and Bart have four shots and the odds of hitting each other increase as the player closes the 100 paces between each.
An early 3D flight simulator game, released by Sega in 1970. It was an electro-mechanical arcade game, using video projection to display a 3D game world on screen. It features free-roaming, first-person flight shooting gameplay, making it the first primitive example of a flight simulator game, first-person shooter, and open world.
The original Lunar Lander game was a 1969 text-based game called Lunar, or alternately the Lunar Landing Game. Lunar Lander was originally written as a text-based computer game in the FOCAL programming language for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 computer by Jim Storer while a student at Lexington High School (Massachusetts) in the autumn of 1969.
Storer submitted the game to the DEC users' newsletter, which distributed the source code to readers. Other versions of the concept were written soon after: a version called Rocket was written in BASIC by Eric Peters at DEC, and a third version, LEM, was written by William Labaree II in BASIC, among others.
A full game of Rocket, one of the early versions of the game type. The player has only spent fuel at the last moment, and as a result has crashed into the moon.
All three text-based games require the player to control a rocket attempting to land on the moon by entering instructions to the rocket in a turn-based system in response to the textual summary
Table Tennis was developed from 1966-1969 until eventually releasing as the pack-in game for the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972 and is one of the earliest known sports games, notably the inspiration for Atari's Pong.
A first-person arcade racing game released by Kasco in 1969. It was an electro-mechanical game using a form of video projection to display a racing track on a screen. It was a precursor to first-person racing video games.
A turn-based, strategic simulation of fourteen real battles of the American Civil War. In single player mode, you play as the Confederacy, while the computer controls the Union. Each turn you have to decide how to allocate your funds on food, ammunition and salaries and choose one out of eight strategies to use in battle (four offensive, four defensive). The sides with fewer casualties wins the battle, and whoever wins eight or more battles wins the war.
The game was developed at Lexington High School by students L. Cram, L. Goodie, and D. Hibbard. In 1973, it was compiled and published on "101 BASIC Computer Games" by David H. Ahl, who credited G. Paul and R. Hess of "TIES" for adding a two-player mode
Hamurabi is a text-based game of land and resource management and is one of the earliest computer games. It was originally written in FOCAL in 1968, but it was ported to BASIC in 1971. Like many BASIC games of the time, Hamurabi was mainly a game of numeric input. As the ruler, the player could buy and sell land, purchase grain and decide how much grain to release to his kingdom.
The Sumerian Game is a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. It was developed as part of a joint research project between the Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Westchester County, New York and IBM in 1964–1966 for investigation of the use of computer-based simulations in schools. It was designed by Mabel Addis, then a fourth-grade teacher, and programmed by William McKay for the IBM 7090 time-shared mainframe computer.
The Sumerian Game has been described as the first video game with a narrative, as well as the first edutainment game. As a result, Mabel Addis has been called the first female video game designer and the first writer for a video game.
Spacewar! is one of the earliest digital computer video games. It is a two-player game, with each player taking control of a starship and attempting to destroy the other. A star in the center of the screen pulls on both ships and requires maneuvering to avoid falling into it.
In 1971 it was unofficially ported into a coin-operated PDP-11 machine and renamed Galaxy Game. As an arcade machine it was installed at the Tresidder Union at Stanford University in September, 1971, two months before the official release of Computer Space, the first mass-produced video game. Only one unit was built initially, although the game later included several consoles allowing users to play against each other.
A game of pool (billiards) developed by William George Brown and Ted Lewis in 1954 on the MIDSAC computer, intended primarily to showcase the computing power of the MIDSAC.
"The game displayed a 2-inch rendition of the pool cue for the players to line up their shots and ran a simulation of the colliding and ricocheting balls in real-time, implementing a full game of a cue ball and 15 frame balls for two players. Graphics were drawn in real-time on a monochrome 13" point plotting X-Y display, the screen being updated by the program 40 times a second (that is, in a normal in-game situations with 2 to 4 balls moving at once). However, for time constraints, the table and its pockets weren’t drawn by the computer graphics, but were rather drawn manually onto the display using a grease pencil."
- Norbert Landsteiner for masswerk.at
OXO was a computer game developed by Alexander S. Douglas in 1952 for the EDSAC computer, which simulates a game of Noughts and crosses, also sometimes called Tic-tac-toe. OXO is the earliest known game to display visuals on a video monitor.
To play OXO, the player would enter input using a rotary telephone controller, and output was displayed on the computer's 35×16 dot matrix cathode ray tube. Each game was played against an artificially intelligent opponent.
A game of draughts (a.k.a. checkers) written for the Ferranti Mark 1 computer by Christopher Strachey at the University of Manchester between 1951 and 1952. In the summer of 1952, the program was able to "play a complete game of Draughts at a reasonable speed".