New Games - Page 10048
Lunar Lander
1969
Lunar Lander
1969
star 7The 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 summaryTable Tennis
1969
Table Tennis
1969
star 7.9Table 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.Indy 500
1969
Civil War
1968
Civil War
1968
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 modeHamurabi
1968
Hamurabi
1968
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
1964
The Sumerian Game
1964
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!
1962
Spacewar!
1962
star 6.7Spacewar! 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.Mouse in the Maze
1959
Mouse in the Maze
1959
A game where players place maze walls, bits of cheese, and (in some versions) martini glasses by way of a light pen interacting with the screen.Tennis for Two
1958
Pool
1954
Pool
1954
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.atOXO
1952
OXO
1952
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.Draughts
1952
Draughts
1952
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".Bertie the Brain
1950
Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device
1947
The cathode ray tube amusement device is the earliest known interactive electronic game to use a cathode ray tube (CRT). It is a device that records and controls the quality of an electronic signal. The strength of the electronic signals produced by the amusement device is controlled by knobs which influences the trajectory of the CRT's light beam. The device is purely electromechanical and does not use any memory device, computer, or programming. The player turns a control knob to position the CRT beam on the screen; to the player, the beam appears as a dot, which represents a reticle or scope. The player has a restricted amount of time in which to maneuver the dot so that it overlaps an airplane, and then to fire at the airplane by pressing a button. If the beam's gun falls within the predefined mechanical coordinates of a target when the user presses the button, then the CRT beam defocuses, simulating an explosion.
