"Haskel programmed the world's first video game inside joke"

January 22, 2015 2:20 PM

Reaching for inspiration, Haskel based his first program on the prevailing trend in the video game market: sporty, ping-pong type games popularized by the [Magnavox] Odyssey and Atari's Pong arcade machine. The games made a big impact on Haskel, who vividly recalls the first time he saw the Odyssey in action during a visit to a department store. "I was going to see the furniture department, and there was a little kid playing Odyssey," recalls Haskel. "I sat down and played with him for probably an hour. It was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I couldn't get that out of my mind."

—The Untold Story of the Invention of the Game Cartridge by Benj Edwards of Vintage Computing and Gaming, who started researching the subject after interviewing one of the people involved, Jerry Lawson, in 2009.
posted by Kattullus (12 comments total)

Neat stuff. This stirred a dormant memory of the Radio Shack TV Scoreboard system we had as kids, with various games selected by a rotary switch.
posted by exogenous at 2:33 PM on January 22, 2015

YOU LOSE TURKEY
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:59 PM on January 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

(btw many of these are emulated on archive.org -- not all work, but you can wow yourself with the awesome graphics demo Color Organ)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:00 PM on January 22, 2015

Don Rickles must have been proud.
posted by fairmettle at 3:17 PM on January 22, 2015

Up to that point, all commercial video game products had been based on discrete, dedicated logic circuitry to generate on-screen gameplay. None in commercial production used a computer as the heart of its architecture.

Which only poses the question: what was the most complicated/sophisticated electronic game made as a purely discrete logic device, not containing a stored-program computer? I imagine the Nintendo Game&Watch games and various knockoffs could have been made of discrete logic circuits (they're basically a not massively big state machine with inputs for some buttons and a clock, plus a counter for the score; also, CPUs were more expensive back then).
posted by acb at 4:23 PM on January 22, 2015

Breakout was 74 series logic, I think, and that was just at the cusp of cheap-enough microprocessors.

It's a bit odd saying that Magnavox, Motorola, Zenith et al weren't making transistorised circuits in the mid-70s. I don't know US TV circuit history, but that's fifteen years after Philco and Sony made all-transistor tellies.

I never had (as a kid) a cartridge-based video game. I don't really remember them catching on before the home computers hit. We had a generic Pong game (based on the GI AY-3-8500), and then a couple of years later the ZX81 turned up. Atari et al just wasn't part of my childhood, nor that of any of my friends (as far as I remember). Perhaps that's just our part of the UK...
posted by Devonian at 4:41 PM on January 22, 2015

what was the most complicated/sophisticated electronic game made as a purely discrete logic device, not containing a stored-program computer?

Arcade-wise, one of the most sophisticated was Sega's Monaco GP from 1980.

Also, many of the Cinematronics titles (like Star Castle and Ripoff) were done without a single-chip microprocessor. These games used a custom-designed bit slice CPU made out of TTL gates, but the game was stored as instructions in EPROM.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:00 PM on January 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

Was I the only one who misread the headline and was trying to parse it in terms of the programming language Haskell (previously) ?
posted by sourcequench at 6:00 PM on January 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, many of the Cinematronics titles (like Star Castle and Ripoff) were done without a single-chip microprocessor.

And how:

Larry's board had no microprocessor. It was instead something of a PDP-8 clone made entirely of TTL logic. This meant that there were no books or technical specs available to help us understand how the damn thing worked. We quickly hired a hardware guy and a programmer who knew how to write compilers. If we had to we were going to reverse engineer the thing, but time was getting short.

At that time there were only two game trade shows a year, and if you didn't have something to show, you didn't have orders. Very fortunately for us, Larry, who was normally quite secretive, once got caught in a time crunch and had to get a technician to help him out. We found the guy, he had the opcodes, we were in business. While programming tools were developed, I spent my first month writing "Starhawk" on legal pads in machine code.

I was 26 years old at the time, pretty old for that kind of thing. When I hired Scott Boden he was 17, and the next programmer I hired was too young to work without parental permission.

Oh, yeah, when I finished writing "Starhawk," it was the first program I had ever written in assembler code that worked.

posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:47 PM on January 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

RobotVoodooPower: “ I spent my first month writing "Starhawk" on legal pads in machine code.”

God I loved writing out my programs on paper, typing them in later, and having them run.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:11 PM on January 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

More on the Fairchild F8 CPU. The design was unique because the CPU was split into 2 chips instead of several like other designs of the time. There was no address bus on the main CPU, but this freed up space for 64 bytes of RAM on-chip and two 8-bit I/O ports.

Also the Fairchild was the first game console to feature a pause button.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:36 PM on January 22, 2015

Reading this, I was thinking of the functional programming language and my first thought was, "That's nice, but people have made some really cool games using procedural languages, too! And object oriented languages are really useful for handling lots of similar entities, such as a screen full of npcs and enemies. I admire people who have the patience to try new paradigms, though."
posted by mccarty.tim at 7:49 AM on January 23, 2015 [1 favorite]