i wasn't around in the 70's but does anyone know about the video games from the 70's, i just need some information on video games from the 60's - 00's

thanks

Not much.  Video game technology didn't exist in a marketable form until the very late 70's decade.

For home games - I guess Pong (Atari) was about the extent of it.

Arcade games didn't offer much, either.  By '78 or '79 there were a couple, perhaps space invaders or maybe pac man were introduced by then - someone else help me out here.  :-\\

During the late 70's, in college, I really dug pinball.  That was my "arcade game" of choice.  ::)

i wasn't around in the 70's but does anyone know about the video games from the 70's, i just need some information on video games from the 60's - 00's

thanks


I don't even think games were around until the end of the 70's, and I'm pretty sure all that was out was Atari  and Intelevision. All I know is that games were even less complex than Donkey Kong Arcade, Pong and Pac Man were big, the Intelevision had a controller that only a calculus genius could figure out, arcades were better than home systems, and all the investment in games caused a crash in the beginning of the 80's (see the awful E.T. game). I'm not the best person to answer this question, but I find it interesting.

PONG was created in 1972 as a B&W Arcade unit.  It was released as a home version in 1975.  The home version, was the size of a VCR and only played Pong

Arcade Games were popular in the 70s (case in point, if you watch the 1975 movie Jaws, in several scenes, you can see a bunch of kids playing Arcades at the beach)

The first ever home video game system that used cartridges was the Fairchild Channel F, which was introduced in 1976.  The following year (1977), Atari introduced the Video Computer System (VCS), but at the time, the video game crash of 1977 forced manufacturers of older systems to abandon them.  Atari stayed in the game, and ended up dominating the market, despite competition from the likes of Intellevision and Coleco.  In 1982, the Atari VCS was renamed the Atari 2600, but with a run of poorly produced games, sales were very poor which soon resulted in the video game grash of 1983

1971 was the year that coin operated machine's officially "began". The Galaxy Game was the first official coin-op arcade game, released in September of '71, but there was only one unit and it was located on the campus of Stanford University. Computer Space was the first commercially released arcade machine, it was released two months later in November.

The first video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, and it was released in the fall of 1972. While not full fledged video games, the first two electronic games were Tennis For Two, created in 1958, and Spacewar!, created in 1961.

^ Odyssey.  I forgot all about that.  I still see games for that in thrift stores

  I remember playing Sea Wolf, a coin-op, in the late 70s...

  Here's a couple of coin-ops from 1976 at my 7th birthday party.  Can anyone figure out what these games are..?

  http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2006-6/1193336/7th-Birthday-2-(Straw-Hat-P.jpg

   I remember playing Sea Wolf, a coin-op, in the late 70s...

   Here's a couple of coin-ops from 1976 at my 7th birthday party.  Can anyone figure out what these games are..?

   http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2006-6/1193336/7th-Birthday-2-(Straw-Hat-P.jpg
Is it Battlezone?  1942? 

There weren't any video games in the 60's and early 70's. At our old hangout, Mal's pool hall, there were only Pin Ball Machines that only cost a dime or 3 games for a quarter. I am not sure when in the late 70's video games came out, but I think I got my Atari system in 1979 and then soon after, video arcades started springing up everywhere.

Computer Space from 1970 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7381

Asteroid from 1973 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6938
Alley Rally from 1975 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6863
Ace from 1976 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6803
280 ZZAP from 1976 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6777
Amazing Maze from 1976 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6875

Computer Space from 1970 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7381

Asteroid from 1973 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6938
Alley Rally from 1975 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6863
Ace from 1976 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6803
280 ZZAP from 1976 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6777
Amazing Maze from 1976 http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6875





I don't recall ever seeing Asteroid or any other video games during these years mentioned, but I grew up in a samll town  :)

I don't recall ever seeing Asteroid or any other video games during these years mentioned, but I grew up in a samll town  :)


I think this Asteroid and the one that later went on to be kinda infamous in videogame history were different ones.  I, too, grew up in a small town, so I'm sure I didn't see any of those either.  It's just what I found on the Killer List of Video Games (klov.com).

Mostly I remember old-timey pinball machines.  I loved playing one that had a playfield of a baseball field, and the flipper was the bat. 

I think this Asteroid and the one that later went on to be kinda infamous in videogame history were different ones. 


Correct.

Asteroids (Atari, 1979) was the one that became famous.  Although Atari had been around for a few years, this was also the game that really brought them to the forefront during the golden age of the arcade.

The "Asteroid" from 1973's all but forgotten.  Kind of a shame, really.  The bronze age games (roughly anything before 1978, and specifically, any game that was implemented in discrete logic rather than using an actual microprocessor) represented extremely clever engineering for their time.  Imagine programming without a physical CPU; just a bunch of chips that respond in certain ways if you poke at them just right. 

The difference is analagous to carburetors (the engine runs itself because everything's mechanical) and modern engines (where a computer controls the behavior of the mechanical bits that make the car move.)  A modern engine is a lot more powerful and efficient and can do things (variable valve timing, selectively shutting off cylinders at highway speeds, etc...) than the gadgetry in a Model T, but the Model T's pretty fascinating engineering nonetheless.

Similarly, you can do a lot more with a CPU and a stored program than you can with discrete logic, which is why video games "suddenly" became "interesting" around the same time 8-bit CPUs got cheap enough to put into an arcade machine.