Early mainframe games
Developed prior to the rise of the commercial video game industry in the early 1970s, these early mainframe games were generally written by students or employees at large corporations in a machine or assembly language that could only be understood by the specific machine or computer type they were developed on.
This in turn led to a modest proliferation of generally small, text-based games on mainframe computers, with increasing complexity towards the end of the decade.
While games continued to be developed on mainframes and minicomputers through the 1970s, the rise of personal computers and the spread of high-level programming languages meant that later games were generally intended to or were capable of being run on personal computers, even when developed on a mainframe.
[2] By the end of the 1960s, mainframe computers and minicomputers were present in many academic research institutions and large companies such as Bell Labs.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), access to the TX-0 experimental computer was opened to students and employees of the university.
This in turn led to the development of programs that in addition to highlighting the power of the computer also contained an entertainment aspect.
[17] Mainframe games were developed outside of the IBM and DEC communities as well, such as the 1962 Polish Marienbad for the Odra 1003,[18] and blackjack, hangman, and tic-tac-toe on the United States Air Force and RAND's JOSS.
[19] By the latter half of the 1960s, higher-level programming languages such as BASIC which were able to be run on multiple types of computers further increased the reach of games developed at any given location.
By the 1967–68 school year the DTSS library of 500 programs for the system included, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz wrote, "many games".
Over a quarter of the system's usage was for casual or entertainment purposes, which Kemeny and Kurtz welcomed as helping users to become familiar with and not fear the computer.
They noted that "we have lost many a distinguished visitor for several hours while he quarterbacked the Dartmouth football team in a highly realistic simulated game".
[27] On Christmas Eve, 1970, the BBC television program Tomorrow's World broadcast a mainframe computer racing game played between TV presenter Raymond Baxter and British two-time Formula One world champion Graham Hill on their Christmas special.
The game was written by IBM-employee, Ray Bradshaw, using CALL/360 and required two data center operators to input the instructions.
Their popularity led him to start printing BASIC games in the DEC newsletter he edited, both ones he wrote and reader submissions.
[17][29] The game consists of ten rounds wherein the player, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, manages how much of their grain to spend on crops for the next round, feeding their people, and purchasing additional land, while dealing with random variations in crop yields and plagues.
[33] The other game Ahl originally ported to BASIC, Lunar Lander, appeared in the book in three different forms.
Ahl converted Jim Storer's FOCAL version to BASIC, changed some of the text, and published it in his newsletter.
The player can control four direct variables which interact to determine a battle's outcome: how much of their money to spend on food, salaries, and ammunition, and which of four offensive or four defensive strategies to use.
The player flies their ship around a two-dimensional scale model of the solar system with no objectives other than to attempt to land on various planets and moons.
[42][43] Space Travel never spread beyond Bell Labs or had an effect on future games, leaving its primary legacy as part of the original push for the development of Unix.
