Zhang Shule is a columnist for People's Daily Online and People's Post and Telegraph

In the pixel era,

The black space is best painted.

First of all, it should be explained that leading 30 years is an imaginary number.

Although the first home game console to be connected to a television, the Brown Box, was developed in 1966, it wasn't until 1972 that Atari developed Pong.

Prior to that, in 1971, the world's first arcade prototype was created in a computer lab in the United States.

The console, called "COMPUTER SPACE", has everything from coin holes to consoles to game boards, and already has the initial model of an arcade machine.

I have to say that there is only a year apart, from the laboratory to the commercial, the speed of the transformation of this wave of scientific and technological achievements is really fast to make people feel very "game".

After that, until the 2000s, arcades continued to have the feeling of crushing other game carriers, both in popularity and in technology.

Moreover, it is also worth mentioning that many of the games that later became popular on home consoles, such as Donkey Kong, Contra, and Little Bee, were originally derived from arcades.

However, the appearance of "Pong" was only a shock at the time, and its poor graphics quality and boring gameplay made it only a pioneer, but it did not really establish the form of an arcade game.

At the same time, Atari quickly transformed into a home game console after its disruptive innovation came out of the arcade machine, and truly created its own short-lived global outlet.

A serendipitous coincidence, which made the arcade shine.

In 1977, Star Wars was released.

This film, which can be regarded as a milestone for science fiction movies and Hollywood visual blockbusters, has set off a starship war fantasy around the world.

Who can make ordinary people realize their Star Wars dreams?

It's easy to think of games nowadays, but it seems a bit whimsical in an era when digital media could only rely on a simple stacking of a few pixels to abstract compositions.

Brainstorming is either madness or a gold mine.

The Japanese, who have always been fascinated by space, starships, and mechas, are naturally immersed in the space scenes depicted in "Star Wars".

A fan named Tomohiro Nishikaku later recalled that after watching Star Wars in the cinema, he established the idea of setting the game in space.

A YEAR LATER, TAITO, THE FAN'S COMPANY, RELEASED A SHOOTER ARCADE GAME CALLED SPACE INVADERS.

The game is uncomplicated, and players need to operate a space fighter that looks more like a gun emplacement, shooting at enemies moving above the bottom of the screen, and constantly dodging enemy bullets.

Every few seconds, an array of enemy planes will take a step closer to your baseline, and if you are knocked down three times or if the enemy rushes into your position at the bottom of the screen, you will lose the game.

Due to the limitations of arcade functions at that time, players in the game could only move left and right and shoot guns, and it was still far from flying freely.

But it was such a simple game, which exploded in Japan as soon as it was launched, selling 100,000 arcade machines in a year (at that time, one game was equipped with one arcade machine), and together with the income from arcade coins, the total sales of that year were close to 600 million US dollars.

The game was later released in the U.S. and Europe, with more than 360,000 units installed in two years and total sales of nearly $1 billion.

Perhaps coincidentally, many flashpoints in the history of video games are related to space.

For example, SpaceWar!, which is widely considered to be the world's first video game, is also a two-player shooter and is also set in space.

At that time, an MIT student named Steve Russell used bright spots randomly distributed on the dark background of an oscilloscope on a PDP-1 minicomputer (then a small computer) to simulate the appearance of a starry sky, creating a bizarre starry sky.

The gameplay is also Star Wars-flavored, and the player must use a variety of weapons to destroy the opposing spaceship while avoiding the various planets that come your way.

Of course, there are very few people playing this game.

After all, in that era when computers were still in the laboratory, the temperature of the computer room could easily rise to more than 50°C without air conditioning equipment for those who consumed a lot of power and generated a huge amount of heat.

At the same time, the PDP-1 minicomputer is very expensive and will only be purchased by the government, relatively large universities or enterprises.

But all this does not prevent it from going down in history.

Speaking of which, why are arcade machines and video games all space games?

The reasons for this may be as follows:

In the early era of pixels, it was difficult to draw images that specifically pointed to certain real things.

The ethereal world of space can be composed of a black background and some small points of light.

The rest is left to the player's brain.

Therefore, the width and narrowness of the imagination space determines that the starting point is the sea of stars.

Published in the People's Post and Telegraph on August 31, 2024, Issue 412 of the column of "Le Youji".

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