Fun fact, boys and girls: the history of gaming is about 73 years old. This may or may not seem impressive, depending on whether you were born post-YouTube or if you know who the Smothers Brothers are. Of course, that’s all provided you began counting at the invention of the cathode ray tube amusement device back in 1947. The first true video game, however, is a matter still up for debate – perhaps you’d prefer to start with Nim in 1941, or the classic OXO, which did not come about until a full 11 years later.
As murky as the beginnings of the industry are, murkier still are the beginnings of true imaginative gaming. As defined in my last article, imaginative gaming refers to the art of interactive storytelling, titles which allow players a certain freedom of interpretation and play beyond mere puzzle-solving and target practice. Since the definition itself is highly subjective, pinpointing the exact moment of origin is a bit like debating when humanity became human, or whether Kirk or Picard is better. It depends on who you ask.
Rather than following a strictly ordered timeline, which by my own definition would have to begin at about 1962 when the first seeds of imaginative gaming were first being planted, I’m going to begin this relatively brief history lesson a little later, and just a little heretically: in the beginning (sort of) was the Word, and the Word was Adventure.
The Advent of Adventure: IFs, MUDs, and ASCII
Adventure, also known as Colossal Cave Adventure or simply ADVENT, is heralded as both the first adventure game and the first interactive fiction (IF) game. Created in 1975 by William Crowther (and later added to with the help of Don Woods), Adventure began as a simple vector map of Kentucky’s Mammoth Caves. Crowther then used the map as the basis for a massive (dare I say, colossal) magical cave system populated with all the now-familiar fantasy archetypes. Since graphics at the time were less than impressive, Crowther relied solely on the written word, creating a sort of virtual version of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel.
Adventure kicked off a brief but glorious IF craze which would influence the digital adventure genre for decades to come. In 1977, Infocom’s Zork one-upped Crowther’s cave-crawler with its new and improved parsing, which allowed the game to recognize full, complex sentences like, “Hit the goblin with the blue sword,” as opposed to the clunky-sounding verb-only commands competing titles required (i.e. “hit goblin”).
In the following year, text-based escapades took another leap forward with MUD1, which allowed players to explore and vanquish foes together in the world’s first Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). Later years would see the rise of graphical MUDs such as The Shadow of Yserbius and early versions of Everquest, which featured static images as well as sound to accompany the writing, but the first MUDs were text-only. Many which have persisted or have been created since, such as Aardwolf (created in 1996) and Dark and Shadowed Lands (also from 1996), follow that tradition.
In 1980, the next big thing arrived in the form of Rogue. Created by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, Rogue introduced gamers to the wonderful world of dungeoncrawling, complete with procedurally generated content inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and some of the earliest known in-game ASCII art. In terms of imagination, Toy and Wichman asked quite a bit of gamers by today’s standards: everything, and I mean everything, in the original version was represented only by letters and numbers. Yet Rogue filled a necessary niche, becoming so iconic it has since become a permanent entry in gamers’ lexicons as the root of the popular term “roguelike.”
Though IFs and their ilk seemed to fade out as technology (and, by extension, graphics) improved, the art of the Word is not yet lost, and its influence continues to affect even the highest-res modern releases. Faster Than Light, Subset Games’s 2012 indie hit, dips into many a roguelike element, while the Cabrera Brother’s Cypher: Cyberpunk Text Adventure marries beautiful CG imagery with traditional IF storytelling. A variety of websites are dedicated to archiving new and classic IFs and MUDs, and tools like TADS and Twine keep the doors of invention wide open to any who are interested in keeping the art form alive.
Moving Pictures: Arcade Games and Retro Graphics
Chronologically speaking, the graphical side of gaming was off to a much earlier start than text adventures; after all, the first video game ever, whichever one you choose to believe it is, was almost certainly a majorly visual experience. Even PONG, Atari’s famous debut release, predates Adventure by three years. However, purposely retro graphics did not begin to appear on the scene until the late 90s – before that, low-res graphics were mostly the result of technological limitations, rather than aesthetic intent – leaving the origin story of old-school titles more than a little vague, at least in the context of imaginative gaming.
To begin at the beginning, however, the story (arguably) started with the creation of Spacewar! in 1962. Initially developed by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitane, Spacewar! relied on little more than a collection of bright dots and streaks of light against a blank black background to convince players that they were staring into the deep dark mystery of outer space. Unlike its predecessors, which mimicked analog entertainment already in existence (table tennis, tic-tac-toe, etc.), Spacewar! introduced a narrative element and shifted industry progress in a new direction. It dared to imagine not what already was but what could be, and asked players to do the same.
In 1971, Spacewar! rattled the system again when its arcade port, retitled Galaxy Game, became the earliest known coin-operated release, helping kindle the digital wildfire commonly referred to today as the golden age of arcade games. This era, spanning from the late 70s to the early 90s, set a plethora of industry milestones on parade before the public. It was during this time that the first sprites began to appear, possibly debuting in Taito’s Basketball in 1974 and appearing in countless releases thereafter, including familiar titles like Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1980), Donkey Kong (1981), and Legend of Zelda (1986).
As graphics got better, however, players became, in some ways, less involved. 1983 saw the release of Dragon’s Lair, developed under the partnership of Advanced Computer Microsystems and Disney legend Don Bluth. Though it remains to this day an impressive and enjoyable feat of animation, development focused on aesthetics at the cost of gameplay, and the result was something closer to an interactive movie than a video game. Nearly a decade later, Mortal Kombat took graphics evolution one bone-crunching stride forward with new, digitized sprites which mimicked the motions of real, live actors much more accurately than previously possible. The on-screen violence left so little to the imagination as to warrant the ESRB’s first-ever “M” rating, ramping up the pace in the virtual race for bigger, better, faster graphics, the winner of which has yet to cross the imaginary finish line.
Along the way, something funny happened. Not long after the end of the golden age (but years before the trend went mainstream), players got nostalgic. Enter the retrogaming movement, which rejected cutting edge progress in favor of old-school favorites. As gamers dug up old hardware and scoured bargain bins for near-forgotten gems of techno-yore, developers began working on recapturing the wonder of those early years, releasing fan-games like King’s Quest I: Quest for the Crown (2001) and its 2002 sequel.
Then came the retro-syled games: novel concepts with a golden-oldie feel. Among the earliest of these was Retro Game Challenge (2007), which harkened back with loving glee to the age of 8-bit magic. Now and then, big-time developers took a shot at the retro movement with games like Capcom’s Dark Void Zero (2010), but for the most part retrogaming remained the domain of independent developers. Over time, as indie gaming rose in popularity, so did retro-styled releases. Many have amassed fairly large and dedicated fanbases, such as Cave Story (2004), Fez (2012), and Mutant Mudds (2012).
Of course, IFs and retrogaming are only half the story. Whilst wordsmiths sought better parsing and studios like Nintendo and Atari built strong foundations for future pixel-masons to build on, more traditional artists eyed this new, wonderful digital medium with increasing interest, planting the seeds of a wholly other genre of gaming nearly thirty years before it would finally (and rather controversially) be named in print. Meanwhile, in Japan, a unique sort of text adventuring skyrocketed to popularity, giving rise in the process to what was, according to Square Enix, the world’s “first real detective game.” (To be continued — and concluded — in “A History of Imaginative Gaming, Part 2”!)