HISTORY OF GAME GRAPHICS. AN ERA WITHOUT COLOR
Today, when the performance of the latest consoles is measured in teraflops, and 3D models of video game protagonists contain hundreds of thousands of polygons, it is hard to imagine that games once consisted only of white lines and huge squares. What's more, sometimes they didn't need screens at all.
In this second installment of our History of Game Graphics, we've decided to touch on the beginnings. Now we're going to tell you - and show you - what the very first games were like.
Of course, this is not an encyclopedia. Just a brief excursion into the years that many of you probably did not catch.
WITHOUT SCREENS
The first computer games had no screens at all. Information was displayed using light bulbs, for example. One of the first games, Nimatron, used this technology.
It was created in the early 1940s and looked like a device with bulbs: seven in four columns. The game was a human-computer duel. In one turn, a player could extinguish several lamps in one of the columns. Next, the computer acted. The winner was the one who extinguished the last bulb.
In 1951 there was a ?sequel? Nimrod.
FIRST IMAGE
Later technology progressed, and in 1952 full-fledged video games began to appear, with information displayed on screens.
Some of these were:
1952. OXO (electron-beam tube).
1958. Tennis-For-Two (oscilloscope).
CONSOLE IN THE HOME
Later on, a major boost to the industry came with the release of the first home game consoles.
Brown Box. In the second half of the 1960s, "The Father of Video Games" Ralph Baer created the Brown Box. It allowed you to play several different games on a standard TV. They were the simplest projects, such as a ping pong simulator (the ancestor of Pong). The Brown Box was the prototype of the console that we are going to talk about below.
Magnavox Odyssey. The world's first commercial gaming console was released in 1972. Graphics were without frills, as well as in the Brown Box - monochrome and simple geometric shapes. However, the developers cheated and created external films that were superimposed on the TV screen and formed a semblance of game maps. You could play hockey, soccer, cat-and-mouse and more.
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FALSE 3D
As early as the first half of the 1970s, developers began dreaming about 3D. And in spite of the fact that it was still many years before the first full-fledged 3D games appeared, they started to "deceive" players with false 3D already.
So, there was the game Maze War - one of the first first-person shooters. It recreated a linear perspective, which gave depth to the image. The user was allowed to "freely" move around the locations.
Another example of false 3D might be Spasim in 1974. Objects in it consist of 3D lines, forming a skeleton-like framework and allegedly highlighting surface roughness.
OTHER ICONIC GAMES FROM THE MONOCHROME ERA
Information taken from the websites: