The ExpertMeet, Sean Kelly. He is one of the three founders of The National Video Game History Museum. He is an expert in the video game field and has an excellent knowledge on the history of video games. He has a huge collection of video games and he actually made one! The Vectrex Multi-Cart which has over 50 games was created by Kelly! He also owns a gaming store that I visit to buy my games for my collection. Without Kelly video games would be different.
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Questions |
1. Who is the inventor of video games?
- Ralph Baer is the first person to successfully display a game on a regular television. There were "video games" before Ralph's Brown Box. William Higinbotham first invented "Tennis for Two" which was displayed on an oscilloscope way back in 1958. 2. When was and what was the first video game console to be released in the U.S.? -Magnavox Odyssey, 1972 3. Who is the father of video games? -Ralph Baer is considered the "Father of Videogames" 4. What was the video game crash of 1984? -The crash in 1984 was something of a "perfect storm" and there were many factors that contributed to it. There were nearly ten different consoles to choose from at that time. There were also a number of different highly-anticipated software titles that didn't end-up being very good games. Titles such as Atari 2600 Pac-Man and E.T. are among them. People were also looking at home computers as the "next big thing" and nearly all of them played much more advanced games than the consoles did. Then there were all of the devices that were designed to turn your home videogame console into a computer. Last but not least, the number of people playing games was relatively low and any mass exodus of players had a a very profound impact on the entire industry. Many people like to cite the amount of poor software as the number one cause but if you really think about it, there was far more crap on the Wii and even the Nintendo DS in recent history than there was in 1984 yet the market survived just fine. 5. What brought video games to be popular again the U.S.? -While Nintendo did bring the videogame industry back to life, it was not because they were trying to disguise their system as a "toy". I'm sure that you know the Nintendo system was released in Japan before it came out here in the US and there is was called the "Famicom" or "Family Computer System". What Nintendo did was revolutionize the way that software was published. Back in the early 80s, virtually anyone who could figure out how to write a game for one of those systems could do so and publish it themselves regardless of how good or bad the game was. Inside the Nintendo NES is a custom chip that is commonly referred to as the "lock out" chip. What this chip accomplishes is that anyone who wanted to make a game for their console had to have a unlock chip inside their cartridge or the game wouldn't play on the Nintendo NES. This achieves two things... First, Nintendo now had the power to "review" any game a company wanted to make for their system giving them an unprecedented amount of control over the content and QUALITY of software sold for play on their console. In other words, if they decided that a game was too violent they could simply say "no unlock chip for you". Or if they felt a game was too easy or the quality wasn't there, here again, the would deny the license. That is where the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" was born and it changed game publishing forever. Second, Nintendo also required game developers to publish their games through Nintendo and PAY Nintendo to do it. So when Capcom came up with their Mega Man game, they had to send it to Nintendo for approval, once approved, they had to PAY Nintendo to actually build their cartridges, boxes, and manuals. It was a brilliant move on Nintendo's part and to this day games are still made the exact same way. 6. Was there any controversy in video game history? -There has always been controversy in the videogame industry. One of the earliest controversies was over the "X-rated' Atari 2600 games. By today's standards, a game like Atari 2600 Custer's Revenge is laughable and most people wouldn't even think twice about it because it's fairly difficult to tell what's going on. Back then, the mere suggestion at something pornographic had people out picketing stores. Certainly the longest-running controversy in videogames is the violence in them. Yes, there is violence in some videogames and I am all for age restrictions for certain games. What I do not support at all is the suggestion that videogames can cause violent behavior in real life. Videogames are a form of entertainment very much like movies, books, even music. If a person can be influenced by the action in a videogame, in my opinion they are just as likely to be influenced by a book or a movie or a song. I do not believe it is the least bit sensible to blame the entertainment vehicle for the irrational behavior of an individual. People who are influenced by exposure to an entertainment medium are unstable people to begin with. It has been proven time and time again that unstable people will find "something" to set them off whether it be a videogame or a song or a misperception of a glance from a passerby. 7. How was the Sony PlayStation created? -The Playstation began as a deal between Nintendo and Sony that didn't quite work out the way Nintendo had planned. Did you know that Atari was originally approached by Nintendo to distribute the NES for them in the USA. Atari turned them down and Nintendo said "OK, we'll just do it ourselves then" and the rest is history. 8. What is the best selling video game to date? -Yes, the PS2 is the best-selling videogame console of all time. 9. What are some positive effects video games have on U.S. society? -One of the most positive impacts videogames have have on society is the way videogame players minds are conditioned to think. If you think about it, every videogame from Tetris to Call of Duty presents players with a problem to solve. In Tetris, you're trying to stack the blocks so that they come together without any holes. You're also trying to "look ahead" in such a way so as to maximize the number of lines you can create at once. In Call of Duty, you're presented with all sorts of problems. "How do I get to the enemy's base the fastest", "How can I go undetected for the longest possible time", "How can I shoot that guy and move to safety before the next guy comes along", "What is the most unpredictable way to move so that the opposing players won't see or hear me or anticipate my moves" Even though failure solve these problems may only result in your on-screen character being killed and you having to wait to re-spawn, gamers have to do a great deal of forward-thinking and problem solving to get through the game and gain more skill. I'll never forget a story I read a few years ago about this scientific problem that had gone unsolved for nearly a decade. While I don't remember specifically what the problem was, the gist of it was that scientists had been trying to complete a genetic sequence for almost ten years but were unable to do so. On a whim, they decided to present the genetic sequence as a videogame and made the game available to the public as an "impossible challenge". Gamers solved the "puzzle" within three hours of it's release. Gamers look at problems in a different way than most other people do because in "their world" (the videogame world) they are presented with unusual or even illogical problems every day. When they apply their game world logic to the real world the results can often be extraordinary. 10. Overall, what impact does video games have on U.S. history? -The impact the videogame industry has had on US history is very profound and apparent. The desire to play more and more realistic videogames drives many different technology sectors. For example, the companies NVidia and ATI exist mainly to provide graphics cards to PCs and as each new game comes out demanding higher graphical capabilities companies like these respond with products to meet the challenge. From the moment a videogame console is released to the public, engineers are busy developing new technology to decrease both the size and cost of successors to the console. The Slim version of the PS2 and PS3 consoles are direct examples of this. All of this can be summed-up in one word - JOBS! There are over 250,000 jobs in videogame and videogame-related fields in the USA alone. Many of these are good-paying jobs with the average game developer making approximately $92,000 per year. Fun Fact -The RCA Studio II console is a fairly simplistic game console that was released by RCA in 1977. The heart of this system is RCA's 1802 microprocessor which runs at 1.78MHz. Approximately 20 of these simple processors guided the Galileo spacecraft for over twenty years as it traveled to and eventually orbited Jupiter collecting unprecedented information about our solar system and Jupiter in particular. |