The Golden Age

The story

The Atari VCS, later called the 2600, arrived in 1977 and put cartridge games in homes everywhere.

In the arcades, Space Invaders (1978), Asteroids (1979), Pac-Man (1980) and Donkey Kong (1981), Shigeru Miyamoto’s first hit, made video games part of everyday life.

The screens changed too. Some cabinets still used black-and-white monitors with coloured film over the glass; vector monitors, as in Asteroids and Battlezone, drew bright lines with the beam instead of scanning the picture line by line; and colour raster screens, as in Missile Command (1980), played with a trackball, became the rule.

Home computers such as the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum brought games of a different kind, and games first written on university computers found their way onto them: Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) and Zork told stories in text, Rogue (1980) built a new dungeon every time, and MUD (1978) let players share one world. Ultima and Wizardry shaped the computer role-playing game.

The games in the arcade here are our own recreations of three kinds of screen of the time, under our own names, written from descriptions of the games. No original code is used, and the sprites are our own.