The History of Player Characters: 1970s - Part 1

This week on Super Adventures, I'm doing research!

Everyone knows about '90s video game heroes like Leon S. Kennedy and Lara Croft, and '80s heroes like Mario and Samus Aran haven't entirely slipped into obscurity yet. So what happened to all the '70s heroes? Why have I never heard about the stars of the Magnavox Odyssey and Fairchild Channel F? Home consoles and arcade cabinets began to appear at the very start of the decade and computer games had been around even longer, so there's a whole era of video games I somehow know next to nothing about.

Fortunately it turns out that sites like Hardcore Gaming 101 and YouTube channels like DrAmazing are full of useful information for me to study, and arcade-museum.com has an archive of arcade flyers. In fact "Critical Kate" Willært's 50-part Video Dames series on female video game heroes seemed like it was going to do half my job for me, so I was a bit disappointed when I found it had been cancelled (edit: horribly sidetracked) after part two. I would've have watched all 50 videos!

I'll be going from 1971 to 1979, tracking down the lost icons of video games one year at a time. Plus these games are all so early that I'll have plenty of ancient video game history to write about too.

---

1971

Computer Space

Amusement arcades have been around forever, existing long before arcade cabinets were invented. They featured other kinds of coin-operated devices like electro-mechanical games, pinball tables and pachinko machines. Computer games had been around before arcade games too, running on mainframes and minicomputers. By 1971 students could already play an early incarnation of The Oregon Trail, if their school had a teleprinter set up to print out the text.

But Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney had a new idea: if they took a computer game and put it into arcades they could make a lot of money. They chose the 1962 game Spacewar!, created for the massive $120,000 PDP-1, and worked to reproduce it with custom-designed hardware. The result was Computer Space, the very first arcade cabinet. The very first video game to be released commercially, in fact.

The game doesn't have any playable characters in it though! You fly a space rocket and shoot at flying saucers, and they didn't even give us a picture of the pilot on the cabinet.

Picture cheekily borrowed from djcube.co.uk's History of Star Trek Games

Though Computer Space wasn't the only game from 1971 to take inspiration from Spacewar!, as we also got Star Trek: a text-based strategy game by Mike Mayfield for the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe. And you don't get much more text-based than a game that prints the screen onto paper instead of a monitor.

This was the very first Star Trek video game, made just a couple of years after the series ended. In fact it may be the first game to be based on any TV series, though I doubt anyone at Paramount had been told it existed. You command the USS Enterprise on a mission to save the Federation from Klingons, so I suppose you're technically playing as Captain James T. Kirk. Really though, it's not the kind of game that has characters.

So that's one year down and no player characters so far. I'll see if I have any more luck with 1972.

---

1972

Computer Space wasn't a massive success, but it sold well enough for Bushnell and Dabney to start their own video game company. In November 1972 the newly formed Atari, Inc. released their first arcade cabinet: Pong!

Pong was addictive, it was wildly successful, and it was basically a copy of a table tennis game built into the Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey had come out just a couple of months earlier in September 1972, making it the world's first game console, and Magnavox the first game publisher to sue someone for patent infringement.

It's ping pong, so the rectangles represent bats, not entire players, and again there's no one depicted on the cabinet. So there are absolutely zero characters here. You don't even get an opponent, as it's two player only.

Not an actual photo!

But the Odyssey also included other games, like Tennis, and it came with a plastic overlay to go onto your TV featuring pictures of the players. They don't move as they're literally just stuck onto the glass, but technically Tennis Guy 1 and Tennis Guy 2 are two of the first video game heroes you can see on screen!

The geniuses at Magnavox had to somehow come up with multiple games for people to play with three moving blocks and a line, and they did a pretty good job. The system also features Football, Hockey, Ski, and Cat and Mouse. Plus there's Simon Says, which makes use of another plastic overlay sheet.

Also not an actual photo!

If you consider these two to be video game characters, then they're the first male and first female playable characters in history. Also the guy is the first character with ginger hair. They don't have names though, they're just Boy and Girl.

Incidentally, this is a three player game, as you need someone to read out the cards, which were included with the console. In fact lots of stuff was included, like gambling chips, fake money, dice... it was ridiculous. Why doesn't the Switch 2 come with a bunch of gambling chips, huh?

---

1973

I got a bunch of arcade flyers from 1973 and made this fantastic collage out of some of the art I found. There were lots of guys, lots of girls, a bit of diversity in skin tones, but I've spotted a pattern: 1973 was all about sports games.

Arcade machines had proven to be a success, but they were still using discrete logic circuitry instead of a CPU running code in RAM, so the kinds of games people could produce were limited. Basically we got a whole bunch of Pong clones, featuring nameless athletes represented by glowing rectangles.

Meanwhile computers were still doing their thing. We got another extremely unlicensed Star Trek game (who knew Trek appealed so much to computer nerds?) called Trek73, though this one starts by asking the player their name and sex. As far as I know this is the very first game to ask, though I doubt it changes much as you're still shooting at Klingon Battle Cruisers.

Plus DEC commissioned a game this year called Moonlander to show off the capabilities of their new PDP-based GT40 graphics terminal. It's a real time version of an earlier game called Lunar Lander that's controlled by a light pen, and you play as a nameless, faceless astronaut safely contained in his module.

But if you can land the thing you can tempt him into getting out and going for a walk as a tiny stick man. If you can land it in the right place he can even go get a McDonald's!

This may be the first human character to be depicted in a video game, the first video game cutscene, the first game to have multiple screens, the first video game Easter egg, and the first product placement (kind of)!

I'm sorry about the resolution of the picture, it's probably not showing off the capabilities of the GT40 graphics terminal, but it's what I got. I'm just happy I found the bloody place and landed my craft safely. A screenshot of the game complaining that I'd crashed into the only McDonald's on the moon would've been a disappointing consolation prize after all the time it took to gently lower the thing down.

Man, I really want some fries now.

---

1974

I've been looking through the arcade flyers again and they were still doing sports games in 1974. Lots of pictures of athletes showing you what those white rectangles are meant to represent. In fact there are even more sports now, as they've added basketball and baseball games, though I'm seeing fewer female players.

Also racing games have started to appear as well, with the artwork always dressing the drivers up in helmets and goggles to avoid any possibility that someone might consider one of them to be a character.

Though Qwak's flyer features something I didn't spot back in 1973: a dude with a gun! He's a cartoony little guy as well, which is something else I haven't seen much of in arcades yet. Could this be an actual video game character? Nah, not really. He's not anywhere on the cabinet or in the game, and the game's basically Duck Hunt. You use a massive light gun rifle to shoot birds... though they are actually bird-shaped, not just white dots this time.

Graphics were evolving and legendary Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado realised that if you put enough rectangles down together you can form shapes like basketball hoops and basketball players. That means that TV Basketball isn't just the first basketball arcade game, it's the first game with a vaguely human-shaped character that you slide up and down directly. They're not animated yet, but it's a start.

The shading is presumably showing team colours, as how else would you know what side the two players in the middle were on? The game is four player, though I tried playing it by myself without anyone moving the other team and I still managed to lose 6-10. I am that bad at sports games. In my defence, players can't float all the way to the top of the screen, so the ball can easily sail over their hands. 

But TV Basketball wasn't the best looking game in arcades this year, as that award probably has to go to Wild Gunman, made by legendary Game & Watch and Game Boy designer Gunpei Yokoi for Nintendo (and published by Sega in the US).
 

Wild Gunman is apparently the first light gun game to feature full-motion video, projected from 16mm film. It's not a video game though, it's electro-mechanical! Plus like Qwak you play as yourself, holding a gun at the screen, there's no player character.

It's still amazing to me that there was any kind of game that looked like this just two years after Pong, especially considering all the arcade games that still looked like Pong. This was in arcades 10 years before Dragon's Lair and 20 years before interactive movies became a fad.

Though it shows the advantage that video games had by coming along so late compared to other media. The designers of Wild Gunman didn't have to invent the camera and experiment with capturing images on film, they could build upon what filmmakers had already created over decades of movie production. Game developers didn't have to invent the novel either, they could've put paragraphs of text into video games from day one if they'd had the RAM and could figure out how to make a game out of it.

Anyway those are your three main options for arcade games it seems: sports, racing or shooters. But they weren't really things that mainframe computers were designed for, so the people sitting at terminals had to invent their own genres.

It's hard to pin down definite 'firsts' from a time when computer games were written by amateurs (and then deleted by admins), but Peter Langston's Wander has a good claim to being the very first text adventure. In fact it was a text adventure creation toolkit.

Look at all that text, it's like I'm reading a book! This screenshot is from the earliest Wander world, Castle, and it tells the story of how you got pulled inside your television. So the first adventure game was an isekai story! It may also count as the first survival game, as you need to find food before your hunger timer ticks down.

Trouble is, despite Castle having an intro and a story, you play as 'you', not a player character. So once again, I've got nothing.

I think the problem here is that video games could take advantage of older forms of media and entertainment, and sports titles were just mimicking real world games. But when it came to playing the role of someone else, there was much less for designers to pull from. Role-playing tabletop games are actually younger than video games.

But 1974 was the year that the very first edition of Dungeons & Dragons was published! It took the well-established concept of wargames with miniatures and then pulled the focus in smaller. Instead of players controlling entire squads and armies, they had just one character to look after and worked alongside other players. Each of these characters had ability scores like strength and dexterity that defined them, along with a class and a fantasy race. They even had names.

This kind of tactical gameplay wasn't really suited to arcade machines and game consoles, due to their focus on action gameplay, and the fact that these machines still didn't have a CPU or RAM. But computers did, and the students who'd been making Star Trek games suddenly had something else to inspire them.

Damn, now I'm realising we never got a single-player Star Trek RPG, how does that make any sense?

---

1975

Arcades were still getting the occasional sports game in 1975, but I can tell from game titles like Jet Fighter, Tank, Gun Fight, Western Gun and Anti-Aircraft etc. that there had been a bit of a shift towards war. The space shooters hadn't arrived yet, but that makes sense I suppose as this was still two years before Star Wars brought World War II dogfighting to space.

This was the year that introduced blockbuster movies however, with Jaws becoming the first film to make more than $100 million. So in retrospect I really should've expected the shark genre to suddenly become a thing. I don't think any publisher actually paid for the Jaws licence, though one was cheeky enough to call their game Shark Jaws.

Some of the shark games let you play as a diver, at least one lets you play as the shark, and you can even get a couple of frames of animation. Though they're not quite as advanced as cowboy shooter Western Gun...

Sorry about the picture. There are a few Western Gun cabinets still around apparently, but I had to make do with video footage from an old documentary.

The game was by the same designer who added humans to TV Basketball, Tomohiro Nishikado, and he took it a step further here by giving the cowboys different shades for clothing and making their legs waggle as they move. They also moved their arms to aim their guns, which was controlled with a second joystick, so this was basically the first twin-stick shooter. Maybe even the first video game where you shoot people at all, considering that Wild Gunman is an electro-mechanical game.

Western Gun was actually based on another electro-mechanical game from 1969 called Gun Fight, which had little toy cowboys running on tracks on either side of a miniature Western scene, complete with cacti and a saloon.

Anyway, Western Gun was clever, but it was still using discrete logic TTL integrated circuits instead of running code on a CPU. We're still a while away from an arcade machine that works like a computer.

But not that far away, as in September 1975 the US reimplementation of Western Gun, retitled Gun Fight, became the very first arcade game to feature a CPU! It runs on an 8-bit Intel 8080 chip, only a year old at the time.

Unfortunately for me, the cowboys are basically still toys moving up and down on invisible tracks, so they don't have a character. Plus if you think about it, this is kind of just Pong except with obstacles in the middle of the screen and a ball you don't want to move towards.

The arcade cabinet would later make a cameo appearance in the 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead, and so did Qwak actually, so there's good footage of both of them in action. And yeah it really does take place in inky blackness, there wasn't a painted background.

Meanwhile, on computers, mainframe coders had been busy trying to adapt Dungeons & Dragons into video games so RPGs began popping up all over the place. Well, everywhere with a PLATO or PDP mainframe with a nice amber monitor that could handle graphics, at least.

Released in 1975, The Dungeon (aka pedit5) wasn't just one of the first dungeon crawlers, it was one of the first with save games to let you keep your character between sessions. 

You don't actually get to choose anything about your (male) hero though, you just roll your stats and give them a name. Then you move their icon around a maze of rooms, 'B'ashing doors, finding loot and fighting monsters. Gun Fight wished it could have a maze of rooms!

Combat gives you the standard list of options to choose from, just like in Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy a decade later, so they already had the basics established this early.

Plus there's The Game of Dungeons (dnd), which plays almost exactly the same. You walk around, encounter an enemy, then choose if you're going to fight, evade, use magic, or heal. I've heard that it also invented boss fights, though I made poor choices in the regular fights so I haven't got any screenshots of that for you.

Another RPG called Dungeon also came out this year. I didn't play this one myself, but it apparently featured multiplayer parties.

I'm starting to see a pattern forming: these games were developed by the most creative and innovative RPG designers the world had to offer at this point, and they all used the name "Dungeon". Well I suppose there was also Moria, which was named after a place in The Lord of the Rings.

Anyway, by 1975 user-made characters are now definitely a thing in video games, though you don't get to make any dialogue choices yet, or participate in a story, or choose their appearance. There's room for improvement.

---

Okay, I've hit the halfway point of the decade so I'm taking a break! This is enough words for one page I think.

I haven't really found any characters to talk about yet, but that's fine, it's still early. Arcade machines only just got microprocessors and all people had to play at home were Pong consoles. It's in the second half of the '70s that things really got interesting. Maybe. Hopefully.

TO BE CONTINUED

---

Next on Super Adventures, I'm still speedrunning the '70s.

Though there's plenty here for you to discuss if you feel like leaving a comment. There just aren't any player characters yet.