Early Computer Games

Many of the early computer games were developed on University mainframe computers by student designers, and distributed through the networks by the PLATO system and the DECUS system. During the first half of the 1970s, games typically communicated to the player on paper, using a line printer or teletype machines; however, by 1975, many universities had discarded these terminals for CRT screens, which could display thirty lines of text in a few seconds rather than the minute or more that printing on paper required. The introduction of CRTs led to the development of a series of games that drew graphics on the screen.

Sports Games

In 1971, the first computer baseball game was written by Don Daglow on a PDP-10 mainframe at Pomona College, California, in which players could manage individual games or simulate an entire season. The writer went on to design Weaver Baseball, published by Electronic Arts in 1987.

Star Trek Games

A number of Star Trek themed games were available via PLATO and DECUS throughout the 1970s. The first (called 'Star Trek') was created by Mike Mayfield of MIT in 1971 on a Sigma 7 minicomputer; this was played on a series of small maps of galactic sectors printed on the screen or on paper. Not only was this one of the best-known and most widely played of the 1970's Star Trek games, but it was the first major game to be ported across hardware platforms by students. Don Daglow also wrote a popular Star Trek game during 1971-72 for the PDP-10, which presented the action as a script spoken by the TV programme's characters.

Adventure Games

The first text adventure was written by Gregory Yob in 1972 for the PDP-10. The game was called Hunt the Wumpus and was based on a simple hide-and-seek format, featuring a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) that lurked deep inside a network of rooms. The player would enter commands to move through the rooms using a command line text interface, avoiding bottomless pits, super bats and the Wumpus itself. The player was able to fire an arrow into the Wumpus' chamber to slay it; however, firing the arrow into the wrong chamber would startle the Wumpus, which would then devour the player. The game was written in response to existing hide-and-seek games such as Hurkle, Snark and Mugwump.

In 1975, the first text adventure game as gamers would recognise it today was written by Will Crowther, a computer programmer and keen caver, who wrote a game known as ADVENT, which later become known as Colossal Cave or Adventure. It was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10 and required the player to control the game through simple sentence-like text commands, receiving descriptive text as output. The game was later re-created by students on PLATO, and was one of the few titles that became part of both the PLATO and PDP-10 traditions.

In 1977, Dave Lebling, Tim Anderson, Marc Blank and Bruce Daniels of MIT began writing one of the first interactive fiction computer games, and an early descendent of Colossal Cave Adventure. The game, Zork, was set in a sprawling underground labyrinth through which the player had to navigate in order to find treasures and return alive with them. The Zork team recognised the potential to move these games to the new personal computers, and in 1979, they founded text adventure publisher Infocom.

First Person Shooters

Pioneering examples of early multi-player 3D first person shooters appeared in 1974 with games such as Maze War and Spasim. These games introduced a number of new concepts, such as first-person 3D Perspective, avatars (players were represented to each other as eyeballs), level mapping (players created a visual map of the playfield as they progressed) and representation of a player's position on a playfield.

Role Playing Games

In 1975, Don Daglow, who was then a student at Claremont Graduate University, California, wrote a game called Dungeon on PDP-10 mainframes based on the new table-top role playing game Dungeons & Dragons. This was the first computer role playing game, and although displayed in text, it was also the first game to use line of sight graphics, maps that showed the areas that the party had seen or could see, allowing for darkness or light, and the different vision of dwarves, elves and other species. Another role playing game based on Dungeons and Dragons called dnd appeared around the same time, written on PLATO system CDC computers.

Multi-Player Games

Kelton Flinn and John Taylor of the University of Virginia created the first version of Air in 1977. This was a text air combat game that went on to become the first-ever graphical online multi-player game, Air Warrior (1987). Air was a quasi-real time, multi-player game that attempted to render 3-D on the terminal using ASCII graphics.

Rogue Games

In 1980, Glenn Wichman, Michael Toy and Ken Arnold released a game called Rogue on BSD Unix, which displayed dungeon maps using text characters, somewhat like the earlier games of Dungeon on the PDP-10 and dnd on PLATO. However, unlike those game, Rogue generated a random dungeon for each play session, creating a new set of enemies and new path to treasure for each game. Like Zork, Rogue was adapted for home computers and became a commercial product.

Home Computer Games

Although the majority of early video games appeared mainly in video arcades, university mainframe computers and home video consoles, the rapid evolution of home computers began to allow users to program simple games, using source code printed in books, magazines and newsletters. These games included clones of mainframe classics such as Star Trek, and then later clones of popular arcade games.

Floppy disks, ROM cartridges and cassette tapes were also used to distribute programs to home computer users, either by mail order, or simply sold in local shops.