Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 38)

Trigger Happy
40
same pivotal decade that saw the global war of the
space race and the tectonic cultural shifts of pop music,
videogames had launched a successful initial blitzkrieg
on the digital plains.
The lessons of the PDP-1’s unwitting involvement
in game history are twofold. First: give a man a tool,
and he will play with it. Second: pretty soon, everyone
will want one. Spacewar, however, never became a
mainstream entertainment, because so few people had
access to computers at the time.
7
The videogame
concept was there, but it had to wait ten years for cheap
computer-chip technology to make possible its wider
distribution.
Meanwhile, throughout the 1960s, the small
community of mainframe programmers produced other
highly influential game templates in tiny programs.
Lunar Lander was a turn-based game with a text
interface that required the player to administer
rocketthruster firing without running out of fuel before
meeting the surface. Hammurabi was the first God
game, requiring the user to manage a feudal kingdom
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7 DEC sold about fifty PDP-1s in total. Even by 1971, there was only a total
of about 50,000 computers in the world (The Economist, September 28,
1996). By the end of 1993, there were more than 173 million computers in
use, not counting videogame consoles.