Round up time.

Before I get at the second stage of my fun with video games I thought I'd do a quicky list of things that happened around the beginning of January from years past. Some notable, some laughable, some stupid.

Ok, here we go:

On January 1st, 404 AD, the last gladiator competition was held. Hmm, ran out of slaves, women and dwarfs?

On the same day in 1968 the Blue Velvets changed their name to Creedence Clearwater Revival. Thank God. And its way better than the Golliwogs.

Francesc d'Asís Xavier Cugat Mingall de Bru i Deulofeu (Xavier Cugat to you) was born in 1900. “I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve.”

On January 2, 1974, Richard Nixon brought in a law limiting the speed motorists could drive to 55mph. 55alive.

And on this day in 1904 Sally rand was born. Ne Harriet Beck she gave us the fan dance AND the bubble dance. What a girl.

On January 3, 1833, Britain seized control of the Falkland Islands. Argentina tried to get them back in 1984 but blew it.

And in 1888 the drinking straw was invented. Amazing it took that long.

Lucretia Coffin Mott was born January 3 1793. A very early, if not the first American feminist, and political thorn in the side for women's rights. What a girl.

On this day in 1970 Davey Jones left the Monkees. Sob.

There you have it. I'm off to find some Xavier Cugat MP3s.

Blah Blah

I'm finding it tougher to keep track of all the threads that this blog is starting to generate. Not that's it noticeable for you, the reader, but for me I've had a million real cool subjects that I just have to get to in 2008. Every time I look up something I see something else that I just HAVE to write about sometime soon.

I promised a few new series for 2008 and I am on the hunt for a small desk to use for model building. I changed my mind about building it on the kitchen table. In part because I just got it and have been revelling in eating my meals seated with beverage and napkin within easy reach, rather that balanced on my knee. And I have a series on toasters coming up and I don't want my toaster (prominently featured on my kitchen table)to accidentally appear in any model photos I take. It's not because of any toaster inferiority I suffer, it is a mighty toaster after all, but because I like to review the history of things in their proper order. When the time comes, I'll show you my toaster.

I have the perfect spot in my living room for a desk and an excellent magnifying lamp my wife got for me (she knows how to treat a guy well). I just have to figure out what model to build. I confess I'm a bit nervous. Tall ships or any boat models with rigging just scare the hell out of me. I love looking at them in museums and I marvel at the coiled ropes and how every line just seems to go in the right place, but for the love of Christ I don't know a windlass from a binnacle. I'm leaning towards an airplane, most likely from one of the world wars. At least I know front from back with those.

I plan to post a short list soon for readers to debate and vote on if they want. Once settled I'll see if I can find an actual model kit, do the research on paint and markings, and fill my evenings with the gentle sounds of muttered curses, paint fumes while sipping a brandy and soda. Makes you want to smoke cigars.

1st gen

Hey it's almost 2008 so I better get a post in or two. Took an extended week off from the blog to do some first hand beer research and plug Stella Artois. If I ever do a series on wine I have a bit of leg work completed too.

When I first looked at the video game "thing" I was a little surprised at how far back it all started. Like many, PONG was the game I thought was the first. Since it came out as a coin op arcade game, I was too young to actually get into bars to play it, but I did get a glimpse at the local pool hall where it was a sensation. Really odd to see the pool hall cool guys getting their licks down on this thing.

Atari came out with the arcade version in November 1972, a year after Computer Space. But it did something that all the other games didn't: it became a hit. As goofy as it seems nowadays to slide a white bar up and down, it was serious fun 40 years ago. The very first ping pong type game, Tennis for Two by William Hinginbotham, came out in 1958, but was played on a tiny oscilloscope screen. Few homes had TV's let alone electronics test equipment. What were they thinking?

Anyway, along came the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console with a version of ping pong on it in 1971. So Atari co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney had a legal fight on their hands. No matter, the profits from Pong would more than settle it up. Bushnell's concept was brilliant: devise a game that everyone already knows how to play. He had discovered from his release of Computer Space that consumers didn't read the written instructions provided with the game. But everyone can play pong.Pong's instructions were "Avoid missing ball for high score".

The game was tested at 2 bars and became a huge instant hit. One major reason was that almost all arcade games were for one player at a time, you took turns if you were playing against a foe, but Pong allowed two players to go head to head. Both machines were played till they broke down.

The lawsuit mentioned above was launched in 1974 by Magnavox and they won on all counts, but in one of the gaming industries first dramatic twists, Magnavox discontinued the Odyssey a year later and never went into the video game fray again. Atari did, and released the home version of Pong in 1975.

Say goodbye to 2007, see you in 2008.

Blah Blah Blah

A few more posts and I hit the century mark! In anticipation of the coming year I thought I'd give readers a hint at what's coming around the bend. I will definitely be going back to beer for a few updates, I plan on doing a series on recluses(especially kooky ones)and I'm going to go out and buy a model airplane and try to build it. This one will have a photo diary to chronicle the progress. OOh, and yes, the launch of WellBoy is nigh.

I will be posting through the hols and should pass 100 in a few days. Stick around.

Now its getting complicated.

So not long before the Magnavox Odyssey was launched an intrepid engineer named Nolan Bushnell had a few ideas of his own about where video games were going to go. Mr. Bushnell was thinking that no one was going to play games on their stupid TVs. You had to connect it up, they didn't have sound anyways and whats with those weird stick on backgrounds? He figured pool halls and dives was a much better place to learn your video game chops. Pinball arcades, long the haunt of rebellious youth, were a perfect spot to set one of these bad boys up.

After seeing a demonstration of Spacewar! in 1970 he built a hand wired arcade machine to play a version of it called Computer Space. Bushnell, along with his partner Ted Dabney, moved pretty quick in getting Computer Space to market. They had also seen a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey and were concerned in getting out of the gate first. Now technically, the Odyssey is considered first but only really if you count the fact that it was a "take home" game. Computer Space, released 6 months before Odyssey, was the first commercially available computer game, though designed to go as a stand alone machine in arcades.

The actual machine is quite cool looking, even if its almost 40. With its moulded sparkle blue cabinet and deeply recessed screen giving the player a real sense of immersion. The game electronics are absurdly basic. It didn't use a computer chip or IC's for that matter. Just hard wired components. Output was to a 15" B/W picture tube from a General Electric portable television.


Bushnell and Dabney moved on from Computer Space (it wasn't a huge hit) and formed Atari, who gave us Pong, which was a huge hit.

Crackle and pop.

Okay, here's one for the books: On this day in 1957 the first atomic power station opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Called "the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses"

Built by the Duquesne Light Company the first reactor went critical the beginning of December and the first watt of power ran through the wires on December 18th. The plant was built under the Atoms for Peace program of President Dwight Eisenhower.

It ran until 1982 when it was decommissioned and taken apart. A new plant,the Beaver County Power Station, was built adjacent to the old site and continues to run today.

What can brown do for you?

German / American scientist / engineer Ralph Baer (enough slashes for you?)came up with the idea in 1951 to attach a gaming system to an ordinary TV set. This earth shattering idea, in 1951 no less, would mean that any home with a TV could play games. Doesn't say much for the TV shows back then does it? TV out only 5 years and people are already thinking of playing video games on the damn idiot box.

Ralph came over to America with his family from Germany in the late 1930's. His father had quite rightly diagnosed the coming hell that would be Nazi Germany and moved his Jewish family pronto. He attended technical school and graduated a radio service technician in 1940. After a stint as an intelligence officer in the war he went back to school and earned a BSc degree in 1949. His specialty was the little known science of television. He eventually joined Sanders Associates and stayed with them till he retired in the late 80's. The company is a defence contractor
specializing in electronic systems.

Although he thought about the idea in 1951, it wasn't until 1966 that he started work on the first video game console ultimately called the "Brown Box". What his bosses thought about it I don't know. Still it must have seemed odd when their primary contracts were complex electronic devices for military applications.

By 1971 he had the thing going and Sanders Associates licensed the gizmo to Magnavox whose clever marketing department spotted a dud with its original name and changed it to the Magnavox Odyssey. By today's standards it was pretty plain. It lacked sound and had a bizarre method for dealing with black and white TVs (by far the dominant set in the homes of Americans then): the system was furnished with coloured plastic sticky overlays to put on the TV screen to simulate colour. Yeesh. Wonder how that worked if you changed game and left the old overlay on?

It did, however, have some epochal developments, genre defining technology, such as game cartridges and cool extras like the first "light gun". You plugged it into the console, loaded the shoot em up game and you could actually aim at the screen and, in real time with not that shabby accuracy, develop a video game "skill". Pretty heavy for 1972. Trouble was any light source worked for the gun, but hey, not many homes had electric lights then either.

Magnavox had its headaches marketing the machine and spent more time either suing or being sued by rival video game companies over the next few decades. In an ironic twist, video game giant Nintendo actually got its start in the industry marketing the Odyssey in Japan in 1975.