History of Game Development [2, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27]

Video game development has backgrounds that originated with military defense engineers and hackers. The combination is a bit funny isn’t it? However, it makes total sense from a historical perspective of the computer. Computers have come a long way from filling up full rooms only accessible to government offices and highly funded research universities to becoming portable enough that I can write this entry on my laptop while it sits on my lap while I drink my coffee.

Video game history is said to start around the 1940s, 1950s or 1960s, I used the phrase “said to start” because multiple resources say different as to who created the first video game and such title has been disputed over court! Oh capitalistic innovation, can’t exist without a dispute over patents and authorship. It’s not like someone would ever put their name on a project that isn’t theirs… *sips coffee as a woman*

Speaking of courts, one of the earliest video games was William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two. In a nuclear research lab, and with a very relatable motivation to “liven up the place” of an science exhibition, the head of Brookhaven National Laboratory William Higinbotham and technician Robert V. Dvorak programmed a simulation tennis game that could be interactive to the visiting public. Showing a five inches in diameter oscilloscope screen, Tennis for Two was introduced in 1958. High school students lined up to play at the exhibition that lasted three days. And thus causing a ripple effect that leads to some hackers having fun using MIT’s computer laboratory in the 1960s.

“Hacker” was a term that came to be after an MIT student casually found a basement in Building 26 of their university. Peter Samson and his friends then discovered the EAM room, a room filled with machines called Electronic Accounting Machines which used punch cards, electric punch machines, and sorting machines in order to get the correct data to run on the EAMs. [26] At night, this room was empty except for the students who were about to create a thousands of cyber security jobs in the future.

In 1959, hardly anyone would have been able to interact with a computer. Only those with special clearance would be able to interact with these machines due to the millions of dollars they would cost to obtain. And these freshman students knew it, and they really badly wanted to be able to interact with the IBM 407 computer on the first floor of Building 26. So what was the room they had found in the basement? It was the room where the punch cards that would later get fed into the IBM 407 to run for hours or days. It was unguarded, with EAM machines that the students had no idea how to use, but their curious minds saw the opportunity of a lifetime. Thus, founding the Tech Model Railroad Club and calling themselves hackers as they would get together at night for their casual meet ups in how to prank with the machine to run their train model railroads.

One such hacker, Steve Russel and his friends in the Tech Model Railroad Club gained access to the school’s new acquisition–the PDP-1 computer. In 1962, inspired by science fiction, they developed one of the first video games Spacewar [22], a dueling game between spaceships. However, back then the video game was not able to be available to the general public since computers were not easy to obtain or access.

It was during this time in the 1960s that Engineer Ralph Baer working on national military defense systems at Sanders Associates invented a multi-game console known as the “Brown Box” that was later licensed to Magnavox Odyssey to publish in 1972, thus starting the video game console industry. Ever heard of the console wars? However, a year before that, in 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, unleashed Computer Space, the first-ever arcade video game. [27]. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney were inspired by Tennis for Two and Spacewar.

A couple, or more court cases later, many arcade and video games began to appear. However, it wasn’t until around 30 years later where accessibility began to seriously be considered when font color and size could be adjustable in text-based adventure games. [2] Then, in 1987 Nintendo released the first ever control made with disabled gamers in mind. The NES Hands-Free controller from Nintendo was revolutionary but it was not easy to order which limited a lot of the interested customers. [2]

In 1990, the ADA was passed and the 1990s saw a lot more accessible innovations like button remapping and customization for gamers to make their controllers a better fit for themselves according to their mobility or strength abilities. In the early 2000s, difficulty levels and closed captions became more mainstream in popular video games making games more accessible for gamers with hearing impairments.

Until 2010, the Video and Communications Accessibility Act was passed and the video game industry was thrown for a loop. Although waivers and requests to be accepted were made, the FCC stood their ground after allowing certain waivers to pass. Brands like Xbox created the Xbox Adaptive Controller in 2018 which offers compatibility with assistive technologies. This focus on making accessible specific gaming technology showed their interest in making gaming more inclusive and more companies followed.

Although the history of video game development is pretty recent in the scheme of human history, technology has come so far to the point quantum computing is a thing. Have you heard about neurological computing? Yeah, me neither until a month ago I attended a research talk from a Harvard University researcher discussing their current work in figuring out what a single neuron is computationally capable of…what I’m getting at is that technology is super advanced however in trying to reach new heights, innovators and companies are usually forgetting about the largest minority in the world, which is the disabled community. Everyone will be disabled one day in their lives. To exclude the world to try and create new fancy technology like washing machines without buttons, companies are making blind and low vision people harder to be able to live in society.

We have the technology to make video games more accessible just like websites. Did you know that only 3% of the web is considered accessible to people who need to use screen readers in order to navigate the internet? This is important to know because screen readers are a software that needs to be compatible with the hardware like gaming consoles and their inner operating systems to be able to have blind and low vision gamers to read their text. From my understanding, until after the CVAA was passed gaming technology was becoming more compatible with such screen reader technology.

It is 2024, video games are here to stay and so are the accessibility efforts making waves in the industry. Let's keep the momentum going.