
How Video Games Changed the World
- Year:
- 2013
- 120 min
- 12 Views
1
Videogames,
for years the domain of outsiders
and geeks, and people who look
a bit like owls.
Somewhere down the line,
gaming went mainstream
18 hours a day, even George Alagiah.
And while that is a lie, games have
infiltrated popular culture
and fundamentally changed the way we
interact with the world.
Yes, really.
Now, tonight, I'll share
my personal,
possibly bull-headed selection of
the 25 most significant games that
ever there were, and we'll be
hearing from videogame insiders,
videogame likers, and some
reassuring, friendly, familiar faces
so easily spooked viewers don't
with terrified indignation.
We'll show you games that broke
out of the pixelated ghetto
and romped across
mainstream culture.
We'll see games that will make you
feel guilty, or make you cry,
or even introduced you
to your soulmate.
In fact, we'll show you nothing
less than how videogames
changed the world...
because that is the title,
so we have to.
Today, in 2013, games are almost
as commonplace as shoes.
Practically everyone plays them
in some form.
Even bacon replicant David Cameron
was reportedly addicted to the
jolly food slash 'em up
Fruit Ninja on the iPad.
graphically staggering,
painstakingly realistic,
or conceptually sophisticated
as they tend to be today.
No, they had to start somewhere.
Gaming's Big Bang happened in 1972
with the release of a simple
looking tennis simulator,
a game called Pong.
Pong, of course, was very simple.
You know, it begins with a black
screen, as all great moments do.
It's meant to be kind of table tennis
but it was like a moving white bar
that would go up and down,
and you could bounce
a ball from side to side.
But it was so limited,
so kind of basic in its function,
and yet, curiously, satisfying.
Pong wasn't the first videogame
but it was the first truly
successful one, and it contains
much of the same basic DNA as almost
every game that followed.
It was co-created by Atari founder
Nolan Bushnell
and programmer Allan Alcorn.
Without these two legendary figures,
there would be no videogames
industry at all.
I had completed the design and
we said, "Well, it plays pretty good,
"let's put it in a box and see
And all it had was the name
Pong on it. There's no instructions,
there's just a coinmach.
And Nolan and I carried it over to
Andy Capp's Tavern,
put it on a barrel, and within
a short time, within a week or
so, the thing stopped working,
and so I went over to fix it...
That became full of quarters.
Yeah, I opened it up
and the quarters just gushed out,
filled my pockets with quarters
and came in the next day and said,
"Nolan, I think we've got...
Something is going on here."
And you go, "Hmm."
Pong was incredibly simple.
Everybody knows how to play
ping-pong. It was a very stylised
version of ping-pong on a TV.
The controls were simple,
just a knob each to move the paddle.
There was also hidden depth.
The power allowed the ball to come
off the bats in different angles,
depending on where you hit it,
so it introduced this whole
idea of skill and strategy, which is
really, really important.
Yes, it's hard to remember now,
but in 1972 this was cutting edge.
You know, I found the graphics
on Pong,
the little players, the little lines,
it was quite impressive,
and the ball moved smoothly.
By ball, I mean square!
We didn't make the ball square
because we thought that
a square ball was cool.
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"How Video Games Changed the World" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2019. Web. 13 Dec. 2019. <https://www.scripts.com/script/how_video_games_changed_the_world_10327>.