‘Rise of the Videogames’ documentary shows how old-school hackers changed the world

FROM JASON’S CABLE BOX — The debut of Discovery Channel’s five-hour Rise of the Videogame documentary had me hooked Wednesday, giving me a brand new respect for my old Atari 2600 and its peers.

It seems that I inadvertently blogged about clips from the miniseries earlier this month before it aired — at least in the U.S. It was originally a BBC production, from what I can tell, and the clips that made it to YouTube appear to have Dutch subtitles. I didn’t mind seeing it twice. It’s scheduled to repeat regularly through Christmas.

The documentary intercuts Cold War and war games footage with modern game sequences, pop culture commentary, and interviews of the fathers of the video game industry.

One shot even shows Spacewar! inventor Steve “Slug” Russell bragging to the camera, “Something that I sometimes say is that I unleashed the curse of video games upon the world.”

The shows producers hypothesize that video games are a natural extension of America’s obsession with the space race and its fears about mutual assured destruction. It was Army analyst Willy Higginbotham who started the craze by tweaking his oscilloscope — a refrigerator-sized cathode tube contraption used by programmers to calibrate hardware.

Hacking his military hardware to relieve boredom, Higginbotham programmed the machine so that two people could play a crude game of “Tennis For Two” in glowing green waveforms.

His ideas and methods spread everywhere there were computers — which in the 1950s and 1960s was mainly restricted to military and research applications. In universities across the nation, researchers passed along line code instructions for hijacking primitive computational machinery. They taught the machines to play games.

But it was inventor Ralph Baer who saw the commercial possibilities of games in the home and invented the Magnavox Odyssey in 1968. In Rise of the Videogame, he tells the camera about his 1960s vision of making 40 million U.S. television sets do more than just receive two or three channels

The Odyssey was the world’s first console system when it was released to the masses in 1972 and featured 28 games and a light gun. Nintendo was born as an Odyssey distributor, but Atari quickly killed the platform.

Nolan Bushnell (pictured above) got his start hawking a clone of Russell’s Spacewar!. In 1972, he teamed with Ted Dabney to create Atari (a term from the Japanese board game Go, Atari is kind of like check in chess). Two years later, the duo combined to put Pong in homes rather than just in arcades.

Ironically, Bushnell made far more money in the late 1970s and early 80s as founder of Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater.

For the rest of the story and speculation on the future of video game technology, tune in to Discovery. It’s well worth five hours of your time.

Quick facts

Video games in the U.S. are a $7.1 billion per year industry.

More than 40 percent of gamers are women.

For every arcade game released in the U.S., nine are released in Japan.

Pokemon Red, Blue, and Green is the best-selling video game of all time (that wasn’t bundled with a console), with about 40 million copies worldwide. Super Mario Brothers, which came with the original NES, sold about the same number of copies.

Nintendo’s iconic plumber (and sometime carpenter), Mario, has appeared in more than 200 games.

The Sims is the best-selling PC game of all-time, with 16 million copies.

What M*A*S*H teaches us about Iraq

FROM THE DISTANT SHORES OF JASON’S CHILDHOOD – I’m not sure the cable and satellite generations can understand exactly how pervasive M*A*S*H was in the antennae days.

Set in Korea — America’s original “forgotten war” — the show ran from 1972 to 1983, and ranked in the top 10 shows on television for nine of those years. But what is more impressive is that when the series finale aired in February 1983 it captured 77 percent of the market share, with 55 million families (105 million viewers total) tuning in to watch, according to Nielsen ratings.

It remains the single highest-rated prime-time show in American history, topping the “Who Shot J.R.?” episode of Dallas, the mini-series finale of Roots, all SuperBowls, and even the legendary 1976 telecast of Gone With the Wind.

Even modern broadcasts haven’t been able to surpass M*A*S*H despite the fact that the U.S. population has grown by more than 60 million in the past 20 years. SuperBowl XLI (2007), with 91 million viewers total, is the most-watched show since 2000, and still didn’t exceed M*A*S*H‘s market share by a long-shot.

In 90s context (for Andrew and others), let’s run down the list of other finales: Cheers (1993), 80 million viewers; Seinfeld (1998), 76 million viewers; Friends (2004, 52.5 million viewers.

Skipping a little: Home Improvement (1999), 35.5 million viewers; Will and Grace (2006), 18 million viewers; Monday Night Football (2005), 14.5 million viewers; The Sopranos (2007), 12 million viewers.

My point: Where shows like Lost and Heroes get lots of water cooler play today, everybody — and I mean everybody — in the 70s and 80s had tuned in to M*A*S*H the night before. It’s a phenomenon the scale of which we’d never seen before and haven’t seen since.

Then there’s the theme — “Suicide Is Painless” — which was penned by director Robert Altman when he was 14. For my money, it’s the most recognizable television opener in all of history and the most poignant, rivaled only by the Cheers theme, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.”

The movie version is far superior:

I remember lying close to my grandparents’ woodgrain-paneled console television in the mid-80s, getting nasty orange shag rugburns on my elbows as I watched M*A*S*H reruns. More often than not, I would be shuffled to bed because the show’s themes were not accessible or appropriate for a 6- or 7-year-old boy.

I wanted to understand, and to some degree I did. I got a few of the punch-lines, though most of the sex jokes passed right over my spiky-haired head. More importantly, though (and just like Star Trek: The Next Generation would some few years later), M*A*S*H gave me a concrete ethical compass.

I said an ethical one, not a moral one. There’s an important difference.

But it’s only now, watching the show again in the Sunday afternoon scheduling lull or late-nights on TV Land, that I realize exactly how soulful, how comically tragic, how rueful of the past, and how horribly prescient the scripts were.

Against the cultural context of the Iraq War, these lines seem to be screaming across the decades:

Frank Burns: “I’m sick of hearing about the wounded. What about all the thousands of wonderful guys who are fighting this war without any of the credit or the glory that always goes to those lucky few who just happen to get shot.”

Father Mulcahy (singing): “There’s no one singing war songs now, like people used to do
No ‘Over There’, no ‘Praise the Lord’, no ‘Glory Hallelu’
Perhaps at last we’ve asked ourselves what we should have asked before
With the pain and death this madness brings, what were we ever singing for?”

Col. Potter: “Every month there’s a new procedure we have to learn because somebody’s come up with an even better way to mutilate the human body! Tell me this, captain: How the hell am I supposed to keep up with it? If they can invent better ways to kill each other, why can’t they invent a way to end this stupid war?”

Nothing’s gotten easier since the 80s, though we seem to be more culturally isolated from actually overseas conflicts than ever.

I’ve spoken with soldiers who’ve returned from tours in Iraq. Combat is far more clinical today, but is still laced with the inherent futility of fighting an insurgent enemy. They suffer the same delicate psychological trauma as Hawkeye and Hunnicutt — they might as well be prisoners of war, because they can’t go home, and they can’t forget what they’ve seen.

They also wrestle today with feelings of pettiness and sexual frustration — the two main mechanics of the television show’s weekly plot. And while medicine has advanced significantly in the past 50 years, it hasn’t found a cure for the doctors who feel helpless as they heal soldiers so they can be marched again like puppets straight back to the front.

What M*A*S*H did for an entire generation and more was teach very subtly (and with a laugh track) how nobody benefits from martial conflict, especially those who have pledged to first do no harm.

It’s a lesson I think we could all do well to hear again as a nation, if only we could get behind one source as prevalent and trustworthy as the 4077th.

The man who put the ping in our Pong

FROM JASON’S GAPING MAW OF ADMIRATION – It seems crazy, but people who study the Earth’s ancient past — historiticians, we call them — have discovered that once upon a time there were no vidjagames.

It was a dark and unenlightened time. We can only tell from fossil remains how primitive Man survived with flint and twigs, herding the wild mammoths and fending off sabre-toothed tigers. Yes, the 1960s were a dangerous era, and pastologists continue to puzzle out how Cro-Nixon man weathered Nature’s harsh kill-or-be-killed contest.

Then Ralph Baer emerged to give his tribe the greatest invention since fire: Pong.

This documentary shows Baer’s story: How a veteran dreamed of using vacuum tubes and laughable “micro”chips to make the world’s simplest electronic game in 1972.

PONG INSTRUCTIONS:

Step 1: Insert quarter.

Step 2: Ball will serve automatically.

Step 3: Avoid missing ball for high score.