Feature: 'A Look at Development in North America's Cities'

Author: by Staff

In the half century that people have been playing games on video screens, the art form has undergone a Cambrian explosion of growth and diversification. Today's Gamasutra feature, compiling columns originally printed in Game Developer magazine, takes a look at the various talent pools that have collected across North America -- including Boston, Seattle, Toronto, the Bay Area, Raleigh, and Vancouver -- to discover the exotic life forms that have taken root. For example, we visit the seeds of Massachusetts' video game revolution: In the summer of 1961 MIT became the owner of a PDP-1 and installed it in the university's computer research lab. At that time, a loose-knit group of faculty and students were gathered around MIT's student run Tech Model Railroad Club, drawn together by a love for gear hacking and science fiction. The group began to experiment with the PDP-1 and worked up an ad hoc plan to do something interesting with the computer during its off hours. Even though the machine was intended for such complex scientific calculations as nuclear weapon simulation, the Tech Model Railroad Club looked at its capabilities and in a tremendous conceptual leap, decided that what it really needed to do was run a space game. The resulting two-player Spacewar! game was completed in 1962. Steve Russell developed the initial version along with contributions from J. M. Graetz, Alan Kotok, Dan Edwards, Peter Samson, and Wayne Wiitanen and the game became a favorite pastime at the research lab. Spacewar! soon made its way to DEC's assembly floor, where the game was used as the final test on outgoing PDP-1s. Because the computer's memory was magnetic, Spacewar! remained in memory after shut down, lying dormant until the computer was turned on in its new home, which more often than not was a university. Spacewar! spread across the country's higher education system inspiring new groups of young hackers to expand and refine its game play. Nolan Bushnell was an early convert to Spacewar!, first encountering the game at the University of Utah and later at Stanford. Seeing the enthusiasm for the game that sprung up wherever it was running inspired Bushnell to design his own arcade version called Computer Space in 1971. A year later Bushnell created Atari and with that company's foundation, along with the introduction of Ralph Baer's Magnavox Odyssey in the same year, the video game revolution was underway. And in Seattle is the root of the Microsoft juggernaut: The Microsoft corporation stretches far across the game development landscape and the root of its $230 billion mountain lies in Seattle, the childhood home of its founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Although formed in New Mexico in 1975, Microsoft relocated to the Seattle area in 1979. Two years later Microsoft introduced MS-DOS for the 8086 family of processors and the software was such a success that it became the default operating system for the vast majority of PC games released over the next ten years. Late in 1995 Microsoft released Windows 95 with a revamped interface and soon after the company made a serious commitment to game support with the introduction of the DirectX APIs. Although Microsoft had previously funded game development with titles like Flight Simulator and Age of Empires, the company knew that it would need to invest heavily in first-party development talent when it decided to enter the hardware business with the Xbox console. Known for making thoughtful and visually ambitious games for the Macintosh, Chicago-based Bungie seemed like an odd fit for Microsoft's new console. Joining the company in 2000, the studio packed up and moved to Microsoft's campus. As work progressed on what would become the genre-defining Halo, the studio chaffed under the Microsoft corporate structure and eventually moved to its own location in nearby Kirkland. Days after the release of Halo 3, Bungie became an independent studio again although Microsoft retains a minority stake and the two companies continue to have a close publishing relationship. Over the years, many ex-Microsoft employees have started their own companies in the Seattle area. The founders of Valve Corporation, Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, cut their teeth on OS development at Microsoft before forming a game development studio in 1996. The full Gamasutra feature explores key development hubs in the North American region with an in-depth look at each (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).