Home » Mahjong » Who invented computer games? Where and who invented Tetris? The first Tetris in history

Who invented computer games? Where and who invented Tetris? The first Tetris in history

Poker is considered one of the most popular card games. Now there are many poker rooms where tens of thousands of people play every day. Many people wonder who invented poker and when this game even appeared.

There is no definite answer, since the history of poker began a long time ago. There are only some theories of origin that have not been fully proven.

The origins of the game in Europe

In the mid-16th century, the first mentions of poker appeared in Europe. It is believed that this is where poker was invented. The game was more popular among Italians and Spaniards. The entertainment was not called poker, but "primero". The rules here also differed from modern ones:

The players were dealt not 2, but 3 cards at once.
There were no names of poker combinations, but it was possible to collect identical cards by height or suit.
There was only one round of betting, after which the cards were shown.

A little later in the 18th century, an analogue of poker appeared among the British. Here the players were given 5 cards per hand, from which they collected a combination. The principle here is very similar to classic poker. Already in these times, bluffing was actively used to win money. The British still believe that it was in their country that poker was invented.

History from Asia

Many people are interested in the question: when did poker appear? Some sources mention that poker originated in Asia in the 10th century. This game was preferred by the emperor and his subjects. The cards were carved from ivory and cost a lot of money.

In the story of the general Shang Tsung, there is mention of this gambling game. He preferred poker and was considered a fairly strong player. Many historians believe that it was this man who invented poker.

Differences and features of the rules in the 10th century:

Only 5 people could play at the same time.
The deck contained only 25 ivory cards.
There were 5 suits in total.

Most historians adhere to the idea that poker originated in China.

Game in America

There is a version that the game and basic rules of poker were invented and brought to America by the French. The first games began in Louisiana. It was here that poker arose, which in meaning and rules is closest to modern game. In 1834, a deck of 52 cards was used for poker in America.

Sailors loved this game very much and preferred to play poker on the ship. Therefore, the rules have spread to other states. In the Wild West, the game became an important part of the culture; almost every person knew about the rules.

There is an assumption that poker was invented Jonathan Green. He mentioned the game many times in his letters, describing the nuances and rules. However, from his text it can be understood that he simply watched the play of his sailor friends and made written notes. No other evidence of his authorship could be found. Green called playing cards sailor's entertainment, since during the trip it was the main leisure time of sailors.

How did poker gain popularity?

Many people are interested in when modern poker appeared and from what period it began to gain its popularity. The game began to gain popularity in America and gradually spread throughout Europe. In the 19th century, almost all European countries already knew the rules of the game, which still apply today.. However, at that time poker did not have such mass popularity; the game was not taken seriously. And only after the First World War a major “wave” of popularization of poker began, everyone began to study the rules in detail and treat the game as a sport.

The most popular type of poker is Texas Hold'em. It appeared in Texas. He later gained popularity in Las Vegas. At first, poker was played only among a small circle of friends. A little later, this game began to appear in entertainment venues in Las Vegas. At the moment, this is where the most poker clubs are opened.

In 1970, the most famous and largest tournament in the world series of poker appeared - WSOP. Players from all over the world come to it to receive the main prize and compete with the best opponents. After this, other, no less large and popular poker tournaments began to appear.

Who exactly invented poker?

Many players believe that the game itself was invented by Doyle Brunson. This player is considered a true poker legend. Brunson truly dedicated his entire life to the game and was able to achieve incredible results. The player himself does not take ownership of the poker game and its rules.

The meaning of the word "poker"

It is not entirely known where the rules first appeared and who invented the game of poker. The same goes for the term "poker". Historians cannot give an exact answer about the origin of this word.. However, there are these versions:

Many people believe that the German word pochspiel became the first title of the game. However, this fact has not received precise evidence.
There is a version that poker came from the word poque. The French called this a card game with similar rules.
In English pосket- This is a pocket or purse. Therefore, there is a version that robbers and cheaters gave card game that's the name. Only then did they replace the word pосket on poker.
The word "poker" from English has an exact translation - poker. However, this item has nothing to do with the game and the rules, which misleads many historians.

Conclusion

Historians around the world find it difficult to answer exactly the question of who invented poker. The game appeared so long ago that many facts about it have been lost. Over the years, the rules and nuances have been changed and supplemented many times. The game began to increase in popularity in the 70s of the last century. Now poker has gained so much fame that it is equated to a sport, and not to gambling entertainment. People do this as their main job. Entire poker schools are opening where you can learn the tactics and psychology of playing poker. In our Poker Academy, players are trained in the Academy Win Strategy course under the guidance of a coach, who helps them easily determine the strength of their opponents and choose a table where a novice player can effectively play according to the strategy we provide. You will understand additional software: you will understand how to work with Holdem Manager 2, set up your own HUD and with the help of this you will learn to read your opponents. You will also receive 3 hours of individual lessons with a personal trainer, after which the results will not be long in coming. Sign up using the link below.

The birth of the world's first computer game. Time - 60 years (more precisely 1962), twentieth century, place - Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The characters are programmers who needed to somehow while away the time not spent working on development, coding (and other activities typical of people in this profession), and had access to computers. The SpaceWar game was released on one of the mainframes.

One can argue about its primacy, since in the same 1952 and 1958 games such as Tic-Tac-Toe (tic-tac-toe) and something like ping-pong were created. SpaceWar can be called the first computer game due to the fact that it was developed purely for use on a computer. The laurels in this matter go to a group of programmers, led by Steve Russell and Martin Graetz, who were fond of science fiction. A simple program was written and literally after a short period of time two missiles appeared on the screen, firing at one another. The game took approximately 200 man-hours to create and was created on a PDP-1 machine. Its processor performed 100 thousand operations per second, RAM - 9 kilobytes.

car PDP-1

In those days there was no talk of raster graphic displays, there were only text terminals. Vector graphic displays, which appeared abroad at the end of the 60s, were at the peak of graphic capabilities; the electron beam no longer ran along lines on each frame, but could draw the contours of objects specified by the program.

The eternal toy, as SpaceWar is called, is simple and dynamic, and consists of this: fighting take place against the backdrop of the night sky, copying the location of the stars above Cambridge, in the center of the screen is the sun, which attracts ships and their cartridges, firing shells, the winner is the one who kills the other player without falling into the gravitational trap of the star.

First by genre computer game It was an arcade. The very concept of an arcade comes from one detail of a covered corridor where slot machines used to be located (they appeared 10 years after the creation of SpaceWar)

It's not difficult to predict what happened next. The businessmen got down to business. In 1971, the world saw the game Computer Space. Vector graphics, the same plot as in Space War. It was the first commercially available computer game built into an arcade slot machine. Such an automaton was a device without a central processor and RAM or ROM, the system was based on discrete logic and consisted of microcircuits and diodes. It was housed in a stylish case of “futuristic” design, with a 15-inch black and white monitor. But the game was not a success. As Nolan himself said: “You had to read the instructions first before you could play, and people didn’t want to read the instructions. To succeed, I needed to come up with a game that everyone already knew the rules of, something so simple that any drunk in any bar could play it.”

27-year-old Nolan Bushnell did not lose heart; in 1972 a simple arcade game, Pong, was released. Sound effects have been added to the game. The target audience for this game was initially beer bar regulars. The first slot machine was installed in a bar - Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. The game was a success, the very next day the machine broke down... due to an overflowing coin acceptor.

Pure arithmetic: the production cost of one Pong device was approximately $500, one machine was sold for 1200, and for a week of operation such a machine brought the bar owner $300.

Such success did not go unnoticed; competitors appeared. Steve Wozniak developed in four days at the suggestion of Steve Jobs next game Breakout. This game was a single-player version of Pong, where you used a ball to smash the wall at the top of the screen. 5,000 green bills were paid for its development; Jobs “honestly” gave half ($350) to Wozniak.

Sega developed similar games- Gigas and Gigas Mark 2.

Gigas Mark 2

First game consoles, Odyssey released by Magnavox

The first set-top box did not have a microprocessor or chips in the case. The Odyssey device was based on diode-transistor logic and contained 40 diodes and 40 transistors.

A group of developers with William Crowther (in the mid-seventies) developed the game Adventure, it was a text-based “adventure game”, it became the first adventure genre game. Adventure ran on DEC mainframes (KA-10 series). The essence of the game is an interactive narrative in which you need to explore the endless labyrinths of the Colossal Cave (its real prototype- Bedquilt Cave in Kentucky) in search of treasure. Several lines of text appeared on the screen, describing where the game character was, what was happening around him, and all his possible actions. The player could type what action he wanted to perform and, depending on the command, text was displayed on the screen about the consequences of the player's move, and so on until the end of the game.

In 1974, the video game Maze War (Maze) was developed, which became one of the ancestors of modern first-person shooters, the first game with a deathmatch mode. Players moved through the maze (forward, backward, turned right and left (90° each time), the ability to look into doorways was available. Simple tile-based graphics were used, the player moved along invisible squares. On the screen, other participants in the game were in the form of eyeballs When an opponent appeared on the screen, you had to shoot at him, points were awarded if you hit them, and points were deducted if your opponent hit you.

Maze War (Maze)

Some games (arcade) of the 70s - 80s that conquered the world market

Space Invaders

Asteroids

Battlezone

The game already used vector 3D graphics with a horizontal black and white vector monitor. While playing, you had the feeling that you were physically on the battlefield; one version of this game was developed for the American army as a “trainer” simulator.

Rogue (bagel, as we began to call it)

Became the first in the direction of roguelike games. There was already a game universe randomly created by a computer; the player received almost limitless freedom of movement and action.

NetHack

The Dwarf Fortress

play

Hunt the Wumpus

Ken Thompson founded the family of games in 1972 Hunt the Wumpus - text adventure computer games. The player finds himself in a maze, the goal is to find Wampus and shoot him, the path lies through a cave, where from time to time a regiment of bats flies at you, and the road resembles our roads in early spring. There are 20 doors in the cave that are connected to each other, the player, once in one of the rooms, either shoots at one of the three doors, or goes into some room through the selected door. Well, from your weapon you have 5 “well-aimed” arrows. Happy hunting)

It's impossible not to remember famous game

Pac-Man

It was developed by a Japanese programmer, an employee of the Namco corporation, Toru Iwatani. The idea came to its creator suddenly when he was eating pizza, pakku-man (indeed, the hero looks like a round pizza with one missing piece) - that’s what it was originally called, which in Japanese meant “to eat”, and in Japan it somehow it didn’t work, but after it was acquired by the American company Midway, the game captivated many gamers. In the game you had to deal with aliens or monsters, while dodging the ghosts that were chasing the hero. The goal of the game is very simple: the player is in a maze that is filled with “food” (in the form of dots), you need to eat everything in order to move to the next level.

Toru Iwatani:

At the end of the 70s, arcade halls, which we in Japan call " gaming centers", attracted boys who were eager to destroy hordes of digital aliens. I wanted to come up with a game that was no less attractive, with light humor, and that everyone, even women, would enjoy playing.

Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde are ghosts who either attacked Pac-Man from all sides, then retreated.

Zork

In hacker slang it means an unfinished program.

Another text (later graphic) adventure computer game. The player (adventurer) found himself in the atmosphere of an extremely rich and vibrant Universe, in search of 20 treasures he solved various puzzles and went through labyrinths. A game without a graphical shell, everything that happened was described in text.

“The best creator of graphics is your imagination. It is always with you!”

This game combines two modern genres - quests as such and turn-based strategy. All the player’s actions are entered directly into the action line, depending on what kind of command it is and whether it is entered correctly, Zork will react differently. There are a total of 80 commands in the original trilogy that can be used as you progress. For gameplay, an arcade function was added - counting the player's moves, which made it possible to compete with other gamers in the speed of completion.

It’s hard to imagine how you can present the plot of a game without a graphical shell in such a way as to capture the atmosphere of the game. Zork resembles an interactive book that each player writes himself. With each new action, Zork rewards the player with new information that on the other side of the screen, at the end of the game, an approximate picture of what is happening will be created. Main character game - a nameless traveler finds an unremarkable basement in an old abandoned forest house that will lead him to the great underground empire of Zork. Later, 16 parts of this game were created throughout history.

In the empire, our hero encounters miracles previously unseen in the world: magic, fantastic creatures, mysterious corporations, unknown artifacts, after collecting which he receives the title of dungeon master.

Initially, it was decided to split the game into three parts, since the developers understood that due to a lack of memory on hard drives, it would be impossible to make it one part. They also wrote their own scripting language that would optimize the space occupied by the game. This is how their own engine, Z-Machin, appeared.

Donkey Kong

It was developed in 1981 for arcade machines by Nintendo. The main character of the game was a gorilla named Dunkey Kong. Game developer Shigeru Miyamoto took his inspiration from a scene in King Kong. On the screen in front of the player there is a level divided into several flights of stairs, where a funny-looking man in a red and blue overalls (Jumpman) is running, he deftly jumped over the barrels rolling towards him and fireballs, climbed ladders and jumped over chasms. His goal is to climb to the very top, defeat the barrel-throwing Kong and save his sweet Lady. The game became very popular, but Universal Studios sued Nintendo. “American film producers demanded that Nintendo buy the right to produce and distribute it own game, or, as one option, completely abandon the use of the Donkey Kong trademark." Through the efforts of a lawyer, Nintendo won the lawsuit and gained even more PR.

Donkey Kong became the founder of the platformer genre.

Super Mario Bros

Everyone knows Mario. A man in his prime, moderately well-fed, wearing a red and blue robe with straps and a cap with capital letter"M", the mustachioed plumber Mario, is the most popular Nintendo and video game character of all time. Mario's life story is closely intertwined with the story of Dunky Kong. In the first part of the Donkey Kong game, Mario was the hero who saved his beloved from the clutches of Dunkey Kong. This is where it came from Super game Mario Bros. The game was released on the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) console.

Mario character evolution

The game was included in the Guinness Book of Records as the best-selling game in the world.

Core War - a game for programmers

More from the history of the development of games of the 80s. Entertainment is exclusively for programming. Its essence is the battle between programs. The goal is to write a fighter who will defeat the rest.

Programs that participate in the battle were loaded into a common memory area and launched simultaneously. The one that works the longest is the winner. If the program executed an illegal instruction, it died. The author does not add such instructions to it..." - other programs “bomb” the memory with them in the hope of spoiling their competitors. In addition, trying to escape the bombing, almost all programs constantly move themselves in memory. The memory is looped - after the last cell it goes first (zero)".

The set of commands in Core Wars is limited: it consists of the mov, arithmetic and jmp commands with minor variations. The classic size of a fighter program is also small - from one team to a dozen.
more details about Core Wars

Only programmers could enjoy writing and debugging an assembler warrior program that destroys rivals in the memory of a virtual computer.

This is not the entire list of games created in the 60-80s of the last century. Time passed, computers slowly became more powerful, games similar to today’s began to appear, 256 colors instead of 16, etc., etc. These years were the foundation for the development of the computer games industry.

People love to play games and have been doing so since the very first day of their earthly existence. And not only people, but also animals are also not averse to playing with each other. But it is not for nothing that man is recognized as a rational being, because he has found a way to play even when there is no other person nearby.

In the last century, when people invented the first computer, it was intended exclusively for business. And not just any business, but incredibly important, because he worked for the military. And in those distant years, it could not have occurred to anyone that the power of such a device could be used only for entertainment. Moreover, people simply could not admit that after about half a century computers would be in almost every home, and after another couple of decades, the world would be swept by an epidemic of smart mobile devices.

It's now quite easy to download games to the Android Play Market, download games to the Android Play Market and enjoy the process on your mobile device. After all, this is the 21st century, which means that in order to play there is no need to carry around a huge monitor and system unit. But let's go back about fifty years ago and remember to whom we owe what we have today virtual world, can easily compete with the real world.

Then in 1962, two American students, who had read science fiction, decided to create the world they dreamed of. In just a couple of months, Steve Russell and Martin Gretz came up with a virtual world that would be the envy of space science fiction authors. In fact, the game was incredibly simple. Two starships fought for supremacy in the starry sky, and now no one would even pay attention to it, but at that moment SpacyWar was a triumph

A simple program ran on a modern computer in those years, which could perform about 100 thousand operations per second. By the way, these days computers are capable of performing about 2 billion operations. But in those years one could only dream of such a thing. The game looked very funny by today's standards. The stars were spread out on a black circle that symbolized the sky. And around them two ships fought. Moreover, each had a clearly defined supply of fuel and weapons. The task was the simplest. Destroy the enemy and survive yourself. For this, several secrets were invented; in particular, it was possible to use the gravitational field of the star for its movement. It cannot be said that the game brought a lot of money to the creators, but it was popular. True, this secret was hidden in the fact that computer manufacturers installed it on sold models as a test program.

The very first computer game - a dramatic duel between two spaceships- called Spacewar. In a couple of months, in their free time, several programmers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created it. The group was led by Steve Russel and Martin Graetz, who met at a university travel club and bonded over their passion for science fiction. In January 1962 they wrote a simple program, and a month later it was already a simple game with two missiles shooting at each other. Spacewar ran on the PDP-1 computer, which was new at the time. Its processor performed 100 thousand operations per second (modern ones, remember, accelerate to 2 billion), and the PDP-1 had 9 kilobytes of RAM.

The round cathode display displayed a map of the fighting - a fragment of the night sky copying the location of the stars over Cambridge. Two opponents using a keyboard or joystick could move their shuttles and shoot. Ammunition and fuel quantity were limited. To dodge the shot, you could spin around the star in the center of the map, using its gravity, or make a “hyper jump” - the ship would disappear and appear in a random place on the map.

Spacewar was also the first commercial game. In 1971, its arcade version Computer Space appeared, which, however, was not successful. In addition, a few months earlier, a slot machine with another modification of Spacewar - the Galaxy Game - was installed in the Stanford student union. Galaxy Game was a huge success within six years, which allowed the creator of the slot, Bill Pitts, to return the $60 thousand invested in the project. Today his version of Spacewar is in the collection of the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View, California.

Spacewar did not bring any income to its creators, except for fame in narrow programming circles. “The only money I made from Spacewar were consulting fees in 1970s litigation related to gaming industry“- says one of the creators of the game Alan Kotok. Everyone who was involved in the creation of Spacewar still works with computers. These are several hardware developers, several programmers, one professor and even one employee of the American National Security Agency (NSA). They say that it was the desire to play Spacewar on the PDP-7 that subsequently prompted Ken Thomson to create a prototype operating system UNIX, however, it is possible that all these are empty tales.

The London Underground is the oldest in the world. It was in Foggy Albion that the first metro appeared. It has been in continuous operation since 1863 and carries 3 million passengers daily, which is →

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) was an artist, famous for his Parisian diorama, created together with the artist Charles Bouton. Daguerre showed the public impressive light paintings. For example, " dense forest at different hours →

Charles "Chuck" Foley was born in Lafayette, Indiana. It is known that he presented his first invention at the age of 10 - for the family farm, the boy invented a latch for a cattle pen. Chuck studied at school until the eighth grade, after which he began working as a salesman. Foley also visited the army - he served in the Air Force national guard in Michigan (Michigan Air National Guard).

After the army, Chuck worked as an assembly line assembler for the Ford Motor Company, and in 1962 he found work at the Lakeside Toys factory in Minnesota. It was there, at the toy factory, that his indefatigable imagination as an inventor came in handy - Chuck Foley invented dozens of toys and games.

The game "Twister" was born in 1966, and in the same year it already became deafeningly popular after Johnny Carson and Eva Gabor played it live on the air of the program "The Tonight Show". For the next decade and a half, Twister was played in living rooms across America. What made Twister good was its versatility - both children and adults played it with passion. It was played at parties, birthdays, it was played at children's parties, in parks and in schools. “A game that ties you in knots” is how Twister officially presents itself. “Sex in a box” - this is how spiteful critics described the game. Meanwhile, Americans continued to play and buy the game.

Foley shared his invention with Neil W. Rabens, and the game was soon sold to Hasbro.

Foley's other inventions include a toy launch helicopter, children's toy plastic handcuffs, a stamp remover, and more.

Chuck later lived for a long time in North Carolina, but when his health began to fail with age, he moved back to Minnesota to be closer to his family. His wife Kathleen died of breast cancer in 1975, and after that Chuck never remarried.

Chuck Foley died on July 1, 2013, after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. He died at the Golden Living Center, leaving behind six sons and three daughters. At the time of his death, the inventor was 82 years old.

Chuck's son, Mark Foley, said that while his father was best known as the inventor of the Twister, it was actually just one of his many wonderful inventions.

Best of the day

Army fan
Visited:149

Tightrope show between the Twin Towers