Specifically, if I were to think about notable games throughout the relatively short history of video games, which game would I start with?
I’m always split between Adventure and Pong, for different reasons. Which game would you start with?
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I think Adventure. Pong is amazing and historical, but it’s in a sense nothing new. It was basically tennis. Adventure was something entirely different.
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I mean I think its kind of reductionist to skip one over the other you gotta talk about both.
Pong was highly influential to pre Apple Wozniac. Not only directly in his personal life wanting to play a home arcade version of it, but also some of his contract work at Atari were involved in second gen Pong evolutions like breakout. It also helped jump start the whole arcade track which preceded game consoles.
Let us not forget whole first generation of console gaming was pong clones.
Adventure was mainly part of the mainframe scene initially, and was highly influential to those who could access the mainframe scene but that was a different audience from arcades. Its easy to forget but mainframe games were inaccessible to a lot of people. For the first few years of it’s existence the easiest way to get access to adventure initially was to attend a college.
Adventure wouldn’t make it to the general public until the rise of the initial Woz designed Apple Machines or various Commodore machines. (In terms of hardware thats a mostly american take though.)
That isn’t to say Adventure wasn’t crazy influential and once home computing took off it drove a lot of PC gaming in the early years. You can also draw straight lines from adventure to things like Infocom, Wizardry and Ultima. Which kind of started the whole PC / Console game genre divisions for a good long while.
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