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Video games are one of the most widely used computer programs written and they exist from over several decades. People such as Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates are the ones, who started it all.
Since the dawn of the computer era computer games were used not only to entertain the consumer, but also to test the computer’s performance. In the late sixties one of the first creators and distributors of video games was the company “DEC”. The simple, but yet fun and addictive, games were a good way to kill a couple of hours.
The first distribution of the computer operating system Unix, released on the market in 1971, featured games such as blackjack, chess, moo (a guessing game), and tic-tac-toe. All of them were very primitive and text based. Since then all Unix-like OS distributions came with build in such games, which could be ran from the shell console.
In the late seventies the corporation Tandy introduced it’s microcomputer – the TRS-80 with two demo versions of games(yes, there were demos back then), written in BASIC and supplied on cassette: backgammon and blackjack, introducing many people to computer games for the first time. Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak wrote the game “Brick Out” in Integer BASIC (also coded by Wozniak). The game made its informal debut on a prototype II at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting in 1976, and than its formal debut under the name “Little Brick Out”, written by Bruce Tognizzini, after which Apple releases it as part of DOS 3.2 in 1979.
Bill Gates wrote at least one game and its name was DONKEY, better known by its file name: DONKEY.BAS . Microsoft included it as a demonstration for the capabilities of the BASIC programming language, which was embedded in the early versions of PC DOS(The IBM equivalent of MS-DOS, also developed by Microsoft).
Early versions of Macintosh OS included small applications called “Desk Accessories” - small programs roughly equivalent to today’s gadgets/widgets that could be run quickly on top of another application (this was before the Mac could multitask). Such application was the first game written for Macintosh, called Puzzle, written by Andy Hertzfeld.
The first Windows(Windows 1.0, released in 1985) ever to appear came with only one game called Reversi, which Microsoft also included in Windows 2.0 and Windows 3.0 . The game finally got cut from Windows 3.1 in favor of Minesweeper.
“Desk Mate” is a program, which offered users a GUI interface under DOS and on it people were able to play a graphical version of the game Hangman. MS-DOS 5.0 and newer versions came with QBasic, the best interpreter for programming languages at this time. The operating system featured two games – Nibbles and Gorillas. We can assume, that Nibbles was the first version of the well known game “Snake”. Gorillas was a QBasic programming demonstration included with MS-DOS 5.0 and up. Two players had to throw exploding bananas(which detonated on impact) at each other, thus giving them points for each successful kill of the rival player. Just as Microsoft was ready to release its Windows 3.1, IBM distributed a 32bit operating system – OS/2 2.0, which had a rich, for the time, choice of games. It featured seven games. Later developments of the OS didn’t cut down on the number of games.
The world famous game, Windows Solitaire, first shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990. Four years later Mac OS featured a Jigsaw Puzzle game, where the player had to arrange a puzzle of map of the Earth. The operating system was Apple Macintosh System 7.5 with 32 bit colors, which allowed for a great variety of colors to be used for the puzzle at that time.
Freecell first appeared with Windows 3.0 in 1990 and then then later shipped as part of Windows Entertainment Pack 2 in 1991. However, Freecell first gained widespread recognition when it shipped with Windows 95 in 1995. It also came with Windows ME and XP and had a makeover for the Vista and 7 versions of Windows.
NeXTSTEP operating system debuted in 1988 with the all-black NeXT Computer, the first machine produced by Steve Jobs’ post-Apple company. From 1989 the operating system contained in itself a game of chess, called: Chess.app . After NeXTSTEP stopped making hardware the operating system changed its name to OPENSTEP. Versions 4.2 had build in Chess, Billiards, and BoinkOut (a clone of Breakout). An interesting fact is, that the game is still build in Mac OS X, the successor of NeXTSTEP.
3D Pinball: Space Cadet first appears on Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 and than with every copy of Windows 98, NT, ME, and XP sold from 1998 to the present. Apple bought NeXT in 1996, so that they can use its OPENSTEP operating system, which was intended to replace Apple’s old OS. It later became Mac OS X Server 1.0, which grew into the Mac OS X we all know today. To this day, OS X ships with Chess, although the game received a fundamental overhaul with the release of OS X 10.3 Panther in 2003.
Windows ME featured many new games, some of which allowed the users to play a game over the internet: Internet Checkers, Internet Chess, Internet Hearts, Internet Spades, Internet Backgammon, and Internet Reversi. In Windows ME were included some new games such as Spider Solitaire and Classic Hearts, but they also left the well known Pinball, Minesweeper, Freecell, and Solitaire.
We have seen how, in the past, Unix and Linux distributions offered text based games, which had to be ran trough the console. They were later replaced with games, based on XWindow. Ubuntu had always offered a great variety of graphically based games, some of which you may see on distributions 7.04 and later.
With the release of Vista Windows offered a new, improved versions of FreeCell, Spider Solitaire, and Hearts. It introduced three completely new games (Chess Titans, Mahjong Titans, Purble Place) and one, mostly new – InkBall.
This way games, which came with operating systems, gain popularity throughout the years and to this day are used by many people, who have some free time on their hands. Those games were the basis on which higher-end and flash games are created.
The history of all flash games starts with the growing popularity of the company Macromedia in 1996 and became one of the most favorite enterprising zones for generations to come. In that same year more and more websites were improved by adding Macromedia Flash which was designed to give an animated and interactive affect to the games. People realized the potential of Macromedia Flash and with the further development of Flash(Action Script 5) people started creating web-based games more easily.
In 2001 web-based online games have already gained huge popularity, but more and more people were complaining about the fact, that those games were consuming peoples free time more than it was needed. It is curious, that people started skipping work just so that they cold play flash games. Soon afterwards popular games like Mario and Hedgehog got available online.
It became worse, when people started to compete who will get the highest score in a given game, which urged them more and more to continue playing online games. However Flash had certain problems specifically on machines with lower capability, which proved to be somewhat of a problem when playing action games. In 2004, Flash MX and Action Script 2.0 came out, which organized the Flash applications very well.
Now Flash Games, such as “Stick Cricket” and “Bejeweled” are played by more than a thousands of players online, moreover these games are simple to understand and easy to play.
References:
1- technologizer.com
2- wikipedia.org
3- articlesbase.com
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